Planning the Continuity Piece

Today in our media studies lesson, we were given a few helpful tips for success when filming our continuity piece. 

Firstly, we were told that we should use a story board and a script to plan what you will film, and so that you can reference back to them if you forget something that you are meant to be doing. The story board can also be used as a form of checklist to make sure that you have filmed all of the shots.

Secondly, we were told that we should always keep the camera steady. In order to achieve stable footage we were advised to use a tripod to film the shots and not to record it hand held.

Then, we were told that we should be sure to consider the shot/reverse shot technique whilst filming in order to make sure that it makes sense, and that there are no continuity errors.

Finally, we were told to include a wide variety of shots such as close ups and extreme close ups. This is to ensure that the footage is interesting to watch and helps to keep the audience engaged.

Caitlin and Hannah drew up the story board for our continuity piece and we all reviewed it to make sure that there was enough variety of shots in it. After reviewing the story board, Josh and I went and created the script. 

Before we were able to start filming, we had to make sure that we were able to set up all the equipment. At the beginning of the year, we had been demonstrated this by our teacher, and had undertaken a task to film some different types of camera shots. As this would only be our second time setting up the camera and tripod, we were watched over by our teacher to make sure that we had set up and secured the tripod correctly so it capsize, and that we had correctly attached the camera to the tripod so it didn’t fall off. We successfully remembered how to set up the camera and tripod, as our teacher gave us the all clear that it was set up correctly and was safe to use. 

The final preparations we made for filming were to clear the memory card of our camera to ensure that we would not run out of storage space whilst filming. We also made sure that we had a spare, fully charged battery on hand with us as a precaution, in case the battery we were using in our camera had/developed a fault.

As a testing shot, Josh filmed an extreme close up of Caitlin’s eye to practice this type of shot, to make sure that the reflection of the camera was not visible. We observed that very small movements of the camera were very noticeable, so we made sure that we kept the camera as still as possible when filming.