Codename Cleaner Location shots
Single Camera Drama
Our next assignment will be the production of a 5 minute single camera drama.
- What is a single camera drama?
A single camera drama is a production that is filmed using only one camera, this means that all scenes are recorded with one camera and in order to get conversation shots the camera must be moved.
-What are the advantages of producing a single camera drama?
There is more space for camera movement in single camera dramas where as with multiple cameras you can only have them in set places so that the other cameras don’t appear in the scene, although one disadvantage of a single camera drama is that in order to get different shots of the same scene you have to stop the whole thing and move the camera.
-How do single camera dramas differ to multi camera dramas?
Multi camera dramas are a lot more accurate as you can use clips from both cameras to edit together a conversation, where as if you only have a single camera, you have to mess around moving the camera between sentences or recording the people talking separately and not getting the true reactions.
-Explain clearly the difference between short films and commercial feature films
Short films are a lot different to commercial feature films in terms of length, budget and sponsorship. Many short films are only 10 to 30 minutes long and rarely go into very much detail about the characters or the story, commercial feature films on the other hand are always over a minimum of 1 hour in length and go in to as much detail as they can in the time they have, an example of this would be the short film “The Joyride” which is a 10 minute short film about an engineer who is abducted by 2 armed men, this is about as much detail into the characters as the film gets, if this were a commercial film nearly all of the main characters would have a backstory of some sorts and the film itself would be around 1 or 2 hours in length.
Done in 60 Seconds Evaluation
•What are the challenges of creating a narrative in just 60 seconds?
The challenges of creating a narrative in 60 seconds is that the storyline has to be very short, and can only be told through body language and camera techniques. It also makes it very difficult to cut it down to the right length as you don’t have many clips to work with which can cause problems with scene transitions.
•What are the main advantages and disadvantages of working in groups?
The advantages of working in groups are that you can rely on each person to have a set job and get it right, which means you don’t have to do everything and not find out if you did a good take until reviewing it afterwards. It’s also an advantage as you each have a lot of thoughts to put into the final work so you can never be stuck for ideas.
A disadvantage with working in groups is that you don’t always share the same thoughts, so if you explain a scene to someone they might get a completely different idea of what you mean.
Another disadvantage is that you may not always agree on what to film and you have to either choose someone’s idea or merge them all into one somehow.
•How successful is your final edit? What worked well? What would you change?
Our final edit turned out better than we originally expected as the original idea was quite poorly thought out, we decided to give it an older feel seeing as we couldn’t use voices, so we turned the whole film black and white and added a piano playing over the top.
I think I would change a few of the camera angles, as we didn’t use that many and it could have done with a few reaction shots from Panda, I also would change some of my editing as some of it didn’t flow very well due to the fact we had to keep it under 60 seconds long and some large pieces had to be cut out.
•How confident do you feel with using cameras and Adobe Premiere Pro?
After doing three different styles of film I feel like I can navigate my way around premiere pro quite well although there are some parts I have to search around to find, I also feel quite confident with using cameras now but I feel like our group needs to plan out the project in more detail so I can specify where I want the camera before we start.
I would give this work a Merit as The editing was a little off because of the time limit, but it still turned out quite well.
Done In 60 Seconds - The Fight
This was our 3rd Assignment working as a group and the first time we had to bring up our own idea, having said that i think this turned out better than i expected it to.
