Task 1 ; School tour

Our first task of preparing for our final project within the A2 course was to create and shoot a guided tour of our school, st marks west essex catholic school. Our brief was pretty much that, it was then our choice to decide upon camera angles and other such matters as who would be our target audience and which we thought were the focal areas of the school which would need to ensure were projected to this audience. My group for this task was made of my self and 3 other girls, we decided to approach the audience of current year 11 students who were perspectively next years sixth form. The video was aimed to give these students and their parents an insight into what st marks sixth form could offer them.

The first aspect of our films which we learnt about and had to asses was how steady we was with the camera. Our teacher spent a while with us explaining how something as simple as a shaky shot could make a good film awful. We each took it in terms to attempt to take a free hand shot and to assess who had the steadiest hands to use when a tripod was not an option. Not only would an unsteady shot make the video seem of a lower standard but it would also cause us to lose marks on our overall video due to this being an aspect of which we would be gaining marks, simply on if we could hold a steady shot.

The second aspect we had to take into consideration was whether we framed the shot appropriately this involved making sure that all those in the shot who were meant to be within the shot were visible and the video didn't cut any on out. As we used a tripod this part of our skill level was pretty much taken care of for us however there was instances with audio where we chose to frame a long shot from afar and then we lost what was being said. This is therefore something we should look to improve upon within our final piece.

As just mentioned we also had to vary the distances in which we took our shots from. My group and i did experiment with this aspect of our filming but as mentioned it did cause issues at times with audio and therefore in future circumstances we would have to look to how we could suitably vary out shot distances but at the same time still be able to make out any use of audio. Our group varied out distances by changing the camera angles and by using features of our camera such as zoom. how ever we could look in future to vary the height of our shots as well as the distance as the tripod caused many of our shots to seem pretty much from the same height and of eye level. By varying the height we could give our prospective students another perspective of the school.