We went out to complete an area recce of all the roads, river and church. the river was an important one as it was the location where we genuinely feared something might go wrong if someone were to fall in. We also needed to find out where cameras could be put as these are majority rocky landscapes with unstable surfaces.
After doing this, we decided that the location was suitable and appropriate.
The 180-degree rule is where you are meant to (the camera) stay on one side of an imaginary line, set between the actors within the scene. Once you choose the side of the line you are setting your camera on, you have to stay on that side of the line for that scene, unless there is camera movement, a neutral shot or a cutaway.
Walking Sequence
Walking sequences: This simple sequence task was designed to test our ability in respecting the 180-degree rule with three simple shots, like this;
My first walking sequence is the part of the video of the first actor, Ellie, walking across a bridge and my second attempt is of the second actor, Natasha, walking down a corridor and through a door ready to leave. I chose to combine them to show my improvement from the two examples.
Challenges:
The challenges here were majorly the weather conditions as for the angle I needed to get, I had to step through mud and large puddles. Because of this, I wasn't able to get the right angles so it looks a little jarring. Since this was my first attempt, the actor didn't walk all the way out of shots so when I cropped it together, it looked unnatural.
At points, it was difficult to get the correct angles and lighting, having to alter manually the white balance on the camera as to make the shots not look either extremely pink or blue.
The space to film was small so it was difficult and took longer than first expected because we could not break the 180-degree rule and had to navigate under tables.
Our task was to respect the rule of thirds by considering headroom, looking room and variations of shot types to show the progression of a scene paired with a randomly selected piece of dialogue. Mine was a romantic confession scene so it was certainly a challenge!
Version 2 (improved)
The changes I made were to let my shots further follow the rule of thirds rule, as well as a 50/50 composition as for some shots, it was near to impossible to use the transform tool in FCP to fix them as they looked too zoomed in. We tilted some of the shots accidentally during initial filming so we fixed this by rotating the shots using the transform tool.
Version 3 (improved further)
I adapted some of my shots more by making all of them follow the golden ratio (rule of thirds), zooming in and making sure that they didn't look too blurry or unnatural. At one point, I have broken the 180 degree rule which I did intentionally as due to the emotional nature of the audio to go along with it, I wanted to make this to seem uncomfortable. I also added some more atmospheric music which, in my opinion, adds to the scene as a whole.
