For this preliminary exercise, I worked with Rayelle and Daniel to tell the story of a kidnapping. Our planning process was somewhat confused as we had got the wrong impression that the video was meant to be three minutes long rather than thirty seconds so we had planned a three minute video which we then had to cut down, but that wasn't too difficult. We split the planning tasks between the three of us and this was an effective way of getting the planning done efficiently so we were ready to film with a clear plan and no confusion on Friday. This made the filming process a lot easier and even gave us some time to start editing it. In terms of the actual video there were elements to it that were good and elements that could have been better. One of the good things about it I think was the camerawork, specifically the handheld shot at 0:35 and the slow movement of the camera from the shot at 0:50 to 0:58. I think these two moments in the video add to the realism and tension and as a result the audience become more immersed in the action happening on screen. Another good element to this video I think were the match on action shots we used because these made the video 'flow' better and made it look a lot neater. However, there were things that we could have done better. For example although we followed the 180 degrees rule, our over the shoulder shots could have been made to look more realistic so one way we could do this in the future is by having the two actors sit closer together - this way it would increase the realism of the idea that a conversation is being held. Something else to help with this would be to position the camera much closer to the shoulder/neck of the person in front of it to decrease the amount of empty space in the shot to ensure the audience's attention is solely on the characters and their interaction with each other. One of the biggest issues we had during filming was that we found it hard to focus on the important objects, particularly smaller ones like the purse so the focus ended up on things like the radiator. I think the reason behind this was that we didn't get to grips with the lens we were using and I think we possibly used the less useful one of the two we could have chosen from in terms of filming close up shots. If we were to do this again I think we would need to spend more time getting the accuracy of our shots right rather than dedicating most of our time to the content.
