Filming and Editing the Preliminary Exercise

My group did the filming for the Preliminary Exercise this morning and though I was very nervous and sceptical about our abilities before the recording, everything went really well according to our schedule and in particular, our organsiation was spot on. We started by setting up the room, and then debriefing the actors we used in the production. Next, we placed our first camera and spent some time working with the angles, framing and lighting to make sure that everything we intended to be in the shot was there and was correctly seen. Beth spent a really promising amount of time before pressing the 'record' button by moving and perfecting the camera angle, looking out for the rule of thirds and actor blocking. This meant when we were ready to record our first clip for editing, I as the director was really confident what we would see in the end would be really clear, perfectly in focus and zoomed in fittingly. We continued with this pattern before each recording, by the whole team agreeing on the happiness of the camera frame, double checking the actors knew precisely what we wanted them to do, and then took our positions to over watch the recording. Because of this process, we managed to finish up the recording very early, we managed to get the last clip on around the 50 minute mark, which was impressive as we'd left ourself 4 hours to get everything we needed.
After the recording, on the same day, we began editing the clips together and realised a couple faults we made whilst recording. Most importantly, we didn't leave ourself enough room for edit on either side of the clip. For example, in one clip, the dialogue starts instantly, and the clip is cut right at the end of the dialogue, this leaves no room for us to edit and no room for any sort of drama mood to be developed from the audience. This was mainly due to the lack of direct from me I feel. We planned to next time press 'record' and then announce action, and then cut at the end, so we have room to edit it out, but enough space on either side of the dialogue for dead air. Another difficultly was that of our location, but of the surrounding locations to it. In one shot a car horn is heard in the background, and specifically in the 'door handle' shots, background conversation and movement can be heard, because it was filmed during lesson time.
But the biggest problem we faced was during the editing. We realised we had missed a couple of shots, that weren't actually NEEDED in the final cut, but they still added more understanding and mostly they padded out the production. What we have does fulfill the brief, and is more than we need, but because of some difficulties we did not pick up with the paper work, it could of cost us more marks if we weren't so lucky. Next time we'll dedinately spend a lot more time laying out a specific order and checklist of shots and the amount of take for each we need, to be on the safe side.
I think our emplyment of actors worked really smoothly as well, because they both knew each other before hand, so were a lot more confident in their acting. This meant it was quicker and easier for us to shoot them as they picked up the script and what we required them to do quicker, as well as having a couple of laughs and generally allowing them and us to relax, something I felt was necessary as being nervous and unconfident may of come across in the clips.
Overall, for our first time filming and organising a shoot toegther, we worked together really well. We only had a few hiccups, but they were noticable on our over view and can easily be evaluated and sorted for the main exercise.
Our final cut for the Preliminary Exercise.