Preliminary Filming

In our preliminary task, we used the idea of someone being forced to break someone's neck to fit the storyboard we were given. I suggested the idea because in our theatre lesson earlier in the day, we'd learnt how to fake it as part of a stage combat session and as it's such a violent action I thought it fitted the genre: thriller.

We chose to use the set of a house which was set up in the studio because it had deliberately been made to look derilict and abandonded, a theme of setting which often crops up in thriller films. The set also gave the atmosphere of the sequence a fair amount of tension before any action occurred.

We used three actors so that all of our group could experience being behind the camera and we each had a try at being different roles, such as director, continuity person and cameraperson.


Firstly, we filmed a wide shot of the whole room, being careful to frame the shot correctly so as not to show any of the studio (the room only had three walls). We did this to have a full view of all the action occurring; all three actors started offset and entered through a door so it was essential the audience can see this.
After we'd filmed the wide shot, we moved the camera to to our right and filmed the action from a low, inferior,  angle. We framed the shot so that we could see the face of the people in the foreground and tried to film the person in the background out of focus.
 We also filmed a close up of the victim's face while we were at this angle, which meant we could see her expressions and reactions fully.

Next, we used the 180 degree rule and moved behind the right shoulder of the character who was in the background. We filmed it from a superior angle to show that they have more power than the other two. I also suggested we use the use of  levels to show the status of the characters and I think this worked well as the victim was on sat on her knees, the person holding her was kneeling up and the person in control of the situation was stood.