Preliminary Continuity Exercise!

Today, we worked on out first practical task: Getting to Know the Cameras (or you could call it the Preliminary Continuity Exercise, if you really wanted...)
I worked in a group with Nicola (http://www.nicolaastleyasmedia.blogspot.com/), Conor (http://thatone-conorwastleyasmedia.blogspot.com/) and Jon (http://www.jonasmediacoursework.blogspot.com/).
Last lesson, we worked on creating storyboards for the exercise and today had to get into groups of a minimum of three people to film one or more of the storyboards. Mostly, everybody wanted to do my storyboard so we went round to the classroom we wanted and asked permission to use it. We were given it, so we began filming.
I had tried to create an original idea that still featured the basics of the exercise: somebody opening a door, walking through it, closing it, sitting and having a conversation with somebody else. My idea was to have somebody run down the stairs to a door, open the door, walk through into a lobby, then to have somebody in a room behind her call out to her, she turns, walks towards them, stands in the doorway, has a brief conversation with the person in the room to then be asked to leave. She leaves the room by grabbing the door handle and pulling it shut as she backs out of the room.
We started off well, using different angles for the shot, but then had a problem with the focus of the camera and had to start again. This meant that we didn't have a lot of time and then we were not allowed to film where we had been told we could, so had to find another room in the area that would mean that we wouldn't have to start over again. Luckily, we found one and began to film, but I feel that the time we had remaining meant that it didn't turn out how I wanted it to at all. The change in location didn't help either!

We filmed the stairs scene again, but had to completely change the direction Nicola walked because of our change of location; this meant we had to put some hard thinking into it and eventually added an extra part to the scene, meaning we could show Nicola turning around and walking to a different room, rather than the one we had initially planned on using. We filmed the rest of the scene very quickly because it was already the end of the lesson, and later on, we watched it back.

It wasn't the best feeling, watching back the scene. It didn't look at all how I had planned, and we had a bit of a continuity "error" where we had accidentally recorded something without intending to. It didn't feature the energy I would have liked it to, and so, with Mr Mayers' guidance in where we went wrong, we filmed again, this time basing our scene on Jon's storyboard.

It was a much quicker process the second time round. We had a fixed, vacated location at our disposal, and enough people to have two "creating" the scene and two people in the scene. Jon had a clear idea of how he wanted the scene to go and so we practised once and then began filming.
It only took us about fifteen minutes to film this time, and when we watched it back with Mr Mayers, he said it was a much better start to the task. We used a good use of camera angles, and it was a lot more "traditional" preliminary-exercise-wise, than our original scene.

I will upload it when possible! :)