The Meeting task (continuity editing)

As a class we begun to look at using continuity editing (a style of editing in which everything flows in an consistent, smooth and orderly manner) as practise for vital skills that would come in handy in future when making our own promotional film campaigns. In small groups we were asked to do as follows; construct a story board between us with the title 'The Meeting' in mind- where effectively this would allow us to test and put our continuity editing skills to practise as we would only be editing a basic sequence of simple but well thought out shots, plan and prepare for filming the meeting, and finally film the meeting.
 The sequence consisted of different shots and angles for example long shots of a girl walking towards the male character. then a reaction shot to emphasize the emotion between the two and the idea that action is constantly happening within the narrative. We also used basic editing rules such as shot reverse shot- to show the action and reaction between the two characters and the 180 degree rule to create a realistic and believable sequence. Below you can find the story board my group orignally created:




And here is the short film we constructed (need meeting film)

.Although the overall piece came out fine we learnt that planning is key for a successful edit as we had failed to plan throughoughly which left us at a disadvantage due to not thinking enough about how/ in what way we would shoot the film, this meant we had to come up with new, spontaneous ideas on the day of filming providing us with a jumbled mix of shots in which it was very hard to piece together effectively and provide a continuous style of editing. If we had spent more time in thinking about specific types of angles, camera movement ect we would of been able to edit the overall sequence better and create a much higher quality piece of work then we had the first time.

Another problem we had was not sticking to our original story board- we had changed the narrative from what we originally decided to plan shot's for in the beginning therefore had to quickly prepare another set of shots for which would fit the changed narrative. Therefore, the piece lacked true continuity as each shot didn't lend into each other enough and the transitions weren't very smooth.

So, although the final sequence didn't reflect good continuity editing it was a great learning curve for us as it showed the importance of good planning which we will remember in future.