Continuity Editng Exercise

The Encounter

We were given a scenario and brief to work too and had to use our own creativity to further develop the idea. Our brief was that our piece  of Continuity Editing must show a character opening a door,who crosses a room and sits down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue.

This is our continuity editing exercise.

We filmed in a group of three but had to edit the footage individually.

The key media language skills we had to demonstrate were:

Shot Reverse Shot: this is when one character is shown looking at another character that is often off screen and then the other character is shown looking back at the first character.

Match on Action: is a shot which connects two shots cut together by having a character finish an action in the second shot begun in the first shot.

180 degree rule: is the rule which a character must remain on either the left our right of the screen and cannot go 180 degrees past their body’s

Rule of Thirds: is the rule that an actors eyeline has to be  3/4 the way up the screen.

 During this piece of continuity editing exercise I worked with Rianne and Ashley, we made a story board and divided the parts of the piece of work up equally and we also filmed in the same group. This was beneficial as we all had the same ideas and worked together well as a group and we did not dispute on any topic of the media exercise, we also chose to work together as a group which helped to put together all the ideas we had and produced a good quality piece of editing and created a successful end product.

We all individually had ideas which we put forward in order to develop the scenario and make it interesting to create suspense and also left the piece of work ending in a cliff hanger to image the audience and wanting them to watch on.

We had to use our creativity to further develop the idea given to us in the brief, the main idea of our piece of work was an interrogation scene, and we used this initial idea to further build on this. We then came to the conclusion of that our piece of work will be set in a police station and the conversation will take place between Rianne and Ashley who are criminals and as they are talking they have certain flash backs of their crime which narrate the rest of the story to the audience. Our match on action took place between the police officer coming into the interrogation room and then sitting down. Then our shot reverse shot takes place between the police officer and Ashley who is the criminal. We have maintained the 180 degree rule throughout however in our initial filming we broke the 180 degree rule and had to re shoot. This taught us the importance of continuity editing and why it is so important because when the work will be watched by the audience they would be confused due to the positioning of the actors and the work will not have a smooth edit. We also maintaited the rule of 3rds as the actors eyeline was 3/4 the way up the screen.

We created a story board to put our ideas down on paper, creating a story board helped us keep to plan but we had to change a few shots as they were not possible to shoot and we realised it did not work with our flow of filming when we were editing the work in i-movie.

Here below is our story board which we all divied up and created.