3.1 What I learned by doing the Construction Preliminary Exercise

During the construction preliminary exercise, we had to film a character walking across a room, sitting down and exchanging a couple of lines of dialogue. We also had to demonstrate the 180-degree rule, match on action and shot/reverse shot.

During this exercise I worked with Zainab, Abderahim and Niel and our scenario was a girl called Jessie (who I played) having a job interview to be a teacher with the boss of the school, Bob (played by Niel).

I learned a lot of things during this exercise such as the importance of location and sound.

In our first time filming, we did it in the office library and it turned out really well. We had good shots and they demonstrated all the shots that we needed (although we did break the 180-degree rule once) but we didn't receive a mic and boom so our sound was very quiet and was barley audible which caused a problem resulting in us having to film again.

The second time, we decided to film in the recording studio but another group had also booked it at the same time. This showed us that organisation was key and it resulted in us having to alternate between groups and we ended up not filming all the shots we needed before we were meant to be leaving the recording studio for the second group to use. Without some key footage, our film was incomplete so we had to film for a third time.

The third and final time was filmed in a teachers office which was perfect for our scenario. We made sure the sound worked and we had a mic and boom this time to make sure the sound was perfect. We also did it quickly so we had enough time to film everything and we managed to get all the footage done quickly with time to spare before lunch which gave us time to get all the equipment back to Howard, showing our organisation skills had improved.

I learned a lot during this exercise and I will take this knowledge and use it for the next time we film.