Evaluation of Continuity Sequence

This first video we shot and edited for the class had some positives in the final product, but also a lot of things that could and should be improved if we were to do the task again.

An example would be the shot of the watch, where it fades to the same shot of it seconds later to show a large mount of time passing. The final set we got of this which was used in the video was a non-focused shot of the watch, which meant that the passing of time between the fade was not very visible for the viewer due to how blurry the hands of the clock were in the piece of footage. This error was partly because of the fact that we did this shot near the very end of the lesson with not a lot of time left, meaning we had to rush the filming of it and didn't have much time to perfect the shot, as we had spent too much time filming the shots prior to this one in the lesson; quite a few of our shots were filmed like this (around four) because of how long we took for the others. If we were to do this again, we should make sure to have our time managed better so we wouldn't have to rush many, if any pieces of footage at all, and focus the shots like the watch one better on the subject of the camera - we could maybe even film the watch for longer so the time jump in between the fade is bigger and more significant in the context of the complete video.

A positive thing about the video is that a lot of the shots flow nicely into each other and there isn't really any point where there's a jarring cut or a shot appears that doesn't make sense in the continuity of the scene. A specific example of shots that flow together well would be the opening few; the shots of the student walking through the corridors towards the classroom follow each other in ways that make sense and don't look unnatural.

Another slight point of improvement to focus on if we were to redo the project would be the camera work for a few shots. Specifically, the shots filmed with the camera on the tripod where we attempted a 'pan' effect sometimes came out a little choppy in the final project - instead of a smooth looking pan across what is in the frame, the camera stops slightly or jolts a bit during it. An example of where this happens would be the introductory scene (aka the establishing shot). This is only a slight issue and if we were more practised at the effect we wanted it would probably come out better.

The 'mise-en-scene' of most of our shots were for the most part done pretty well, with nothing being in the background or foreground of our shots that were not supposed to be. There was a shot near the end where a student from outside the group is in the background, happening again due to the lack of time we had to film the last few shots, but other than that there were not many issues about it.

For the lighting of our video, we just used the natural lighting that was available. There aren't any shots in the final project where the lighting is particularly bad enough to the extent that certain things in shot aren't visible enough, so I would say overall that the lighting in our video was just fine.
High or low camera angles

All of the different shot distances we were told to include on the worksheet we were given were used in the final project. These included close-ups, extreme close-ups, an establishing shot, shot/reverse shots, over the shoulder shot, point-of-view shots, and a piece of camera movement. The camera movement shot was done as one of the earliest ones, where the camera is following the main student down the hallway, over his shoulder.