THE RULES OF SHOOTING

STARTER

To identify and understand the key principles of shooting film.

To begin using blogs to record the classroom learning.

• These are the guidelines from OCR about your preliminary task and main task for video coursework. What stands out?

The preliminary task

• Although the quality of your preliminary task does not affect your coursework grade, you must include a preliminary task in order to be awarded a grade for AS Media.

• You may work in groups of up to 4 people on both the preliminary and main task.

Match on action

• Match on action means that when something happens in the scene then there is a cut, the same piece of action must continue into the next shot.

Match on action in Friends

An early example of match on action

Shot/reverse shot

• Shot reverse shot is a film technique where one character is shown looking at another character and then the other character is shown looking back at the first character.

• Since the characters are shown facing opposite directions, the viewer assumes that they are looking at each other.

Shot/reverse shot in Star Wars

The 180⁰ rule

The 180⁰ rule explained

Stanley Kubrick often broke the continuity rules in order to create a sense of unease or discomfort amongst his audience. Watch this scene

from ‘The Shinning’ and try to identify the 180⁰ rule being broken.

Preliminary task

• Film and edit a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue.

An example – WWW? EBI?