Evaluation of Exchange

This production task was more challenging than the first preliminary exercise. This time we were asked to take more thought into consideration regarding the environment we would be filming in. To give our productions a feel of noir or even neo-noir. Which type was not specified in the brief. But our group choose to use a neo-noir feel. We had a first group meeting to discuss possible locations to film in. We quickly decided that we would like to use drugs and money as the items being exchanged. This was mainly due to the fact that those two items we felt would appeal to our target audience. We wanted the viewers to see that what the characters were doing was illegal.

After deciding the items we then needed a location that would match the theme of drugs. We went around the group asking each person to show a location that they know and feel that would fit the mise-en-scene of a drug exchange. Each person explained were their locations was and why they felt it was a good place to shoot a drug exchange. It was decided that we would use my location which was situated about 500 metres away from the college. It was a dark alley with old bricks and bunkers in. Most of the brick had moss on it and the location felt really gray and dark which they group liked. But a week before filming one of the groups stumbled across a location near the marina in Ipswich and said it’s perfect for what we want. I really liked what they had found and wasn’t bothered with the change from my location to theirs.






Whilst filming in the location we found some really good locations were cameras could be positioned like fire escapes three stories high. But we were told not to use the location as it did not meet the health and safety requirements to shoot. Also whilst filming we found that some shoots at the marina worked better than the planned story board so we shoot them and included them in the edit. We were also very lucky to have the Suffolk police helicopter fly over our location whilst filming. Again the group felt filming this and putting it in our video would make the audience feel that the characters are doing illegal substances.


The overall task was very successful as we completed all the pre-production paperwork to shoot off the site of the college in time for our filming day. The mise-en-scene was great as the location was what we wanted and we didn’t have to compromise.


The cinematography was also very good, although confined by health and safety we still managed to shoot some really good extreme high and low angle shoots. The only problem with Dutch tilts is its very hard to get the target on the thirds line but I used the knowledge learnt from the mistake in the preliminary exercise and managed to get a really amazing high angle Dutch tilt shot.






The editing also went very well we had very good footage from the cinematography but the continuity didn’t seem to work. We couldn’t accurately show the passing of time. This really made the production value of the piece look really low. But reusing shoots like the police helicopter and a shoot were the character starts walking to the location and gets to the location of the exchange is the same but we used the same clip. Again not having to have to use sound made a vast improvement on my first preliminary piece of work as a boom was not required. The only downside to sound in the piece was the two tracks we used. If we used one sound track (the first one), then the film would have felt a lot more tense. With the second soundtrack in there at the end test audiences said that spoilt the suspense that the first piece had given them.