The exchange:

Exchange exercise:

In groups of four we will be doing The Exchange exercise which was to film a short (ours was 45 seconds) sequence of a film thriller which was called The Exchange, had to involve somehow an exchange of an item this could be anything at all from an envelope, tape or even a kidnapping exchange from one character to another. Using the style film thriller, this could be shown by the costumes, shot angle, music and location. This will also help me improve on using the camera equipment and editing and I will learn how to put over music as this will be the first time of putting a sound track over our filming.

As our group we wanted to make our 1 minute film thriller to look like a noir film as we could then look back at this task and see what does and don’t make it look noir and could use this to help us out with our final film opening. We followed the typical film noir location and therefore we filmed ours in a run down street next to a car park also there was a lot of wire fencing making it look a very dodgy place this was brilliant as we exchanged an envelope with money in it, we wanted the audience to think that it was a dodgy situation a girl giving a man an envelope full of money.

 I was the lady character in The Exchange I wore jeans and a long brown coat; we wanted the girl character to look simple and normal. The man character wore black trousers, long grey coat and black shade glasses; this was to make him look like he was in charge of the situation which was the money given to him. Also the lady looked like she was a bit nervous when she gave the money making him look like an important character. As the film idea would have been him being a drug dealer and the lady as his client. But as a group we did find out when we showed the class it that they laughed at the male character this could have been because of the glasses maybe we made him look a bit to serious especially as the audiences didn’t really know who he was. So in our final opening thriller that we will be doing we will make sure we don’t make this mistake of using humour as when humour is brought into the characters it loses the noir thriller feel to the film.

We tried out as many different shot angles such as Dutch tilt etc. As we wanted to have a few to choose from when editing and also could see what they looked like. We used a close up as the lady and male feet meeting each other. Mid shot when the envelope is passed over to the male. Over shoulder when the male character is checking the envelope to see if the money is in there. Also this shot of him doing this was filmed as a low angle, shows the audience that he is powerful as it looks like he is looking down, giving it that intimating feel to it. The first shot is a wide shot showing the whole location I found this worked as the audience know straight away where they are.

When we was editing we realised that we had a problem with continuity. As the lady was holding the money in her left hand but when she passed the money over to the male character it was filmed in her right hand. Because of this we didn’t have many shots to choose from for this bit of the film as some of the shots we could no longer use because of the continuity problem. Obviously this was a fault we did but I guess we learnt from it as we know not to do it again and make sure when filming keep everything the same or it just looks weird and stupid to the audience.

The sound over piece we added to it I thought went well with it as it was a simple slow beat and wasn’t anything over the top and it just worked and our feed back from the class agreed and said it went well and it made the audience wanted to know what was going to happen, the music contributed to this.