Planning for our Continuity Piece

For our first piece of film, we have been set to produce a simple continuity piece, to help familiarise us with different camera angles, shots and movements. It's also a good way to develop skills in continuity editing. The most basic example of this would be a man walking up to a room, exchanging a line of dialogue, then leaving.

The Plot for our Piece


For our piece, we decided to use the basics of the example that was given to us, but add a little extra to it.
Our protagonist is walking along a corridor. This is because his pen has run out, and needs to go to the next office (the antagonist's office) to get one. When our protagonist reaches the office and asks for a pen, the antagonist responds violently, and grabs our character by the collar. The protagonist is then thrown out of the office, but we can see in his hand that he has managed to take a pen from the desk. Our hero then walks smugly back to his office, and jumps down the steps in ecstasy.

 The Storyboard

 This first shot shows the protagonist walking down a corridor, in order to retrieve the pen.

This shot shows our walking man from a side-on angle, inferring it is shown from another office within the building. The door arch helps to frame the shot nicely.

  Now we can finally see the protagonist's face, we are given the nervous expression on his face. This gradual bleeding of information helps to intrigue the audience further.

 Shot from the top-right hand corner of the corridor, we switch to a CCTV shot that tracks our character around the corner of the corridor.

From around the corner, we see our protagonist enter the antagonist's office...

 ...and as he opens the door, we switch to a shot from inside the office as he walks through to the desk.
 

 Here, we decided to use an over-shoulder shot, as our protagonist asks the in inhabitant of the office "Can I borrow a pen?" The antagonist then swivels around on the chair, so he is to the left of the protagonist's shoulder. Although we wanted to display the antagonist from a lower camera angles, to convey him as in power, it was hard to achieve, seeing as he was sitting down.

The next shot shows the antagonist rising from his chair, grabbing our hero by the collar...

...and is subsequently thrown out of the office. This shot appears to be looking round the corner, and our protagonist falls after a few seconds of that still shot, represented a calm before the storm. We can see from this shot that the hero has got the pen in his hand, and has completed his quest.

We see the protagonist getting up...

...and then we switch to his smug face, showing the audience he is pleased in achieving his goal.

Different shots are then used to show him going down the corridor back to his office.

 This is our final shot: Our protagonist jumps down the stairs in delight. The shot freezes as he is in mid air, and slowly fades to black, and the credits will then roll.
For the music, we have agreed that we would like some kind of melancholy music for the first part of the film, followed by a happier piece after he has retrieved the pen, and his smug face is shown.