Preliminary task - Pre-production

We were assigned with a preliminary task of producing a short film to demonstrate everything that we have learnt so far. For this we were divided into groups of three, and I worked in a group with Isaac White and Tom Coatsworth. We had to incorporate everything into the film such as shot, reverse shot, match-on-action, the 180 degree rule and others.
We started with our brief idea of the type of short film we wanted to make. Our vision was to create a short dramatic piece with suspense, mystery and fear, which I feel worked well because it allowed us to incorporate different types of shots well in the final product. Isaac and Tom crafted the storyline and I adapted their suggestions and ideas into a storyboard, which helped to visualise how we wanted the film to look and how the film could look. Only one scene from the storyboard was cut in the end (the shot with the heads on the floor at the end), which we decided before filming didn't seem necessary since we had thought of a better ending to the piece as seen in the final cut.
Throughout designing the storyboard, the three of us went out to the different locations around the school where we might film, so we had a better idea of how the storyboard should look. We also planned the camera angles and different types of shots here which we thought we might use. This helped us a lot and saved us time thinking about the locations on the day of the shoot. We also agreed at this stage that Tom and Isaac would be two actors in the film, and I would spend most of the production stage behind the camera, although Tom also had a chance to film during the first scenes of the film. Again, this saved us a lot of time, so I think we were all happy to have planned everything in advance before production would start.