Today’s class was a standard introductory class, everyone was briefly acquainted with one another. Our tutor, Robin, introduced us to the concept of ‘coverage’ in cinema and explained what it means to have ‘adequate coverage’; this means to have enough footage from all necessary angles to compile a coherent and visually captivating final product of film. The term ‘coverage’ is exclusively used to describe the pre-productive endeavours of filmmakers.

Although I chose this class as my first choice, I still had not gathered a solid idea of what would take place in the studio! I was glad to find out almost immediately after our introductions that we’d be working very hands-on with equipment and what we’d be learning would be very helpful knowledge for any film projects to come.

We were split into groups and film a scene from a set script we were given. This was an exercise which, later, gave us a better idea of how to plan the coverage in our takes. I learnt that certain angles, shooting directions etc. conveyed different meanings or emotions. It showed us how a viewer (other members of the class) thought the choices of coverage told about the characters in the shots. Our scene involved a group of people worrying that they weren’t safe and that they may be in trouble. We interpreted this in a way which meant the group was worried because they’d done something wrong – Josh, who was shooting, decided to film from a (very unflattering) low angle upon us as he wanted to convey that we were powerful/troublesome and had caused havoc, maybe we had some something illegal – who knows!

Robin showed us after we had completed this task that the scripts were actually part of films. We firstly watched our scenes, played through the projector (as we didn’t film them). Many of us ran through our scenes several times so the rest of the class could put forward ideas and comment on what they thought the interpretations meant. We then watched the original film scenes which the script excerpts had been taken from. It was interesting to see the different interpretations which the class made to what the actual films were set to convey to their audience.