Our sequence was successful in that, as the brief required, it featured a match-on-action, shot/reverse-shots, and demonstrated the 180 degree rule. The brief also stated it should show a character opening a door (that's where the match-on-action is), crossing a room, sitting opposite another character and exchanging dialogue with them (where we get the 180 degree rule and shot/reverse-shot), all of which our sequence has. There is good continuity, although there is one bit after Amelia comes in the door where she is in a slightly different place (see 0:10 minutes in and 0:12 minutes in). However, it does not greatly affect the continuity of the sequence.
The sequence makes sense, although it may be a bit confusing before you see the whole thing where Loren is - we had planned to make our establishing shot a pan from Loren typing on a computer to the door opening and Amelia coming in. However, when it came to editing, we realised we'd made a mistake and that this wouldn't work, as we showed Amelia rushing in from outside - the pan would be too slow and our match-on-action would not work. We remedied this by taking the beginning of the pan shot, which just showed Loren typing, before the camera started moving, and then cutting straight to Amelia coming in the outside door. Although this bit may be slightly confusing (partly because it had to be short, so the audience would not see the camera begin to pan to the door), it does make sense - when Amelia enters you have a sense of where the characters are in relation to each other and the room. It flows in a logical way, and is also a plausible situation - two girls gossipping about another girl, and then being interrupted by that girl, so when you watch it back the edits are not really noticeable - this of course is what we aimed to achieve. It is fairly seamless and works quite well overall, but there are some moments where it's a little unrealistic or stilted. One such section is after Loren asks "What's up?", and Amelia grabs a chair and pulls it towards Loren before speaking. There is a slightly too long pause in between Loren's question and Amelia's reply, which is a little bit unnatural, thought it does create suspense for the audience as they don't know what she's so excited about, and have to wait - just a bit too long. However, we had to use this shot, as from the bit where she grabs the chair and starts talking to Loren, it is all one shot until they turn to look at the door, and, despite shooting about twelve takes, it was the only one we could use. In the others, Amelia's head kept getting cut out of the frame because she was moving about when she was talking (because it was such exciting gossip!).
However, overall the sequence was how we'd planned it to be - the shot distances and camera movements (apart from the pan at the beginning which we had to change) were the same as the way they'd been storyboarded, and by following our storyboard we got match-on-actions and shot/reverse-shots that made sense and I feel worked really well. This was the first time we'd used the microphones, and they were really helpful; I feel that the sound in our sequence is really good, in that the dialogue is all audible and clear, and there is not too much background noise, only what was necessary, i.e. the sound of typing on a keyboard when Loren is doing so in the establishing shot, and the door opening, which causes Amelia and Loren to look out of shot towards it, and therefore allows a motivated cut to the girl wearing the 'ugliest jumper ever' opening the door and looking in, after which there is a reaction shot of the two girls giggling. All in all, we had to work really hard on editing to make the sequence look more natural and make it flow, but I think we did a pretty good job and it was quite successful.
With hindsight, if we were to reshoot the sequence, I think we would shoot more takes where we needed them, which we didn't have time to do this time, with just an hour. We would also think more about how everything would fit together from filming to editing, so we could avoid disasters with establishing shots!
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