Even though I said I’ve improved in my storytelling I don’t believe this is true for this piece. Original I had a much different ending that had a little resolution between the two characters but this one doesn’t have resolution. I think the ending short of works if all the characters were introduced at the same time but since they aren’t it just seems like a serial tv show repeating basically the same premise over and over. One of the actors wasn’t really good and talks you out real quick. When the special effects worked, they looked good but the problem is they don’t always look good. There were a few shots where the screen turned a shade of red. I noticed it happen but I didn’t know how that happen and how to fix it. The story is abnormal but I feel very predictable. I wish it had been a better writer because what this film needed was better dialogue between the actors. You had no scene of the characters expect they like their respective shows. I could have made one a Han Solo fan boy and another a Spock fan boy. Also “the line” was jump throughout even though it was attempted to be correct by flipping, it didn’t help all that much. There need to be more attention to costume and color. I had my actors a tan couch, in a tan shirt, and in front of with tan wallpaper. I was just so used to my apartment I didn’t realize how much it blurred depth until I began editing.
Over the semester I feel as though I have improved as a filmmaker. The key aspect I have improved upon this year is storytelling. Before I made a lot of “so what” films. They were films that lacked any conflict or struggle. I was even able to transfer this to my documentary work. This technique has help give my films structure and made them less like fluff pieces. Also I feel my skills with equipment has improved. I’ve started using equipment like lav mics and shotgun mic that I haven’t really used before. I’m still learning a lot through experience where what situations are the best for each piece of equipment. Lighting is another thing that I can’t say I’ve mastered this semester but I have definitely gone from placing lights around a subject at random to placing them in position to create the correct mood.
I shot a good portion of the film earlier this week and scheduled to do some re-shoots and shoot the end. So I started working on the After Effects side of the project where I spent a lot of time on Lynda.com and other tutorial sites to get myself familiar with the software. At the last minute my actor decide to go home leaving me without an ending to my film. So I had to right in a different ending where I bring in another character. Once I found the actress, I ran into lighting and audio problems with the D300. The first time I used the D300 I thought the reason for the pixilation on some of the shots was lack of light so I got a light kit in hopes to remedy that problem. The extra lighting had no effect on the pixilation and even when I blasted the actors with light it just became overexposed pixilation. What surprises me is the D300 works very well in sun and you don’t get this problem. A possible explanation for both of these problems could be my lack of experience with the camera. It may be something simple like I might have missed a setting or the D300 don’t work well indoors. After Effects hates me. I don’t know why. That was my biggest problem because there is a limited number of computers that have After Effects and my problem was most of them the program wasn’t working, it kept crashing. I also had a problem with my harddrive where it won’t save at times so I ended up losing hours of work. My timeline got messed up somehow from computer to computer so I had rematch the audio. Sometimes this weird thing would had where it would lock the audio with video but it would be a few seconds off and I couldn’t unlink or unlock. I ended up important new clips sometimes. This is the first project where I’ve spent hours of work on and not happy with my final results but I am glad to now have a base set of knowledge on After Effects.
Ed Wood is a Tim Burton biopic on Ed Wood Jr., who’s claim to fame was being known as the worst director of all time. The film follows Ed as he, against all odds, works to put together his films no matter what others think about them. Along the way Wood befriends an old, drug addicted actor, Bela Lugosi.
The choice to shoot in black and white was a great stylistic choice. I gave the movie that b-movie look and made you feel like you were in the 1950s. One scene that had the best editing I believe was the opening credits. I was so taken in with the editing of opening credits in the way that the whole shot seemed to be one long take but was clearly consisting of a variety of different shots. The camera flies from outside into a house then back outside then into the water then into space. Looking back over the scene I realized the cuts were easy because most of the time the shot went to black making it easy to transition without it looking like there was a cut. Though it was obvious when you were looking for the cuts, I was amazed at the subtly of the cuts. I got far into the scene before I realized that it all couldn’t be one shot. The editor was able to make these cuts because the film is in black and white making it easier to cut without being noticed. Another time they did this was at the end which was interesting because the shot started out zooming out from the actors in a city but then started to boom up out of the city showing a clearly B style Hollywood backdrop. This was interesting because the transition from the real city to the fake was done so smoothly I couldn’t see it.
Ed Wood’s cult fame comes from the humor of laughing at his movies but to him those movies were art. The film could have easily taken the route of making complete fun of him but instead portrayed his optimistic drive to make his art a reality. I believe the choice of having Tim Burton direct this film was perfect in trying to portray this message. Tim Burton himself was an outcast and like Wood he never gave up. The parallels between the director and the protagonist helped give the film heart.
American Movie is a documentary by Chris Smith that chronicles the production of an amateur filmmaker Mark Borchardt as he tries to make his two films Northwestern and Coven. Mark and his friend long time Mike Schank start work on Mark’s feature length film Northwestern, his dream movie but due to financial problems, he decides to stop production. Instead Mark starts production on Coven, a short film he has started years ago, in order to finance Northwestern.
This movie is one of the wackiest films I have ever seen. Every single individual in this film is an outrageous character from Mark’s sidekick Mike who seems as though he’s constantly on drugs. Uncle Bill, the execute producer, who is around 80 and has nearly lost his mind. The list of ridiculous individuals just keeps going. At first all you do is just laugh at these guys with their problems after problems that arise like when they lose all their extras so Mark has to get his mother to help but she doesn’t want to since she has groceries to get. Then when Mark is trying to get audio for the film using Uncle Bill but has trouble because Bill can’t remember his four lines even after 30 takes and his teeth keep falling out.
The movie changed for me at the end when Mark is having a discussion with Uncle Bill. Mark asked Bill, “Don’t you want to follow your dreams.” Bill replies, “What dreams is that. I don’t have any dreams anymore.” Earlier in the film Bill’s brother (Mark’s father) explained how Bill used to be a scholar and he would look up to him but not anymore. It made me realize the point of the film. Bill had lived his life like everyone would expect and made lots of money but never followed his dreams. Slowly you stop laughing at Mark and begin to admire his determination to keep film, to keep his dream going, even though everything keeps going wrong. You start to see what the title means by American Movie in that it’s about Mark’s American dream to go from a nobody to an important director. The film forces you to think again about Mark because even though he is ridiculous, he working to accomplishing his dream which most people tend to give up.
Throughout the movie, the director would splice in scenes from Marks’ older movies showing Mark’s passion and love for film. I found this intercutting with old film interesting because Mark filmed in a variety of mms so the director had to hired variety of film experts to transfer them to the Chris’ film and then properly color correct them to make them fit smoothly with the film.
In the narrative project Brett had a prior commitment making him unavailable for the shoot. So Brett wrote the script and storyboarded a part of the script to give us an idea about what he had envisioned. Once David and I obtained the script from Brett we went and casted our actors. We wanted to get four actors but one of the actors bailed at the last second so David and I rewrote the script for three inside of four.
This project was challenging because this was the first time I was doing a project where the story wasn’t my own creation. It was difficult to take a story that wasn’t my own and bring it to life. I wanted to put my spin on but still retain Brett’s vision.
A major issue we came across during the production was our battery died during our filming. David had charged the battery the night before and it was at full power. Over the course of the filming though the power dropped rapidly because the battery was old and couldn’t hold a charge like it used too. So we had to stop production but lucky I had checked out a backup camera just in case of a situation like this. This was a problem because it wasted our time forcing us to cut shots from our storyboard to make up for lost time since the actors had to leave at a certain time.
Working with the actors was interesting. Most of the time, they were great but sometimes it was hard to get them express an emotion they contradicts what they believe the character should act. So it would require us to build more of a back story for the characters to give them better motives for their emotion.
The film I watched this week was a documentary called “Fetishes”. I had just finished taking an Abnormal Psychology class for my psychology major where we discussed in detail about different types of fetishes so when I saw this documentary on hulu.com I though it would be interesting. I thought wrong.
The documentary follows the director Nick as he spends a few weeks at Pandora’s Box, a S&M parlor in Manhattan, where he follows the mistresses around interviewing them and their clients. The crew for the film was extreme small from what I could tell. Nick the director was also the audio recordist and interviewer. There was one other guy who was the cameraman and that was it. I was impressed with the shooting since they had to work in low lighting and tight spaces so even though the footage wasn’t amazing it was great for the conditions they were working in. Also they shot this way the whole film, even though there were times they could have easily set up some lights, they didn’t, that way they kept the same feel throughout.
Overall, the film wasn’t informative but felt more like a promotional video for Pandora’s Box. It just listed different fetishes people had and just asked superficial questions. In my Abnormal Psychology class we had done case studies analyzing different people who have these types of fetishes and the studies were fascinating. The reason I feel the studies were more compelling than the film was the fact the studies had stronger character development. The film tackled topics like the cause of their fetishes and how they hide the fetishes from the rest of the world but does so in a superficial way. For example he asked one may why he likes to dress up as a women and he said because he likes to do it and the director left it like that and didn’t develop deeper. All the people the director interviewed were very interesting people but I feel they were too complex for the director to interview. What I think could have made this film more interesting was if the director wasn’t asking the questions but an actual psychologist. The director had no clue about what he was documenting which cause conflicts between the interviewer and the interviewees. I know you don’t want to know everything before entering a doc because as you learn as the viewer would learn but you need to know some before hand so you can avoid causing problems.
I was disappointed in this film because the film failed to delve deep into these people’s character and instead focused on shocking image of people being tied up. I was amazed how often the director would ask an interviewee a question and mid-answer he would cut the interviewee off and ask another question. I feel you should never interrupt someone while interviewing them. The other reason I was upset with the director for interrupting was when as the interviewee started to say something deep and interesting but he would cut them off with another superficial question. If he had just let the interviewees keep talking, I feel he would have captured a much deeper and more compelling moments on film. One of the dominatrix workers kept referring to her job as a show, getting in costume, acting and I feel like the director could have delved deeper in how this world was like some escape for her.
The director did a good job in becoming friends with the Mistresses so they opened up to him would constantly destroy this bond by overstepping his boundaries. I feel people get some of the best footage when they push boundaries but the director just wasn’t careful when choosing questions. One example of this was when one of the girls had an argument with one of the clients, she was extremely upset and instead of letting the tape roll he starts asking questions. This isn’t a bad thing but he started off asking stupid questions. He asked her how does she feel which was completely unnecessary because you could visually see she was upset. All it accomplished was her getting disgusted with the camera and leaving.
This was a good film because it shows you what not to do.
Bronson is a British biopic based on the real life individual Michael Peterson aka Charlie Bronson aka “most violent prisoner in Britain”. The film loosely chronicles Bronson’s life from his youth to now. The film focuses on Bronson’s dream to be famous and it seems the only thing he’s good is fighting.
I found this movie interesting in the way it pulls you in. I feel what kept drawn to the film was based heavily on the lead actor. The actor playing Bronson was able to emanate this sense of power and he gave such a dead stare that it was terrifying because you could never guess when he was going to snap.
A problem my friend pointed out after the film that I had to agree with was the film lacked character development. The film makes large jumps to fight to fight to fight which was thrilling and a lot of fun seeing someone being a complete badass but you don’t get any sense of character. The film at one point showed Bronson getting into a massive fight with six guards and the next scene he is being released from prison. I personally believe the better story lies in how he was able to pull that off from being in solitary to freedom than just seeing him go crazy. After the film, I researched the real Bronson and his true biography seemed more interesting and even crazier than the actual movie.
You get no true motive for way he acts the way he does which ruins it as a biopic but I feel it adds if you look at this movie not as a biopic but a horror movie. By looking at in a different perspective as a horror movie it works almost better. This guy has no reason behind why he’s crazy, the only reason is that he likes fighting which makes him even scarier.
The movie was very visually stimulating and at time would overload you with information. The beginning of this film starts with an ending showing him getting beat up by a bunch of guards. Then you are shown shots of him over the course of the movie. I’m not quite sure what the director was trying to say by do thing this. I believe he either was trying to make the viewer unsettled by flashing all these confusing images or was to show that this character is living in a never ending cycle of fighting.
The film has a very Stanley Kubrick feel especially compared with his A Clockwork Orange. The director repeatedly used classical music which contrasted the extreme violence happening on screen. The film tried to depict Bronson not just as a fighter but almost as a performance artist. So the film has more of an artistic feel to portray this with unique lighting and odd shooting angles.
This project has been full of problems. I started this project hoping to cover this group Sustainable Alamance which is a group that helps ex-convicts find jobs. I believed this would be a very interesting topic and would present itself with great stories of overcoming conflict. I made contact with the founder of Sustainable Alamance and went over with Brett to interview. We got a great interview and planned with the guy to meet on Wednesday to get b-roll of the men working. Also during that time would be able to conduct interviews with the ex-offenders. So I edited the interview which only need b-roll and the gaps for the ex-offenders but when Brett and I went to get the footage we came across a problem. Sustainable Alamance was locked out of the warehouse where we were supposed to shoot. Only one Sustainable Alamance member showed up and we couldn’t interview him because we couldn’t get inside and there was loud construction outside ruining the audio. So we had to scrap the whole project because it was missing too much needed footage.
Another issue we came across when doing this project was trying to find the focus of the story in the project. We weren’t sure whether to cover the event or the individual because we couldn’t tell who conveyed the more interesting story. This issue came up for both the paintball and the rally video. Unlike the videos I have shot before this style didn’t lend itself to time to setup shots. I had to work fast with my partner to quickly find a willing participant then as the interviewer got background information I did framing and focus. This production was fast pace and didn’t lend itself to mistakes. You either got the shot or not. It also was a challenge to take 45 minutes of footage and cut it down to what was important.
Brown and furry
Caterpillar in a hurry;
Take your walk
To the shady leaf or stalk.
May no toad spy you,
May the little birds pass by you;
Spin and die,
To live again a butterfly.
- Christina Georgina Rosetti
This project was much more difficult than the previous because I lacked a concept I wanted to do. I kept digging through poems but couldn’t find anything that would inspire me. Finally a found this short children’s poem entitled The Caterpillar. A few of children’s songs and poem have a tendency to come from disturbing events such a Ring-Around-the-Rosy, which comes from the Plague. I wanted to do the inverse with this poem. Take something sweet, find the deeper scarier aspects, and bring them out. Ultimately I wanted to make an almost satirical experimental film.
I checked out the Panasonic and captured some great shots of plants and caterpillars. I adjusted the shutter speed and was able to obtain some unique shots. But when I tried to upload the files I ran across an error. All my files on the card somehow got corrupted so I had to use the pickup footage that I had shot with D300. I lacked the time to reshoot so I gathered up the footage I had, along with some earlier footage I had and combined them to get the feel I wanted for the film.
I started off the film with old footage I got from the Prelinger Archives. The non-HD footage and lack of color tends to throw off a person who is used to crisp images thus automatically making the viewer feel uncomfortable. The changing color background was created by taking off the lens of the camera and running above this colorful flag on the wall. The sunset was an interesting shot because as the sun went farther below the horizon the brighter the foreground got making the shot useless after a certain point. That is why the sun doesn’t go completely down. This shot represents the end of the happy warm colors and the beginning of the dark tone and color. The cutting between the two guys exhibits conflict and war of nature with green as the earth and blue as the water. Also the guy is tinted blue because blue is a cool color which makes a person feel calm/depressed. This helps represent the blue guy as the struggling caterpillar trying to survive the nature (toads/birds) around him represented by the green guy. The card shot represented life in that life is random and it’s the luck of the draw. I manipulated the color to represent both nature and the caterpillar also making it slightly out of focus because the future is unclear. The shot of the “caterpillar boy” had an equalizer filter put on it to bring out the black changing to the tone to an even darker feel. The defocusing and fade to black represents the metamorphosis he is about to undertake. The scenes from then on represent change and transformation. The content in these shots are strange but that’s because change is strange. In the end, the caterpillar has completely transformed into this creature that just radiates light.
The final shot of the cup and the audio of me trying to learn how to work the camera shows that this piece isn’t as serious as it comes off to be. The whole piece is actually supposed to be a satire of the life of a caterpillar. Life is not supposed to be taken completely serious and change isn’t supposed to be scary but should be a fun time. The whole premise is from a kids’ poem and that helps reiterate that message. Another challenge I had in this project was trying to get a message and a feeling across without doing a narrative.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the story of Peter, a television show music composer, who gets dumped by his girlfriend Sarah Marshall, a famous television show actress. Peter was deeply in love with Sarah so he struggles to get over her. He ends up traveling to Hawaii to get his mind off Sarah since everything at home reminded him of her. Once he arrives, he realizes his ex and her new boyfriend are staying at the same hotel and hilarity ensues.
I heard a lot before seeing this movie that it was extremely which I would have to agree. What surprised me though was how much of a story there was in the film. I assumed it was just going to be a film that relied more on its jokes than its story to carry the viewer through. Normally with these types of comedies, the writer makes it clear whom you should like and who you should hate. What I was impressed with was at times you started to sympathize with the people you know you should hate and at time hate the people you know you should be rooting for. I was impressed because if they weren’t careful they could have ruined the movie by making the hero seem to evil but they didn’t. Instead, they added a new depth to the movie making the characters seem more human than caricatures like you normally see in these types of comedies.
There was one scene that the lighting stood out which just didn’t fit the movie. The shot had Peter on the balcony of his hotel room crying as the sun is setting. The blasts a very yellow light directly into the camera making the whole room turn this dark yellowish color. I understand what the lighting director was trying to do but it took me right out of the movie. The sun was setting and coming into the room but this is seen nowhere else in the movie making it feel out-of-place.
The film did a good job in their use of flashbacks. All the flashbacks slightly cheesy but that fit the feel of the movie. Plus all the flashback backs had a motivation and helped develop each actors’ character.
