Assignment 4 Video:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tEftd4u6wJ1ZvmU1z3GikReLlQFJsy4v
Week 9 Reflection:
Week 10 Reflection:
Week 11 Reflection:
Week 12 Reflection:
Advanced Research Project Reflection:
Exhibition Post:
The Scene in Cinema has been my favorite part of the media course thus far by a considerable margin. I’ve met some great people and the class as a whole has bonded really well. This is entirely thanks to the fantastic work of Robin, through his unparalleled commitment and passion towards the course which makes the environment such an enjoyable place to learn and collaborate with others. I genuinely look forward to going to class every day and engaging with the fascination we all share for the filmmaking process. If there’s just one thing I take out of this class from a theoretical basis, it’s the flow of actors within a location and how they flow both on and off the screen. This was apparent in my analysis of ‘There Will Be Blood’ earlier in the year, whereby the way in which the camera transversed the space made it seem real and alive. It felt like there was a lot more going on off-screen, and it takes a great camera to actor relationship to pull this off. On a broader spectrum, I’ve learned to far greater appreciate the effort of the team behind film productions that too often goes unnoticed. The fact that a directors thinking does go unnoticed by their audience is a credit to them, and is arguably the most rewarding part of the process, as it means they are fully immersed in what they’re watching. I loved the focus on group collaboration and constructing a scene, getting feedback and improving it. It’s a tried and proven formula that worked really well in this class, and the quality of what we produced only grew as the semester progressed. As I’m sure everyone in this studio will agree, it’s been a great class to be a part of, and it’s a shame it’s ended so soon. We’ve developed some great friendships and look forward to continuing collaborating in the future. As Robin put it himself… ‘you’ll never have the opportunity again you have now to create stuff’.
For my advanced research project in the ‘Scene in Cinema’, I wanted to do something that would push me to reimagine the actor to camera relationship by focusing entirely on the way in which actors can be shot moving around a space, with little to no emphasis on what the characters represent and the greater narrative. My main source of inspiration for my final assessment in this course was the work of Antonioni which we focused on in week 9, and how he makes the bizarre and at times senseless movement in the frame look so natural to the viewer. This was particularly apparent in his 1964 film ‘Red Desert‘ starring Monica Vitti and Richard Harris, heavily inspired by Antonioni’s roots in postwar neorealism. I took special interest towards the scene we watched in class in which Monica Vitti and Richard Harris basically walk around a blank room with no apparent motives whilst they talk. It’s incredibly well produced in how fluidly they flow from space to space. Even when one character moves out of the frame into a blank corner of the room, the camera positioning is so fantastically well done that you still understand where they are in relation to the other actor. This is largely down to the phenomenal acting and partly the specific choice of location. This is the only place I could find the scene online:
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/1099292/Red-Desert-Movie-Clip-Maybe-Light-Blue-s-Better.html
For my scene, I decided to shoot it at home because I wanted a location I had complete control over which couldn’t be replicated at uni, and it also allowed me to custom envisage the actor movement in the room. Living in Geelong, it was too difficult to get one of our proper cameras down from Melbourne so I shot on a DSLR. The image quality isn’t a big deal for this exercise however it made it slightly more difficult to pull the focus from actor to actor, as well as having some bizarre exposure issues in which some shots became incredibly dark. However, these technical elements are not important to what i am trying to display, just something to keep in mind. I used members of my family as actors (god bless them), so they did a lot of smiling and non-professional things like that, so I just focused on what I could control.
In the Red Desert scene, businessman Zeller visits Ravenna at her shop for no apparent reason, so I’ve employed a similar plot decision here and made the detectives motives for investigation unclear. Zeller is used as a ground anchor in Red Desert, as he barely moves around the space compared to Ravenna. This makes it easier to establish where Ravenna moves in the space as the viewer has a fixated point to identify where she is in relation to Zeller. This is true in my scene however the roles are reversed and the detective is the one moving around the space. Eyelines a critical to make this movement seem legitimate, so I ensured the actors never left their positions so those in the frame had a point to lock on to. The young girl doesn’t move throughout the entirety of my scene, and it makes it easy for the viewer to establish where the detective is in the space as he keeps looking back to the same spot where the girl is established in the first shot.
The second shot is taken just to the right of the girl, hence it’s almost a point of view shot which is used to once again clearly establish the detective’s position in the room even though it wasn’t shown in the previous shot. Being a DSLR the video exposure was rather difficult to adjust mid shot so I accepted the dark silhouette around the investigator as he looks out the window. In a way, it works as it paints him as a dark and untrustworthy character.
The scene is essentially the investigator doing a circle around the room in front of the girl, and the simplicity of doing it this way makes him easier to track, as the viewer can almost anticipate where he’s going to end up. I really wanted to do a pullback shot to bring the girl into the frame in this shot, and I did this by using the detective’s movement towards the camera as a means to force the camera back to keep him in the frame, pushing the camera into an OTS of the same character in the one shot. As the camera pulls back, the windows position in the room is also established for greater context.
The last few shots are simple shot-reverse shots of the two characters in conversation, and upon closer reflection, something about it doesn’t look quite right. The way in which both characters are framed screen left in both shots looks cramped and looking back on it, rather crap. This applies particularly to the shot of my sister, in which there is so much blank screen real estate on the right that it looks like it was shot in another house completely. Frankly, it pisses me off that I was so blind to it at the time at least it’s something to reflect on.
Thanks again for a phenomenal semester.
Assignment 4:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tEftd4u6wJ1ZvmU1z3GikReLlQFJsy4v
Our last week in the Scene in Cinema sadly. It’s been a great class and I’ll discuss this in my ‘exhibition post’ later in the week. On Tuesday we participated in our last group shooting exercise, focusing this week on the scene to scene relationship and coming up with practical solutions for linking scenes together with fluidity. We broke into two relatively large groups due to the number of roles to be fulfilled, as well as a whole host of extras. In the script, a student falls asleep and wakes up with different people around him to the previous scene. We rotated the roles around regularly as a means to change around the extras. I started off as the boom operator and noted that to avoid the varying spike in audio levels that has been apparent in our previous exercises, we plugged the mic in right from the start even though there was no audio in the opening scene to record the ambient noise. This worked to great effect and the background noise flowed seamlessly from shot to shot. Credit to director Issac and later Sophia who did a great job on capturing a ton of footage for our editor Rob to play with. Combined it meant that, as Robin put it, the scenes didn’t feel rushed, as the shots extended beyond what was written in the script. That is my big take away from week 12, that scripts never really tell the full story of every shot, and it is the responsibility of the director to capture every angle and go beyond what is detailed, otherwise, you lose immersion and may as well just read the script instead of going to the cinema to see it. I haven’t gotten around to filming assignment 4 yet. But I ready to shoot for the weekend.
Thanks for a great semester Robin and Co.
Second last week of classes, time fly’s. In Tuesday’s class we moved into another room to talk about lighting, and it’s use in conveying mood. Our group of four wanted to cast soft lighting over our subject and use a fill light to remove any harshness. As a means to do this, we positioned our subject side on to a window casting natural sunlight onto one half of the subjects face, and then used a white board to redirect that light back onto the other side of his face for a less stark contrast. Without this fill light, we found there to be a very harsh and distinctive line splitting Johns face, giving him a split personality look, not a great interview look. The third lighting direction is a ‘back light’, which is positioned somewhere behind the subject to create a glowing/halo effect. We didn’t need a back light in this case.
We then moved back into the other classroom and briefly discussed our presentations on friday. Finally, we did an exercise in small groups playing around with the components of lighting we discussed in the first half of the class. We did significant experimenting with the black and white boards as a means to manipulated the lighting conditions for our cause.
On Friday we did our presentations to the class touching on various elements of the course from assignments, thoughts on the subject, and genuinely flattering Robin’s commitment and passion to the topic (well deserved). All of the presentations were excellent and it was invigorating to experience my peers open up on the revelations they uncovered, and it was great to see we all share a common goal and that we all wish to continue creating. I’ve got a 2000 word essay due next week which I haven’t started at the present moment so I probably won’t start filming until Tuesday, however I now have a firm grasp of where I’m heading and the general direction I wish to take.