With the university moving the classes online for at least the next month I, along with the rest of the class, was unable to take part in planned group practical exercises instead we looked at the readings Robin posted.

This week’s reading focused on my favourite aspects of directing a film which is the individual styles that directors leave on their work due to combination of their choices such as the shots involved, character blocking as well as other factors such as set and costume design by looking at a variety of clips each set in pairs that had a similar situation eg: characters talking in a bar and analysed the differences in them. I thoroughly enjoyed this week’s reading as it not only covered a topic I’m interested in but it challenged me to look more in depth at these scenes and the directorial choices involved by each one by making me question why I thought the directors chose those shots over others and how if I was shooting those scenes what choices would I make instead.

In part 3 I watched a scene from the movie Margaret (2011) Directed by Kenneth Lonergan and Robin asked us to break it down:

This scene conveys a lot of information from the very start using wide shots of busy sidewalks the central character is walking up and down before cutting to a shot of her looking for a cowboy hat in stores in between the two wide shots this is used to show the audience how much time and effort she must be spending to look for this hat before we see the bus driver. The shot choices here are very specific to put the audience on edge as we have two characters one of which is driving a bus and the other is running alongside it on the road talking to each other and clearly not paying attention to what’s in front of them which is why the director chooses to show the camera choices through their eyes as their conversation stays entirely on them through a combination of mid and wide shots and the director chooses to not show what’s ahead on the road itself just as the characters are not paying attention to what’s ahead until we see the woman when it’s too late for the bus driver.