The week 5 reading on cinematography excited me firstly because it was by Martin Scorsese and secondly because it was on cinematography (I get excited by pretty frames).

A point I really loved that he made was that the way you set up your shot is based on ‘how much you want your audience to see’. I love the idea of stuff happening off camera and the audience only has the sound to go off. Sometimes not seeing something can be a lot more interesting and letting the shot run longer with no edits can be interesting in ‘letting things play out’, another point made by Scorsese. That section of the reading made me want to go start filming stuff immediately.

I had never heard of Dusan Makavejev before this reading. He makes an interesting point about timing between frames. People carrying expectations with them from the previous shot. This can be used to imply things or even surprising people by not cohering to their expectations.

The lecture covered lighting techniques like 3-point lighting, hard/soft lighting, artificial/natural lighting and what equipment to use to create set ups of lighting. Point that were made were the importance of lighting in cinematography, themes and moods that can be conveyed through lighting  and the importance of exposure levels.

The content was very relevant to our project since we planned to use lighting equipment but the hands on practise in class was a lot more helpful in my opinion. We got to set up lights and play around with different lights such as redheads, dedos and Blondie’s. We learnt to bounce lights off white card board or white walls if they were available which became the most important thing in our shoot to create a softer light. In class we also got to practise creating ‘daylight’ in a dark room was very important to our shoot since we ran over time and had to shoot a morning scene at night.

This week was on narratives and conclusions. Conclusions are pretty much non-existent in K-films and pretty much so are narratives, or maybe they are just a little obscure – I guess that depends on what it’s about. The important thing about K-films though is the theme. The theme gives us something to work around, some way to relate all the videos and in and out words together. It’s a constraint – which as we learnt in a previous lecture – is the best thing for creativity. However, you shouldn’t be too literal with your theme, give your audience some excitement, some freedom of thought… some obscurity?

Our theme is centred around addiction, however we stray from the normal heroin and tobacco addiction and stretch the word “addiction” to everyday habits like biting the bit of skin off next to your nail, or even being addicted to the person you love.

This weeks lecture stressed that cinema is based on the visuals and not on the language. I thought this was quite obvious since the first films contained no sound at all and still told stories with just their images. The same goes for foreign films nowadays, although we have subtitles, the tone of the person’s voice, their expressions and what happens in the scene is where the real story is. “The Artist”, the oscar winning film from 2011 is an example of this – go see it, it’s great.

Korsakow supports this claim. Many K-films have no words at all yet still express a meaning. They are just a series  of clips that collectively mean something through their images. Adrian mentioned film grammar is different to language grammar. You can’t mix up a word in a sentence for it to still make sense. However, mix up clips in a film and it can still make sense. Now I don’t necessarily believe this for narrative driven films but for Korsakow films, it’s the perfect description.

K-films are meant to be all scrambled up, and depending on their order they can mean something different to the viewer.

In this course I really want to learn how to pitch a TV show to a television channel. I mean I have a rough idea but it would be nice to get advice and such. I don’t know if suggestions get read here but yes here is my suggestion, I’d love to know. Also some advice about starting up a production company and all that. Maybe that is year 3 of the course, I’m not sure.

3 Point lighting really interested me. I had heard about it before and used it before in films that I crewed on. It consists of a key light, a fill light and a back light and basically make things look very pretty, enhancing the cinematography (something I am very interested in).

Back when I was 16 I did a short course in film and we learnt about 3 point lighting and how it is classically used in Hollywood films since they love glorifying things and making everything and everyone good looking. I also remember hearing that Australian films tend to do this less due to their raw and stylistic nature. I am not sure if this is true but from what I’ve seen Australian films do have a more real and raw feel to them that makes them seem less like a typical Hollywood Blockbuster.

I loved the idea of playing around with all the lights so I am a little disappointed we didn’t get to in class. It seems odd that now we can just take the lights and do what we want with them rather than physically practising setting them up and all.

The gels and all the chances to play around with the colour temperature of scenes excites me. A lot.

LENNY

From this experience I learnt that blocking out shots is very important, the slightest thing such as which direction your characters walk in can change a lot about the film. We will take extra time blocking out shots for our final film. For this reason it is important to visit your location before you start shooting. Another reason that makes this important is sound. It is impossible to tell what a location will sound like if you have never been there. For instance, when we filmed the Lenny we didn’t realise that construction was happening in the area. There was a lot of intermittent noise that we had to film around which made things a lot more difficult. Because of unpredictable sounds like this it is also important to record an atmosphere track with the mic to use in the editing process.

Earlier last week Ella posted a video ‘Sounds of Aronofsky’. It’s really cool. Personally I’m a huge fan of the old ECU as you can probably tell by looking at my Korsakow films. I think this is kind of what the Integrated constraints have been trying to get us to do. We are only allowed to show parts of things, and this clip certainly does. I love that idea. Just showing parts of things. I love how it takes a few seconds to get your head around what you’re seeing. It’s almost slightly abstract. It’s really beautiful and intimate, even if it’s something not so pretty; like the goo between the fingers, the drugs, strange body parts.

So I watched the Wolf of Wall Street. I also read the Wolf of Wall Street. Then I stalked the whole cast, the crew, the real life people the movie was based on, what they did back then and what they do now.

Some would say I’m a little obsessed. This is how I get after seeing a movie I loved. It happened with Titanic, Back to the Future, Avatar and so on.

Anyway, Jordan Belfort in real life is a pretty amazing guy. Sure he is an asshole. But he is a very clever asshole, and watching his seminar clips on youtube, in fact watching him speak in general is so entertaining and so inspiring.

Just watch this clip and tell me you don’t want to write down some grand vision you have for the future and start acting on it.

http://www.themediastudents.net/im1/2014/tiana.koutsis