Monthly Archives: May 2014

Film& TV Reflection 6

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Consider Sandra’s lecture “Directing Actors” and describe at least a couple of points that you took away from it (even if you’re not the director).

Sandra’s lecture “Directing Actors” talks about the importance of maintaining a good relationship with the actors. While on set, director should be giving out clear direction instead of overwhelming them making them to feel confused. I think this is one of the main point for all film makers, decisions should be made clear before giving out to the actors, no matter what position you are in, one of the main thing is to ‘act’ or be professional in front of others, even during the times that you are unsure, to give them a sense of confidence.

Moving on, she also talks about how everybody should be aware on set, even when you’re not doing anything. It is very important that each member of the crew knows exactly what is going on on set. For my group, I was the producer, where most of my job are mainly focus on preparing the film, as compared to the cinematographer and director. During that day, i didn’t have a lot of things to do, but i make sure i’m aware of everything that is going on and point out the problems that i thought was wrong. Fortunately, our group worked really well together and everything went smoothly and finishes on time.

In this clip screened in the lecture from the Coen brothers’ ‘Blood Simple’ describe what is happening in terms of the edits specifically in terms of the audio and video. Also name the different kinds of audio you can hear.

This scene of Blood Simple (Coen Brothers 1984, USA) has a really great audio recordings.

Firstly, most of them are ambient sounds throughout the whole scene, the sounds that i catch up from the scene was the crickets sound, the toilet flushing sound, the lighter dropping on the table, footsteps and the sound of siren etc. Sometimes I do feel like a well recorded sound effect like that are definitely a big plus point to the whole film. It is something that break the suspense.

The scene uses a lot of medium to close up shot on their actors whole constructing the story and overall i think it’s a great scene.

Most applications reserve keyboard shortcuts for the functions that use most often. It is really good to learn all of these as it will speed up your editing and additionally alert you to functions that the software developers and other users find important. (You can learn much about the software by looking at keyboard shortcuts).

Find the keyboard shortcuts for Adobe Premiere and note two or more functions that you’ve never used before that may be invaluable to editing.

I’m the type of person who uses a lot of shortcuts in my laptop. So i’m quite familiar with most of the main shortcuts like undo, save, group, find, delete, copy and paste etc. However, I found a new shorcut that might be helpful for me while i edit for our film, which is Snap and Trim. I think these are the shortcut that i wasn’t familiar with as they are only useful when it comes to editing.

Participation for im1

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Here are my favorite sentences of the readings accumulated over the course from Readings 01 to readings 10.

Readings 1:
“Interactive Documentary: Setting the Field.” Studies in Documentary Film 6.2 (2012): 125–139.

Favorite sentence:
Feed-back loops that are not possible in linear narrative
can give the opportunity both to participants and to the artefact to re-define themselves and to change. Where this is the case, it is through enacted engagement with the artefact that the reality being portrayed comes into being.

Readings 02:
Sørenssen, Bjørn. “Digital Video and Alexandre Astruc’s Caméra-Stylo: The New Avant-Garde in Documentary Realized?” Studies in Documentary Film 2.1 (2008): 47–59. EBSCOhost. Web. 19 Sept.

Favorite sentence:
They Must be Represented. This title denotes a ‘they’ and a ‘we’, where all good intentions of acting on behalf of others very often leads to a cementation of existing social constellations.

Readings 03:
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 2013. Print.

Favorite sentence:
One standard description of rhetorical form suggests that it begins with an in­troduction of the situation, goes on to a discussion of the relevant facts, then pre­sents proofs that a given solution fits those facts, and ends with an epilogue that
summarizes what has come before

Readings 04:
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Favorite sentence:
Eliminates bad stories. This is the most controversial condition in the list, because it straddles the borderline between definition and poetics, and because it needs to be complemented by a full theory of the different ways in which narrative significance.

Readings 05:
Rascaroli, Laura. “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.2 (2008): 24–47.

Favorite sentence:
“despite overlappings, this genre of filmmaking needs to be distinguished from a documentary tradition and an avant-garde/experimental one.”

Readins 06:
Soar, Matt. “Making (with) the Korsakow System: Database Documentaries as Articulation and Assemblage.” New Documentary Ecologies Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses. Ed. Kate Nash, Craig Hight, and Catherine Summerhayes. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 154–73. Print.

Favorite sentence:
“A challenge of researching interactive texts is that the whole text is never completely available for analysis.” Each viewing has the potential to be different from the last.

Readings 07:
Frankham, Bettina Louise. “Complexity, Flux and Webs of Connection.” A Poetic Approach to Documentary : Discomfort of Form, Rhetorical Strategies and Aesthetic Experience. (2013): PhD Dissertation, University of Technology Sydney.

Favorite sentence:
The key issue is to provide the constitutive elements in a context that still permits a heuristic, exploratory engagement that may be taken further rather than setting the elements up as an algorithmic recipe that is definitive in the understanding of a topic.

Readings 08:
Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Vintage, 2011. Print.

Favorite sentence:
Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and i want to say, No, it doesn’t.

Readings 09:
Luers, Will. “Plotting the Database.” Database | Narrative | Archive: Seven Interactive Essays on Digital Nonlinear Storytelling. Ed. Matt Soar and Monika Gagnon. N. p., 2013. Web.

Favorite sentence:
Search, fast retrieval, user control of temporal ordering – the qualities that make databases unique – leave standard plot effects, such as foreshadowing and suspense, ineffective.

Readings 10:
Dovey, Jon, and Mandy Rose. “We’re Happy and We Know It: Documentary, Data, Montage.” Studies in Documentary Film 6.2 (2012): 159–173.

Favorite sentence:
Video content ‘of the web’, live to the affordances of networked connectivity, has particular attractions to the documentary producer. It has the potential to introduce different voices into a linear text, to offer in-depth investigation of particular sequences, and to re-contextualise documentary material through mobilising the enormous co-creative potential of human discourse captured in the web.

Film& TV Reflection 5

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Question 1:
The lecture that was covered during week 7 was the key and basic principles of lighting and some introduction to the equipments and the use of different type of lights. Lighting in my film plays a very important role, not because we want the most light out of the daylight, but because we need to restraint our lights during the daytime to create a darker scene. Most of our group members are not quite familiar with the use of light, but because of the lecture we actually sort of have an idea on what light to use and how to use black cloth or cardboard to restraint the light.

Question 2:

Week 7’s reading about “Lighting a scene” definitely highlights some key point that could help us with our short film. Since we are shooting mostly indoor, it is stated that for day interior, windows are the most logical light resources. If the major light source is window, it might be obvious to the audience that the time during your shooting which we do not want it. For our film, it is located at a garage, which is being set up as a ‘Bunker’. We definitely do not want any lights coming in from the window as we are trying to create a darker film. The second key point I got from the reading was the night interior. Since we are to create a night scenes during the daytime, the illusion of night is created by the angle and the distribution of light. Anytime you have a source of light in the frame it adds definition to the picture. So we thought that we definitely need to do something to control the amount of light that is being distributed. During our shoot, we actually cover a black cloth over the light to limit the lights that are coming our and using a pole to adjust the lighting direction and amount of lights that we want during the shoot.

Question 3

Blow Up is a 1966 film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
In this scene note the choreography of the actors, camera, frame and focus. As covered in the lecture describe the things Antonioni would have to consider when directing the actors and the camera.
I realize that this film is very complicated even if it looks like a relatively simple scene. Many shots were taken from multiple angles. For example, the opening scene, it started off with a medium close up shot of the men character, and changes to a long shot without moving the camera, but the character himself walking towards to camera to create a long shot.

There were also a lot of angles coming from the top, sides or front. The panning shot for the film would be deliberate, not just because the actors moved sideways but because the director planned this way. It was also mentioned in the lecture that the use of tracking and panning for camera movements, there will be at least three people to operate. There must be several rehearsals with both the camera and actors to ensure the scene goes smoothly as there is a perk for doing these kind of shots, as it might take longer time for the camera set ups and might take multiple takes for a successful shot.

Reflection 4 Film&TV

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Question 7: Please outline some points that you took away from the Lighting Lecture. Points that excite you, something that was completely new to you, perplexes you or even one you take issue with.

Lighting is very important as a camera only capture the images for a film through light. Every lighting set up provides a specific mood, emotion, and atmosphere to overall film viewing experience. The importance of it is pretty straight forward, but the procedures of the set up can be complicated. This overwhelms me as there is so many things to consider.
The key light, fill light and back light each plays an important role in setting up. The different amounts of key and fill light can be used to create harsh lighting or soft lighting which provides different atmosphere. I’ve seen some BTS of some movie, due to budget and time constraint, they could actually use lighting to shoot ‘night scene’ during the morning, and shoot ‘morning scenes’ at night.

Question 8: Please insert the link for your Lenny ex2 here. (use insert link tool)
List the things that you learnt from this experience – this could be things that went well or not so well.

I think the main thing that I’ve learnt through the Lenny exercise is the shooting schedule. As a director I had to watch the time and keep up with the shooting schedule. As it was our first actual shooting, most of us was unprepared and wanted to give several attempts to a scene, thus it will take up a lot of time.

We could have planned a bit better before shooting to have a clearer idea of possible problems and to fix it. Overall, the shooting went well and we were the first group who returned to class on time.