April 16, 2016 by jakekenner

Mise-en-scene and Wes Anderson

Mise-en-scene is one of those academic terms that has never quite made sense to me. I’m convinced that on no film set has one ever uttered the word “mise-en-scene” because it’s not strictly speaking, a technical term. Bordwell and Thompson dissect the term into a few different categories.

As a self confessed Anderson fan, this isn’t my first time studying his artistic sensibilities. His use of focal length and symmetry is particularly fascinating. Audiences may not be able to put their finger on what exactly creates that sense of artifice but there’s something unnatural about shooting with a wide-angle lens, a foot away from an actors face rather than a more conventional portrait focal length and distance.

Wes Anderson’s Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a masterpiece of Mise-en-scene. In terms of Setting (the first element of mies-en-scene), the film is relatively minimalistic (the theatre location, the islands, the Belafonte and Operation Hennessey). Anderson’s style is intentionally artificial. Anderson constructs the Belafonte in one of the scenes is as a huge diorama over 100 feet in length.

Costume in Life Aquatic is similarly important as contrast is a key aspect of the film’s costumes. The Belafonte crew wear powder blue pants and matching tops with a bright red cap, each character wearing the cap and the uniform in slightly varying ways. This is juxtaposed with the Hennessy sailors and the extraneous people aboard the belafonte in khaki clothing which directly clashes with the blue uniforms.

Wes Anderson very rarely uses shadow in Life Aquatic. Most shots in the film are lit in a very flat manor and are also lit naturally which contrasts with the very artificial use of setting, costume, makeup and cinematography. The use of 3-point lighting is very minimal, more often, Anderson and his crew use available natural light and means to manipulate light (reflectors, diffusers etc.)

When it comes to the staging of the film, Anderson very deliberately places talent within a scene to again create a very staged feeling. Probably the best example of Staging Mise-en-scene is the submarine scene in which each of the cast members are placed perfectly in the shot so that they are almost all visible in the frame despite how packed they are within the scene.

Aside from the very obvious aspects of mise-en-scene, Wes Anderson very deliberately manipulates space and time, most obviously space with mise-en-scene. The almost constant use of wide angle lenses distorts the space to give the audience a broader view than they would normally have, allowing Anderson to fill the frame with elements of mise-en-scene, even moreso than many directors of this time.

April 14, 2016April 21, 2016 by jakekenner

Project Brief 3 Interview: A Story Analysis

1. What is the ‘controlling idea’ (Robert McKee) of your portrait?

The controlling idea of my portrait is that theatre (specifically the theatre that Asher creates) has the power to profoundly affect not only the people who they perform for but also the performers themselves. My goal is to show that Asher’s dream of creating humanitarian theatre has brought him to change the lives of many students.

2. How is your portrait film structured?

The interview is structured with effectively two plot lines, the first is about the overseas trips themselves and how they affect the people overseas and the performers and the reasons why students have such a great time experiencing another culture. The second plot line is about theatre in general and the power that it has to change students and the country even back home here in Australia. I asked four questions and I’m intercutting two plot lines throughout rather than just giving the one perspective the whole time. I think this will create a more engaging piece.

3. What do you want your audience to make of your interviewee?

I would like the audience to see that Asher is not only very intelligent and well researched but also passionate and caring towards his students and I would like them to feel uplifted at the end of the interview.

4. How is your portrait being narrated?

The only narration in the the interview will be Asher himself. I do not want to speak at all as I feel it will break the feeling I am going for which is very flowing, the speech should be rarely broken.

5. What role will the ‘found footage’ play in your portrait?

I would like to find a lot of found footage of theatre performance and maybe use some of the footage people shot on the trips he has done with students. Also music is very important but I think it will really hard to find the right track because the mood in my head is very specific.

6. Does your portrait have a dramatic turning point?

Yes. I would like there to be one when he says that art should have no agenda, that the agenda should be love because I really think that that’s a really great point. Maybe I’ll find some more softer pieces of narration to place after this moment to tie the interview up. As I am editing the interview out of order, it will be a little difficult.

7. When does this turning point in your portrait and why?

The turning point takes place at approximately three quarters of the way through, in many ways, this is similar to the three act structure, it has that end of act two, beginning of act three feeling

8. How does your portrait gather and maintain momentum?

I think I kind of talked about this in Question 2. I think through the fact that the two different topics will be happening simultaneously will make the pace feel like it’s building until I focus more on the one topic and then it will feel like a nice resolved denouement.

9. Where will your portrait’s dramatic tension come from?

I don’t think there is that much dramatic tensioning the interview. I don’t think that’s the kind of interview it is, I think certainly it has form, but I am struggling to think of a point in the interview where there is a juxtaposition strong enough to create dramatic tension.

10. Does the portrait have a climax and/or resolution?

Yes. Though I am only in the very early stages of editing the piece, I think the climax of the piece is definitely the turn of the third act as I mentioned earlier when Asher says that the agenda is love, it really has an emotional weight and I think between that and the ending there’s a really beautiful correlation and the way that line sets up the ending is really nice. The idea that the agenda is loving others and then that sets up the last line of the piece “let’s share something together” I think it really not only says something about Asher’s goal as a teacher but also him as a person.

April 12, 2016April 20, 2016 by jakekenner

Ballet Mechanique and Avant Garde Cinema

This post is a Media One / Cinema Studies Crossover post about Non-narrative / avant-gade cinema

I confess, I have never much enjoyed non-narrative and avant grade cinema. I tend to stick to the warm fuzzies of pretty hollywood narratives. But eventually, a film student is forced to grapple with the void of a sans story film or learn to find the story in the apparent absence. Ballet Mechanique, has a very similar kind of absence as Disney’s Fantasia in the sense that, the two films are like a dance, seemingly made up of small components that don’t much blend (kinda sorta like Holy Motors).

Film Art categorises Ballet Mechanique as abstract form, suggesting that the film is made up of several distinct parts. As I touched on in some of my previous blog posts, pieces that people would consider to be non-narrative, still at a core level contain some level of narrative. In this case the way in which the elements of the scene are juxtaposed with editing creates narrative, despite it being near impossible to extract meaning from.

I found the film to be quite jarring to watch as the quick successive shots in the film do not really flow. The pace of the edit is very disjointed as opposed to modern montages. The inclusion of the cartoon Charlie Chaplain as a motif was really interesting. Using theme and variation, similarly to other longer form cinema, the film introduces and then reintroduces images and motifs to encourage small snippets of audience-created meaning. The idea is to create a dance of the machines, yet with mostly human elements rather than machine-like elements.

Obviously, the film substantially differs from anything around in the late twenties and the film would have been more of a visual experience for the audience and I think that is something really interesting about these avant grade films, they show us how cinema can exist without the conventional elements we would associate with the medium.

April 12, 2016 by jakekenner

La Jetée: Form

La Jetée is in many ways an extremely modern film despite it’s actual time of creation. I was extraordinarily inspired by the film because felt like the genre of film that I love and I could see elements of the film that would be brilliant to re-contextualise. I could think of many modern films that could have been directly inspired by La Jetée including Looper and Oblivion. The feeling of the film itself was very sombre and dramatic and I could see why the construction of the film was considered avant grade, though I felt the story itself followed very classical form and could quite easily be turned into a modern blockbuster by removing the voice-over and having a moving frame rather than purely stills.

One of the key elements of film form described by Film Art is the idea of Unity/Disunity. In my opinion, the idea of a cyclical narrative (some would call this elliptical storytelling) is the most obvious form of unity within a screenplay. Many of my favourite scripts employ this technique such as Nolan’s Inception. La Jetée’s conclusion is profoundly successful because of it’s setup at the beginning of his film, though the way in which it is communicated is somewhat vague and took multiple viewings before I actually understood it. I think, from a cinematography perspective, the scene does not have enough repetitive elements to cue the audience that they are at the beginning of the film, we also do not see the main character as a child in the scene at the end which, in my opinion, severely diminishes the effect and the “ah hah!” moment is diminished because the only cue is the narration.

In a poetic sense, the form of the piece is very rondo. Film Art would describe it as a sort of ABACA structure. The character begins at the Jetty (La Jetée), fast forward to the future, the experiment then back to the past the first time, the development and the final time at the Jetty. This is very classical form.

April 12, 2016 by jakekenner

Holy Motors: Film Form

Holy Motors makes one feel like they have accidentally consumed illegal substances on the way into the theatre because not only does it seemingly avoid any kind of story (at least in classical form), it is also completely absurd; complete with gorilla families, talking cars and computer generated alien sex. It was suggested in class that the film is intentionally lacking narrative, though if that was the intention of the filmmakers, they were unsuccessful, I tend to think of the film as having many seemingly disconnected narratives. At no point in the film, does the audience lose interest. Film Art: An Introduction suggests that all art contains form and this is the reason we are annoyed when someone changes the channel in the middle of a television show or we lose a book half way through. Our mind’s are not designed to appreciate the film simply for the experience, we crave the ending, the resolution, beginning, middle and end, three act structure.

Holy Motors, though seemingly lacking resolution does still follow film form. When it comes to Repetition and Variation, the film skilfully upsets your expectations. By constantly leading you back to the limousine between these seemingly ridiculous, eclectically arranged scenes, the film’s repetition, creates the expectation that the narrative should tie up the loose end, or at least explain the significance of the limo, or the characters that we see throughout the film, things that have been repeated. Film Art refers to these as formal expectations and explains the construction in terms of poetic form (AB, ABA etc.). Holy Motors seems to abuse conventional form by setting up so many expectations and subtly coercing the audience toward believing a resolution is imminent and then tears those expectations apart. For me, certainly, I spent the entire film wanting it to all make sense, almost the “Inception” conclusion, when suddenly you understand that the reason Cobb’s wife killed herself was because he put the idea there in the first place. That sudden feeling of all the puzzle pieces fitting together, instead it was the realisation that the pieces were from 3 different boxes and half of them were missing and there was no way the pieces were ever going to come together.

April 11, 2016April 21, 2016 by jakekenner

PB3 Interview and the Controlling Idea

Robert McKee, in his famous screenwriting Bible, “Story” suggests that every story must have a controlling idea and that audiences will become disoriented with a lack of discernible focus in a script. As I referred to in my earlier blog post on Story I absolutely love McKee’s book and read the entire book for the sake of my own research in year 11 of high school, prior to writing both of my last two short films.

When approaching my Project Brief Three I have decided that the controlling idea should be Asher’s (my subject’s) effect on the students who go on his trips and participate in his shows. As a former student of his, I can say, I have been profoundly affected by his generosity, professionalism and teaching over the course of many years in high school. Once I established this focus, I set about designing questions that engage with his love of art and theatre as well as the people he has directly impacted. I plan to use found footage of the previous trips created by students and teachers who were on the trips as B-roll with the main interview.

At the moment my ideas for questions are as follows:

“When did you decide to take a theatrical trip overseas?”

“Why do you think the trips have been so successful?”

“What are your plans for the trips in future?”

At the moment these are very basic questions and I definitely need to expand them before recording my interview!!

April 11, 2016May 27, 2016 by jakekenner

Editing of the State

Enemy of the State. Regarded by many as ludicrous and non-sensical, especially given Will Smith’s transition from everyday lawyer to Bruce Willis action hero in minutes, however, the film is in fact an homage to another of Gene Hackman’s films, Francis-Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Critically, the film is regarded as a very typical Tony Scott film with lots of flashy, fast paced cuts, intense action and lacking plot. Yet, as an action film, which is what it is, it doesn’t disappoint, looking particularly at the editing, we can see Tony Scott’s definitive hand on the work. Film Art essentially describes editing as juxtaposition of shots. Meaning is created through this juxtaposition. It continues to describe several types of edits. Aside from the regular cross-cut, match-cut, shot-reverse-shot edits which fall into the graphic relations category.

But Film Art also describes three other types of edits within the taxonomy of editing: Rhythmic Relations, Spatial Relations and Temporal Relations. These, aside from rhythmic relations describe the locus of a shot within the diegesis. Rhythmic relations describe the tempo of an edit or series of edits, whereas Temporal Relations and Spatial relations describe the time and place of an edit within the broader corpus of the film itself.

In Enemy of the State, the scene in which “Brill” and Robert Dean first meet in the elevator is a fast paced scene full of cross-cuts through space but relatively continuous in time. These cuts most often last for less than three seconds, some shorter than a second. The pace of the edits is used to heighten excitement and suspense, the rhythmic relations of these shots are very tight and fast paced with a very small temporal duration. Yet the dynamic created, I would argue is much less about the relation between the shots in terms of time and space and more the shots themselves and the tension that the fast cross-cutting of shots creates.

April 10, 2016April 20, 2016 by jakekenner

Robert McKee’s Story (A.K.A Why I Love the Book)

Story is the first of our Media readings that I have previously encountered in my media travels and by encountered I mean, I read the whole book about a year and half ago and loved it

My theatre studies teacher and mentor Mr Asher Johnson, who is also my interview subject for Project Brief 3 was a screenwriter in L.A before coming to Australia a second time. After he discovered a passion for writing, he flew to the US and had training at the Act One school of Screenwriting. On an overseas theatre trip, he then took us to the school and we were given a class in screenwriting and got a chance to talk to the writer behind the film Blended which, of course, she claims was a good script that was ruined by Adam Sandler’s people. In year 10, we were taught the fundamentals of American Hollywood screenwriting and structure including all the specifics the feature film formula and when and how to break the rules. As a young filmmaker, this was crucial to my understanding of writing and story and since then I have written six screenplays including a feature length one (which was admittedly the worst thing I’ve ever committed to paper). And in my quest to become better and better as I made short films for festivals, I picked up a recommendation by my mother’s cousin’s husband, (who also works in Hollywood) Story!.

I absolutely love McKee’s book and the way he constantly uses examples of how screenwriters successfully (and spectacularly unsuccessfully) use and break the rules of modern screenwriting. And the most important thing that both the Act One school and Robert McKee taught me is that the rules are not simply in place to make money, and they’re not there to stifle creativity or to create a safe, easy money making machine, they are there because audiences identify with them. The three act structure Hollywood screenplay works because it’s brilliant, it captures something innate within us as story consumers and storytellers that speaks to us. A good strong protagonist, someone to root for, is important! I have seen so many people, particularly in academic circles that seek to push the boundaries of film structure and firmly believe that conventional narrative structure is pop trash, without acknowledging the reason it was developed, or more accurately discovered.

McKee’s taxonomy is based entirely on the academic study of what film writers have done well for years. No screenwriter sets out to write a three act film with an inciting incident on page 10, a wafer scene on page 91 and a change of the hero’s plans on page 65 but it happens, naturally, constantly, because for some bizarre reason, we are hardwired to respond to a story like that and therefore we create stories like that.

I leave you with my favourite quote from the book, it has not only inspired my work but also inspired the way that I think about creativity.

Talent is a muscle: without something to push against, it atrophies. So we deliberately put obstacles in our path – barriers that inspire.

April 8, 2016April 20, 2016 by jakekenner

Noticing and an Intro to Textual Analysis

This week we begin talking about textual analysis and a key to the whole textual analysis equation is what has been coined as “noticing”. Noticing according to our lecturer Rachel, is the process of simply noticing media texts in our daily lives, she showed us an example of an ad in Vietnam for washing product OMO. We discussed as a class how it differs to an ad for the same product in this country and how the societal factors and ideas of wealth and cleanliness differ substantially across cultures.

From my high school Media and Visual Communication studies, I thought of the idea of noticing very similar to the techniques we used in visual analysis. This was a very important skill in VCE and I think it has become an important part of my life particularly in writing. My father and I have watched the advertising show The Gruen Transfer for years and the show is fantastic for drawing attention to the things we take for granted in the audience/producer relationship and how advertising has the power to influence you by essentially placing you within the ad itself. A fantastic example was the hotel ad we viewed in class, it showed a man and his child in a perfect hotel setting that had a very clear intended meaning.

We also discussed the difference between connotation and denotation. This, I found particularly fascinating because I have never known what the technical way of talking about surface observations in an analysis context was.

I am excited because I am started to see the separation of the theory and practical sections of the course and there is definitely a feeling that it is leading to studio based practise.

April 7, 2016April 20, 2016 by jakekenner

Sony MC50 Workshop: Interview

Today we were introduced to the first University camera we get to use. I was super excited to see something super professional, I guess I can wait till like third year or something. But we took these cute little guys out for a test drive and they are really quite versatile, though they lack nice lenses and big sensors, they do one thing right, they’re easy to use when you don’t know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, the moment I tried to access any setting that was even remotely advanced, it became extremely convoluted yes, I know, sad face but our class banded together as one and worked it out.

As a group of four, a few of us headed out and filmed an interview exercise, though we seemed to have misunderstood a few elements of the brief. That being said, I still think the footage we got was decent, we offloaded our footage and myself and Bronte edited our video together. Bronte is an A plus human, but she didn’t get into the Media course to edit videos so I was more than happy to help her smash the video out in preparation for our Project Brief 3. Here is the final result:

Also here’s one of my favourite screen grabs from a particularly fantastic piece of footage:

Note: Seth’s bandaged hand in the background. Hope they fixed it up!

Cinemascope

BY JAKE KENNER

Month / April 2016