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).

Two things I took away from Sandra’s lecture were;

• When rehearsing with the actors, get them to talk about their interpretation of the film and each scene in particular, rather than telling them directly.
• Sandra recommended shooting outside wherever possible, and if it was possible to try and shoot near windows, as it is easier to use the natural light than create complicated lighting set ups (also cuts down 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.

Sounds you can hear in “Blood Simple:

• Diagetic sound – fish being put on the table, lighter, the envelope, chairs, the gun etc
• Background noise  – fluro lights buzzing (?), cars outside
• Dialouge

The sound in this clip establishes the characters in this relationship, as well as the relationship with them. The stark silence between lines of dialogue communicates to the audience that these characters aren’t friends. Because of the lack of non-diagetic music in this scene, the audience’s attention wholely consumed by the dialouge.

Keyboard shortcuts. 

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.

Cmd+N for new sequence

Shift+9 for audio mixing

= and – for zooming in and out on the sequence