‘Everything is a Remix’

Before watching these videos I had no idea how much content and how many ideas and concepts, especially when it comes to movies, are reused and remixed; the name of the series is completely true when it says that everything is a remix.  As a massive Star Wars fan I found it incredible and fascinating where George Lucas got his ideas, and how much content from various other movies was reused and remade to make the cult classic that is Star Wars.  I also found it amazing how Quentin  Tarantino took it too a whole new level and used elements from several different movies and used them all in one scene.  That, for me, is the mark of an intelligent director, as although his ideas are not completely original (but it could be said that in this day and age ‘original’ ideas are near impossible), he created new scenes and material using old already used material.  I also thought it was incredible that the same thing occurs in the music and technological industries, and I am sure it will continue to happen forever, as new ideas become rarer and rarer as time goes on.

https://vimeo.com/14912890
https://vimeo.com/19447662https://vimeo.com/25380454
https://vimeo.com/36881035

‘Kick-Ass’ (2010)

“As a great man once said… wait ’till they get a load of me.”

I absolutely love this movie and it has to be one of my absolute favourites!  Kick-Ass is an action-comedy released in 2010 and directed by Matthew Vaughn (Stardust, X-Men: First Class, Kingsman:The Secret Service).  The movie follows Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), an unnoticed and comic book loving teenager living in New York who decides to become a superhero and calls himself Kick-Ass, even though he has no super powers, no training and no meaningful reason to actually turn vigilante.  The movie also stars Chloë Grace Moretz and Nicholas Cage as Hit Girl and Big Daddy, a father-daughter vigilante duo with no mercy, who have the sole aim of bringing down New York’s most powerful crime boss Frank D’Amico, (Mark Strong).  Christopher Mintz-Plasse also stars, playing Chris D’Amico, or Red Mist, another superhero who created himself to try and bring down Kick-Ass for his dad.  Kick-Ass is full of humour as well outrageous action and fight scenes, and the two themes compliment each other perfectly.  Moretz’s character Hit Girl is absolutely brilliant and seeing an 11 year old highly trained assassin/vigilante taking out mobsters is just incredible.  Vaughn has directed it extremely well and has a very definite style to his movies, which comes across in both Kick-Ass and Kingsman:The Secret Service (another one of my favourites).  With the whole movie being set in New York I still find it exceptionally hard to believe that the whole thing was filmed in Pinewood Studies in England, which makes the movie even more impressive.  I definitely recommend this movie to everyone who enjoys a laugh and a good action movie.

Shot reverse shot

Shot/reverse shot is a filming technique where a camera shot shows a character looking at another character that is often off screen, and then the camera shot switches to the other character looking back at the first character.  This allows the viewer to assume that the two characters are looking at each other as they are shown to be looking in opposite directions.  This can sometimes be done with over the shoulder shots and is an example of an eyeline match.

Match on action

Match on action, also known as cutting on action, is a technique used to give a sense of continuity.  It refers to the editing technique where the camera shot changes from one to another that matches the action of the first shot.  Examples of this could be a shot of a man reaching for a door knob, and then the next shot could be of the door opening from the authorised, giving a sense of continuous time when all the edited footage is viewed together.  This can also create a visual bridge that can distract the viewer from noticing any errors or mistakes between the two shots.

The 180º rule

The 180º rule is used very often in filming and is predominantly used when filming scenes of dialogue; but it can also be used for other types of scenes, not just dialogue.

The rule is that a line, or axis, runs down the centre of the of the scene and that the camera must stay on one side of the line.  It can move anywhere on that side of the line but should not cross it because the two characters would then be facing the same direction and it can be disorientating for the audience.  This allows the camera to do various shots on this side of the line, ie. over the shoulder shots, and it still allows the audience to understand where the characters are positioned in relation to each other without getting confused and allows them to have a greater sense of location.

However, some directors intentionally break the 180º rule for effect, and maybe their intention is to purposefully confuse and disorientate the audience.  It is usually broken when filming action scenes to add a dramatic effect.  This is referred to as crossing or breaking the line of action.

https://vimeo.com/blog/post/180-degree-rule-explained

‘Doctor Who’ – New series

“I never try to understand.  Its called an open mind.”

Last night the brand new and ninth series of Doctor Who started, and it started with a bang.  It introduced Missy, formerly the Master, a fellow Time Lord and also an enemy of the Doctor, (also presumed dead at the end of series eight), and Davros, creator of the Daleks and one of the Doctor’s oldest enemies and most dangerous enemies.  I was looking forward to the start of this series as I enjoy the show and have been watching it since Christopher Eccleston brought it back from the dead in 2005, after 16 years of absence from TV screens.  However, I was a little bit sceptical and also worried that it wouldn’t be particularly good, as the previous series, the first with new Doctor (at the time) Peter Capaldi, was quite disappointing.  Capaldi is a good Doctor and plays the notorious Time Lord well, but the writing of some of the episodes was poor.

The trailer for the new series was released a couple of months ago and created a lot of excitement.  It gave us glimpses of Daleks, Missy, who we all thought to be dead, and Zygons, a shape-shifting monster from some of the original series.  Also at the very end we saw a highwayman-like character played by Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) who the Doctor seemed to know, indicating that she may be playing the return of a possibly well known character.

Preliminary Task – Evaluation

When filming and editing our Preliminary task, we encountered various challenges that we had to try and overcome.  Unfortunately during filming we were one of the two groups that had to use one of the older cameras that didn’t have an separate external sound recorder and microphone.  This caused problems that we didn’t discover until we began editing our footage: the camera quality was quite poor compared to that of the DSLRs and the sound quality was even worse.  Due to the lack of microphone we had to make sure our camera shots were quite close up so as the make sure that the sound of the dialogue was picked up by the camera’s microphone, however we didn’t realise how loud the background noise of the room we were in would be; a constant buzzing sound could be heard in the background of the footage.  This was mainly due to our poor choice of location for filming, as we chose to film in the computer room.  To try and cover up this sound when there wasn’t dialogue we attempted to include various diegetic sound over the top during editing: we added in the ticking of a watch to emphasise the impatience of the interviewer and the lateness of the interviewee, and we also added the squeak of a door when the interviewee entered the room.  This, however, was not particularly successful and the buzzing could still be heard.

After filming and editing, as a class we viewed each piece of footage from all 6 groups in turn and gave feedback and criticism to them, and received a mix of positive and negative criticism ourselves to highlight areas for improvement.  The diegetic sound of the watch ticking that we put over the top of the footage didn’t match up the actual watch ticks that could be seen in part of the footage, as the editing was partly rushed and we hadn’t paid enough attention to detail, which is something we shall do next time.  The hum and buzzing noise in the background of our footage due to poor choice of location was another point that was mentioned, so when filming next we will pay more attention to and think more about choosing the filming locations, and any background noise they may produce.  Next time we will probably choose to not use hand-held camera shots, because when we did when filming this task it left quite wobbly footage and seemed unprofessional.  We maybe chose not the best combination of camera shots as some of them didn’t quite work together, so next time we will hopefully have more time to spend thinking about camera shot combinations and their effectiveness.  When the interviewee entered the room the camera filled them to their chair from the inside of the room, and this didn’t best show ‘someone entering a room’; it would have been better for the camera to follow them through the door from the outside of the room to their chair.  During the filming we took enough footage and had several takes for each shot to make sure we had got the footage as we wanted it, but when it came to editing we used all the footage we had taken, and didn’t have any ‘spare’ footage so if we had needed more due to problems then we would have been in trouble.  To be honest we probably did need more footage overall anyway because our footage, when edited, cut down and put together, was quite short and would have benefited from being longer.

Even though we encountered problems and made mistakes during planning, filming and editing I still enjoyed the task and am looking forward to doing the next so we can improve on what we did wrong in this one.

Preliminary task – Artifact

I enjoyed the whole process filming this short movie clip and brainstorming ideas for it, such as themes, camera shots and locations, but there are some elements I was disappointed with and would definitely change next time.  Anyway, here it is:

https://vimeo.com/139702545

‘The Jungle Book’ – First look!!

“Look for the bare necessities”

Yesterday the trailer for the new live action Jungle Book movie by Disney was released, and it looks amazing!!  The film is directed by John Favreau and is due to be released in Spring 2016.  The cast list is a rather impressive one with Neel Sethi as Mowgli, Scarlett Johansson as the voice of Kaa the snake, Sir Ben Kingsley as the voice of Bagheera the panther, Bill Murray as the voice of Baloo the bear, Idris Elba as the voice of Sheer Khan and Christopher Walken as the voice of King Louie the orangutan (and he looks huge!).  The only voice that can be heard throughout the trailer is Scarlett Johansson’s and it becomes clear she is Kaa when a very clear ‘hiss’ is heard at the end of one of her words, and we actually see Kaa talking to Mowgli.  Now it’s not clear yet wether this is going to be a musical like the original Disney cartoon, but it is certainly going to be a lot more serious an perhaps darker.  However, right at the very end of the trailer we got a shot of Baloo floating down a river on his back with Mowgli sat on his stomach while a the tune of ‘Bear Necessities’ can clearly be heard being whistled by Baloo; this got me very excited.  The shots of the jungle look absolutely incredible and we even got a glimpse of the raging inferno created by ‘man fire’.  We also got glimpses of all the main characters, and Sheer Khan looks quite terrifying!  I am looking forward to the release of this movie as the original Disney cartoon was part of my childhood and was a fantastic movie with some brilliant songs throughout, I do however hope that they don’t ruin it but I don’t have too many doubts.

Preliminary Task – Planning

This week our teacher, Mr. Jackson, put us into groups of 3 and gave our Preliminary filming exercise.  We have to plan, film and edit a small piece consisting of ‘a character opening a door, crossing a room and siting down in a chair opposite another character , with whom he/she then engages in a few lines of dialogue.  We had to blog our progress in this task as a way of documenting our ideas and planning and also any problems we encounter and how we tackle them.

My group has finished the planning stage after much deliberation and thinking about ideas for the dialogue, location, and camera shots and positions.  We have decided to have the scene as an interview, with the interviewee as the person who comes through the door and sits down, and we thought, in order to create a story, that the interviewee will be late to the interview.  We thought we could add some comedy as it would be more fun, and also slightly easier to film, with a frustrated and sarcastic interviewer who is not happy that they have been kept waiting.  We decided upon the computer room in the Media block to film out piece as it was the most ‘business’ like room we could find in school at short notice that would be suitable for an interview scene.  In the first planning session we created a basic storyboard for our original ideas but upon further planning our ideas changed and we decided to write them out instead.  We decided to have at least 1 moving camera shot where the camera follows the interviewee into the room so the camera is not completely static for the whole piece and also almost put the viewer in the interviewee’s position and help them relate to them.  We also decided last minute to have out first shots of the interviewer with the camera looking up at him to show he has a position of power and authority.  We have also started planning ideas for editing, for example possible adding a filter over the interviewee’s face to show panic and also possibly (if we have time) any non-diegetic sound such as the ticking of a watch/clock to emphasise the passing of time and the fact that the interviewee is late; this would also emphasise the interviewer’s irritation and impatience.  We have now planned out all the dialogue for  ‘the interview’ in the form of a script and also all camera shots and even basic outfit changes like a change of tie to make the interview idea more realistic.  Once we have filmed the piece we will begin editing it to piece the film clips together to finalise and complete it, and add in any effects such as filters or any non-diegetic sound.