Drama: critical review

The film Sign Language by Oscar Sharp is the film I would like to review as it is probably the biggest influence on my film. The main thing that stood out for me was the use of close ups and how they make you feel not only physically closer but emotionally closer to the character. He is an incredibly likable character and the use of humour really helps this, I find myself not understanding why the other people seem to dislike him. The big reveal at the end where they all actually seem to care about him and will miss him had a much bigger impact on me because I had grown to like him and almost dislike the other people around him because he was so likable. I would love for my character to have the same effect on the audience as this one because it helps so much when trying to connect with the film. Overall I found it hard to spot any flaws in this film, the script was very interesting, the idea was fresh and something I had not really seen before and the character building was impecable.

Journey: Drama

We have spent the day re-editing the script to make it flow as well as possible and to get the correct balance between showing the protagonists OCD and also showing the boy meets girl aspect of our drama, I will spend the night storyboarding and doing the shot list using the script. We have contingency actors in place for if we cannot get the cast that we really want for the shoot so there should be no problem shooting now. Equipment is all booked out for the weekend and it just remains for me to teach the cameraman how to work the Canon 550D, which is not dis-similar to the kind of cameras he will be used to using anyway.

5 Minute Drama: Journey

First of all an idea had to be formulated for this project and I worked with Will to create the first draft of the basic story. This basic story was of a man with an OCD living his routine and boring life until he meets somebody that makes him change his outlook on life. The journey aspect was supposed to be an emotional journey as the protagonist goes on this mental journey to rid himself of OCD and also build self belief. Also the physical journey aspect comes from the protagonist travelling about during his normal routine. The idea is to build up the protagonists character and make it obvious that he has OCD, we believe that this disorder is rarely covered in films and could be a point of interest to the audience as it is not something you see very often.

Documentary: Critical Review of "Michael Moore - Bowling for Columbine"

I was initially shown this documentary as an example of "good practice" in making a documentary but I personally did not like certain aspects of it. The coverage of the story and interviews were all very compelling and interesting as well as thought provocing, especially the interview with one of the creators of South Park, which made it seem more real to me as I connected with him as I like his work. The way the story was told was very effective and I came away both interested and well informed but the part that ruined the documentary for me was when he started looking for people to blame. Michael Moore decided to quiz people about why they own and gun in america and why Wall Mart thinks it is okay to sell weapons. This is something I agree with him about but the way that people in the film were having to take the blame, such as the person that simply worked at Wall Mart was very harsh and not very sympathetic of the film maker, it felt biased. When he went into a Politicians house and quizzed him about why he thinks guns should be legalised I did honestly disagree with what the Politician was saying but the whole time I felt like Michael Moore was trying to lay blame on the man and this was unjust. Saying that I did like the part with Marilyn Manson as Michael Moore highlighted the fact that legalised weapons are much more likely the cause of children doing such things than listening to a song and using this celebrity was a very good choice as he is very striking to look at but spoke a lot of sense in the interview, it was almost off putting how strange he looked but how much sense he spoke. Overall I thought the documentary highlighted some important issues and on the whole I agreed with everything that was said but I found it hard to really engage because I could not help but feel that Micheal Moore was trying to sway my opinion, even thought it did not need to be swayed.

Documentary: Critical Review of "Pride and Prejudiced"

This in depth documentary was showing the lifes of two opposing leaders of 1. A Political movement called the EDL (English Defence League) and 2. A Muslim activist group, which was considered to have extremist views (The name had to be changed quite often as it was being made illegal to be part of the organisation under the names they were using) The documentary showed their views and how they went about preaching their message to the people. I thought that the way the documentary gave each person equal opportunities to share their views and did not hide away anything that either person had done was very important and without doing this the documentary would have been very biased. That being said I do believe that the leader of the EDL had more of a chance to say what he wanted but I cannot be sure if it is simply because he had more time to be on camera as it followed him on his rallies around the country. Although this could just be because he is more active and less repetetive in what he does. The fact that the documentary was not afraid to show things happening that where illegal stood out to me as I did not think that they would be allowed to show such things so I thought that was a brave decision and I approved of this. The use of cutting away to seemingly level headed people was quite good because it was nice to get a level headed and thoughtful view on the situation rather than just being bombarded by everything that the two main focuses of the documentary had to say as it became tiresome seeing them repeat the same problems and policies over and over again.

Documentary: Camera (my role)

As the cameraman I am working mostly with Aaron, the director. He has a sort of visual style that he wants from this documentary and that includes finding the best spots in Liverpool to do time-lapse footage showing the busy modern side of Liverpool and then close up and interesting shots of the old derelict places that have been forgotten. We will be using the Canon 550D and an XM2 as well as a Canon 500D for stills and combining all of the footage/stills so that we can get a wide variety as possible. Also with all of the cameras being Canon it means that the lenses are interchangable as I only have one lens for my Canon 550D and being able to use other lenses means that a wider variety of shots are made possible. The visuals in this film will be very important because being able to use the shots to show what the interviewee is talking about will be very important to how well the audience can connect with it.

Documentary

I will be operating the camera on this Documentary and by the time I joined the group Rob and Aaron already had decided on something they were set on doing. The idea is to film quite run down and derelict parts of Liverpool and show that even though they are forgotten by most certain places can still mean something to you. The places will be carefully selected and will show a different side to Liverpool which has become a quite modern and renovated city recently. The main focus will be some strange tunnels underneath Liverpool, which are now forgotten and overgrown. The Strawberry Fields gate/shrine to the Beatles, which is an interesting place to see and obviously has a lot of history. We will also look at a school adjacent to the gate which was closed down and has now become derelics as it epitomises what the documentary is showing. The final thing we will show is the Gormley sculpture art on the Beach with 100 Iron men all looking out to sea made from casts of the artist himself. Over the footage will be sound from interviews with people that care about the places and have spoken to Rob already and suggested these places for him to look at. We will also get interviews with people on the locations if it is possible. I think this will mean that the interviews will not take away from the importance of the places they are about by not directing the audiences attention from looking at the place in question.

Our Experimental Film

We decided to change the direction of our film slightly, keeping the theme of seeing what is going on inside the protagonist's head but this time round physically showing what is going on in his head as he struggles to come to terms with the death of his partner. We changed the influence of the film to a poem that Will had found and thought it would be good to base the film around. We show the protagonist in a slightly messed up narrative either having flashbacks or hallucinations about his former partner and I think this is done quite effectively as we spent a long time making sure it cut well. He does not speak during the whole film as he is alone so we cut out any sounds in the world and decided to make the whole of the sound available to the audience either what he was heading in his head or a low musical ambient that we created in garageband. The music in the background is very slow and slightly dark, we thought this went well with the style of film we was trying to create. We got the person playing the dead partner to read out the poem into a rifle microphone and then modified the sound we collected in soundtrack pro by adding reverb and taking away some of the dryness from the audio creating a sort of angelic or mystical voice which turned out even better than any of us expected in our head. Sections of the poem appear strategically during the film. My favourite shot of the film is probably after the protagonist pours some vodka into a mug instead of making tea and then on the wide shot we blurred the focus while he was in the room as if he was drunk and then reapplied the focus when he left as we thought this would be a good way of engaging the audience making them feel like the protagonist feels. We had a few problems with the playback once we got the footage back onto the mac's and this meant we had to do things in the edit that we did not want to do and leave small sections out but I do not think this affected the film overall and in that case we got lucky. If I was to redo this project I would probably have made a few more ideas rather than deciding too quickly what I wanted to do before bouncing a few ideas around and getting a true solid idea/vision of the film I wanted to make. I do think that I may have rushed into a decision due to being worried about the time contraints and not being able to fit everything into the deadline. Looking at the finished film I do actually quite like it and I believe it is a visible improvement on my last film especially with things such as exposure as we took time before every shot to make sure the exposure was how we wanted it to look.

Blue Monday - by The Duvet Brothers (1984)

This short film is a music video known as a scratch video made up of archive footage in a sort of montage. The film itself is intended as a political statement about the class divide in England in the time that it was made. The footage is cut very well to the beat and the song by New Order is very fitting to the video itself. I like films with a political message because with them there is always a deeper meaning behind what they are doing and usually means the choice of shots are very carefully considered just like in this film. For example there is a shot of a Dictator and then it cuts to a shot of the Conservative logo, this is a very suggestive thing to do as the audience will quickly make a link between the two. Also because of the lyrics it has a feel as if the video is addressing the people it is complaining about directly and this makes the film feel more effective like it could make a difference.

Simon Ellis: Telling Lies

I like this short film even though there is no camera footage. The whole visual of the film is the text and the text shows the audience the truth whereas the dialogue that you can hear is full of lies. The film is a collection of phone calls that a man is having after breaking up with his girlfriend and he speaks to his mother, ex girlfriend, prospective new girlfriend and his friend all of which lie to eachother and the text tells you what they really think. I thought this was a very clever idea and I incorporated it into the idea for my film although the idea has changed since then so we will not be showing lies as such although part of it could still be considered an influence. This influence would be the fact that the protagonist is lieng to himself during the film until he finally figures it out at the end. This short film is fast paced and very funny especially for such a simple idea.

Why we are doing this film

The shrt film using text over phone conversations gave me the idea to have what the protagonist really thinks rather than what they are saying. I believe this would be a great way for the audience to engage with the protagonist as they will be able to literally get inside his head and hear exactly what he thinks. We will be finding sounds to create a sort of ambience that would make the audience feel as if they are inside the protagonists mind and unable to actually hear what the people in the real world are saying. We will use heavy reverb and manipulation on the original soundtrack to make sure that it is not audible as that would make it distracting, we would prefer to use the dialogue as ambient noise. Using the flashback is our way of breaking up the typical narrative therefore making the film more experimental in its structure. I think a lot of the target audience will be able to relate to both the themes involved in the film and also the way that the protagonist thinks and the things that he thinks about.

My experimental Film

We have now got a script prepared after carefully planning the narrative of our story. The story starts with the protagonist waking up next to an unknown person who you do not directly see. This person then leaves after some awkward conversation that you cannot hear as the audience, the only sound you hear is what is going on inside the protagonists head. When the unknown person leaves there is a flashback to the day before where the protagonist is with his friend and sees a girl he likes, he is thinking about her and ignoring his friend. The film then breaks into a expecations vs reality where he imagines going up to the girl he likes but we do not show wether or not he actually goes over. Finishes with a flash forward back to the flat where the unknown person had just left and the audience is still none the wiser.

Film Review: Battle Royale

I watched this film once a few years a go but did not pay much attention so decided to rewatch it again, I stand by my decision. The film is built around a strange but quite entertaining and thought provoking idea that the Government could force this "deathmatch" upon a class full of students. There is clearly a political message that goes along with this film to do with human rights and the treatment of citizens in certain parts of the world. Because of this and the themes involved I found this film quite daring and deeper than just a pointless bloodbath. The flashbacks worked well to help you understand and engage with the characters as you got to know them during the film. The way in which some of the characters brutally burdered their friends and classmates was shocking to watch as you can imagine yourself in the same situation and think to yourself "What would I do" The fact that some of the characters became quite menacing and almost enjoyed the situation they were put in was shocking but somehow believable. The thing that really hooked me was trying to figure out how they were going to escape the island safely as only one person would be able to survive and this is quite cleverly done as there are multiple storylines during the film and they all culminate to create a situation in which the main characters of the film are able to escape the island. The death scene of the characters old teacher is confusing as they appear to shoot him to death then he simply stands up and takes a phone call like nothing is wrong before dying but this may have been an attempt to take away some of his humanity as this was the only person that they had intentionally killed therefore you would consider the peaceful protagonists to be murderers and disengage from them.

Film Review: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I found this film a little hard to follow as the story was quite complicated and not much information was given to the audience but I suppose this was the approach the director wanted to take to make the situation as confusing to the audience as it was to the characters. The film had a nice pace to it for the most part although in order to make the film seem to climax at the end I think that the pace was too fast for the ending of the movie to really sink in or be easily understood by the audience, in fact I think that the pace became too fast for the pay off to really feel worth of the rest of the film. Having said that I did manage to understand everything that had happened and on the whole found the entire film very engaging. The film achieves this feeling of engagement by involving the viewer and keeping them guessing during every single shot, this was opitomised by something by friend said while watching it "I don't know why but I just can't look away" as he wanted to escape to get a drink but did not dare miss a second of the story. I thought that the director was trying to engage the audience more than anything by using strong characters with a lot to them and making anybody a possible suspect, it made the guessing part of it very fun and I would imagine rewatching the film will still be fun because you will see bits you missed such as clues and the fact that the film is generally entertaining on its own.