5 most valuable minutes

I selected these five minutes because they were the climax of the film. It is where the whole film has been leading up to after Travis goes out to buy the guns and make all the contraptions to be able to use them he finally does use them. All the suspense about when he was finally going to snap and use the pays off in how he fights of the gang members to save Iris and almost dies in the process. Those five minutes are what the entire movie led up to and are the one of the few intense part of the movie and allow for the conclusion the movie to be what it is.

            Those Five minutes relate to Martin Scorsese body of work because His other bodies of work talk about concepts such as redemption and modern crime and violence and that extract shows just that. It shows Travis redemption because after just living in New York and talking about how he doesn’t like the city and how its all garbage and should be flushed away he actually does something to help “flush it away” and in the process saves a teenager. After struggling in deciding on what he should do, and in almost killing the senator he does something beneficial and redeems himself from just a taxi cab driver to a hero to some. This extract also shows modern crime and violence as the crime is keeping a child prostitute and the violence is in Travis in a heated gunfight with the gangsters.

            

This extract relates to the narrative plot structure because it is the climax of the movie. It shows how all the things that Travis experienced all tie up in the end. With the man telling him about how he was going to shoot his wife, to him buying guns and how he hates all the garbage that live in the city. It ties up all those points with Travis using the gun the man told him about to go and try to fix the problem of the garbage living in the town.

            This extract shows Martin Scorsese intent with how Travis Bickle is trying t break away from the social dystopia that he lives in. Scorsese use the themes of violence to show the social dystopia. It shows how society was controlled but Travis tries to break out of that society by going against it, which he does by killing of the gang members who run that part of society.

            The 5 minutes reveals how Taxi Driver is part of the rise of the Anti hero genre. The Anti-hero is a hero who isn’t perfect and doesn’t have heroic qualities but because of that the audience is more able to relate to the protagonist. The 70’s anti hero was one who was darker than before and went out and crushed all his opponents to get what he wants, this related to the American people because its reflected America in the Vietnam war. Travis goes out and kills those who he thought were his enemies just so he could get what he wanted to save Iris. Travis making the motion of trying to kill himself shows how the hero is society has become darker.

 Arrival of a train that camera dosnt move it stays in the same spot and creates good depth, while in Damsel in distress the camera moves around to show the emotion if the actor. In arrival of train it is one continuos shot while Damsel has lots of jump cuts. The Train shows story through long shot while the Damsel shows the story through many shots and through the actors interaction

 Constructive Editing is the idea that every angle and shot will show a new idea to the story. The Kuleshov affect is that the placement will proceed the actors thoughts, that the ideas of the film should be conveyed through details put together. Eisinstien belived that the film was in constatnt change and should be comunicated throught the edit. In "Odessa step" the technique is used with incomplete and jump shots to provide the moral for the shot.


Brazen didnt belive in the classical and formalistic editing styles because he belived they destroyed the scenes effectivness and change how the audiance percieves the shot. He belived that these types of edit were harmful for the audiances perception. The realist films are al about isolation, with the use of deep focus and long shots.

Anti Hero

Historical factors that influenced the Anti- Hero were  the American Culture. After WW2 America had a new culture, America was a new country after the war and they wanted a new hero. They wanted someone who was rebelling like they were and they wanted a human hero someone they could relate to. They expressed post how Post war America was not always a nice place to live, how the paranoia of the cold war was looming on everyones mind. It represented that how After WW2 America became very powerful but at a heavy price. With the Korean war the anti hero came to represent one who chases down and crushes all enemies at all costs, they would gain little and lose everything. With the cicil rights movements the anti hero could be seen as someone fighting for equality. in the 70's the anti hero became darker and more evil. The anti hero contradicts the classic hero because it has flaws he is not all powerful person who knows what is right and wrong, makes the right decisions and has a happy ending The anti hero would do the wrong thing and for the wrong reasons he had flaws and those flaws the audience could relate with. The Anti hero would do what he believed was right not what was always right and the Anti hero would leave messages in people lives long after the film he was in ended.

itensified

Our hollywood cinema is now fast, with dramatic action sequences, fast paced shots and sequels coming out faster and faster, with endless remakes which is used to create more and more money for the producers. Continuity is getting more intensified because everything s going faster from movies coming out to the shots in the movies, "Its hard to imagine a full length narrative movie with an asl of 1.5 seconds" cutting has become so fast that narrative movies have become almost. incomprehensible. Another way cinema has become more intensified is with more shot cutting, with cutting after every dialog ends it ads an added intensity as the audience is exposed to more shots and more action and more of a narrative structure, "in the 1930's to the 1960's most films had between 300-700 shots... most films now include over 1000 shots. Another way is that there are more extremes with the lenses with more extreme lenses there is more to show and more dramatic exposures, "Therefore filmmakers have used long lens for establishing shots deep for ground and background and grotesque close ups". With these more intensified aspects for film making we lose the full structure of a film we still have the story from start to finish but we have some much more added to how we tell the story not just the story itself.

film critique

For the film project my area of responsibility was editing and sound design and acting in the film. Problems that arose in my area of responsibility was that I never worked on or edited a film before so I had to learn and learn fast. I solved my problem of never editing before by having to work on a final cut pro tutorial. In the final cut pro tutorial I learned the basics of final cut pro like how to cut pieces, ad transitions and input files and tracks in order to make things run smoothly. During the final cut pro tutorial some problems arose that I had to learn how to fix. These problems were ones like how to fix. For working on the sound for my project, I had to learn how to use garage band which wasn’t to hard it was mostly just drag and drop files onto the sound track and put them in order so that when they played it was everything ran smoothly. But a major problem that came up in garage band was trying to take an instrument piece and crate your own music. This was the biggest problem for garage band because first off I had to find the right track of sound in garage band that matched the idea of sound I had for the specific scene in the movie. That was a challenge because garage band only had a few instruments that I was able to edit on. Also once I found the instrument that would work with the scene I was editing on I would have to look for the right sounds that it could produce within that specific sound track. Another very challenging aspect of garage band was I was pressed for time as I edited the whole movie first then went on to work on the music for each scene, since I was pressed for time at points I couldn’t make my own music and had to use pre-maid tracks in garage band. My final area of responsibility was actually acting in the film; I was the main character so I was in almost all the shots. One problem that rose here was never really acting before so I didn’t know how to convey the emotions that the character was supposed to show, a lot of the scenes looked a little awkward because I didn’t put forth all the emotion that I needed to make the character act like he was supposed to. Another problem of acting in the movie was that I had to change my schedule around to meet the times that we needed to shoot. Even though in my area of work for this project I had a lot to learn in juts a little time I felt that I completed my parts and added to the whole film contribution. For the overall project a problem I noticed was that on certain scenes we didn’t shoot it all the way through but we shot it in just the pieces from the angles that we thought were best and because of this certain parts from the scene were missing. For example we had a shot where Trevor was supposed to walk in through a hallway and into his office sit down and conduct the interview but we never shot the scene all the way through instead we shot it in specific parts like Trevor walking in the hallway then of his feet walking into his office and of him conducting the interview. Because we shot it in this broken up matter we never got a shot of Trevor actually sitting down in his desk. We just shot the scenes which we thought were important and because of this we skipped over little details that we did not notice because they didn’t play drastic parts in the whole scene. Because we didn’t get those little details in the shot the scenes often had to be manipulated that brought the viewers attention away from what was going on in the scene to the manipulations we put in. Other times that we didn’t do a full run through of the shot we missed details that added to the narrative story and because those details were missing the story at times didn’t make sense or confused the audience and we had to manipulate the shots or repeat shots so that the story could still be understood even with out those shots. For example one of the shots was supposed to be of the main character coming out of his day dream and saying “No I would never get the job I have to go to the date”. But we missed that scene and because of this we had to repeat the shot of the main character looking at the picture of the date and then running out of the house to make the scene flow and try to keep the narrative story intact so that the audience could still have some idea of what was going on in the film. Also in the overall project some scenes seemed to be missing parts and because of the missing parts seemed useless to the narrative story. For example there is a scene where the main character stares at a picture of the girl he is going on a date with and the shot is held their for a few seconds. There are parts missing where it was supposed to show all the things he believed a girl would want, flowers jewelry etc, but we were never able to get hat shot and because we couldn’t get those images that shot lingers for a while and bores or distracts the audience. Another time where this happens is when the main character crashes into someone on a bike and gets knocked out, the camera then zooms in slowly on his face until the main characters eyes shoot open and he gets up and keeps on going. This scene lingers on for to long and distracts the audience because of the shots we were missing, during the slow zoom in on the main characters face it was supposed to show what he believed what would happen if he didn’t go to the date: the girl leaves the park, when he gets there she is kissing some other guy, when he sees here again he gets slapped. Since we didn’t have those scenes the zoom on this face is to drawn out and dos not add to the story and just bores the audience. The reasons we were not able to get those scenes is because we didn’t notice that we were missing or needed those shots until a week or two after we had finished shooting and since so much time had passed some members had other commitments they had to go to and could not find the required time to shoot the missing scenes. Even though we were missing some shots we our group was still able to get the main narrative of the film across by having to take a more creative route into successfully putting all the shots together so that it all made sense, by either repeating sense or adding in transitions.

Evidence

Oct 21 First day of shooting was relatively simple with no mic needed just had some trouble seeing if we got sound or not at first are camera operator had to go in some funny spots Oct 28 Finalized version of two column script checked over  Oct 29 Second day of shooting. 5 hours of shooting helped us finish most of our movie, i was acting so we had to get our lighting to hold the boom mic but I checked over it at times  Nov 2 Finishing up Final Cut Pro Nov 2 shooting again today got some running scenes in, got to watch as very one else tried to work the moving camera rig thing Nov 3 looking up videos trying to figure out how they use sound Nov 5 filmed again had to redo a shot because the lighting was bad, not much audio in that shot so it was a simple day Nov 10 - 14 after school editing with Trevor, working on finishing up movie and sound

trailer review

The trailer i reviewed was inception. The narative in the trailer is that there is a team of people who go into dreams and steal the ideas of the dreamer, but then they get a job offer that is the best they have gotten and they need another team member. As they recruite the new member the bascics of what they do are stated, make a dream go into the dream have the dreamer fill it with their secrets and then take it, it is aslo revealed that what they are doing is not legal. As they get closer to there job it seems that they are being stressed out by the workload. Once they start there job and are inside the dream things start to go wrong and the world starts to collapse as they try to escape the dream.

The cinamatography is mostly CU and MS. the CU's are used when characters are talking or when they display emotion. When they are talking the CU's help to describe the narative of the story it is used to keep the audiances attention focused on what they are saying not what else is going on in the rest of the shot. The MS are used when motion is happening in the shot. It is used to show what the character is doing with enough lead room so they dont get cut off but not enough so that the back ground and fore ground are distracting to the audiance. There are some LS they are used when little or no characters are involved and are used to show the dangers or awesomeness of a particular item

In the trailer there are many movement matches that are used when to keep the exitment or tention throughout a variety of sceense, for example as a train plows through a street the next shot is a car spinning out of control, then a man stick his head out of a car thats moving and shooting a gun to a man in a halway firing a gun back. Theses movement matches keep the exitment and tention at an equal levels while showing different parts of the whole movie. Another is eyeline match where one character talks to another and there eyes seem to be looking at eachother even though they arnt, it is used to have the shot have a sence of realism to them so it dosnt just look like  a person talking to a camera.

The music is the trailer is intense and it is used to show what the tention for the movie will be like. Also the beats for the music are sycned up with actions that are happening in the shots. This gives an added level of tention for the shots and keeps the audiance interested. The music also shows what type of movie it will be and what the tention in the overall movie will be. it also gives a sence of exitment as the music is fast paced at times then flat lines  at certain points.

film treatment

a post it note with a the time 5:00 underlined, a voice talks you'll be there right another one answers of course, a boy takes the post it note off the wall looks at it and then glances up to a clock 12:00 and smiles

he grabs  back pack and dumps out its contents looks disappointed at all the papers that fall out, He picks one up looks glances over at the clock 12:01 clears a space on his desk and sets to work.

The pile of unfinished papers are still huge and it shows the boys face stressed out with a small neat stack of finished papers next to him. It shows the clock 12:30

Shot of the clock 2:30, flashes to the pile of unfinished papers has shrunk in size then flashes to the pile of finished has grown and the boy is looking more relaxed

The Clock reads 4:45, the pile of unfinished papers is gone and the pile of finished papers is neatly stacked up the young man finishes the last paper and puts it on top of the stack, He looks at the clock and a look of relief comes across his face

The boy gets up about to leave when his computer makes a noise, he walks over to it and a look of surprised excitement flashes across his face on the computer screen is an IM from the girl he likes asking if he wants to hang out now he sits down and starts to rite a reply, but then looks at the post it note and hears the "voice you'll be there right?"

He gets up and starts to walk out but then looks back at the computer and sits back down

It then shows a door, it suddenly swings open and the young man runs out

On the computer screen the IM is left unanswered

A park bench with another young man on it he looks at his watch then looks around and looks dejected he gets up then starts to walk away

The boy then runs from the side of the shot and catches up with his friend, his friend says " I thought you weren’t coming”, the young man then says “I wouldn’t let you do this alone”

They walk away

presentation review

https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AR-JSez2XU46ZGNtdG0yY2tfMGd3Y2RmbWR3&hl=en_US

1.     Our interpretation of the film was for the most part good as we talked about the movement of a lot little actions that changed the course of the movie. We used a little film language, with the name of camera lens but not as much as we should have.

2.     One of the strengths of our presentation was the way our slides were set up, we showed what happened in each of Lola’s three lives instead of breaking it down into 3 separate slides, another strength we had was talking about the intro to the movie.

3.     Areas we could improve on would be talking about the movement of the camera not just the movement of the actors, also using more film language.  

camera demo review

1.     One thing that I found challenging was if something went wrong with the camera or mic, such as if the audio wasn’t set for head phones or the mic wasn’t working, it was hard to find out how to fix the problem like going into the camera menu or if the problem had to fixed externally by getting a new mic or cord.

2.     The production process was pretty good and well handled. The only part that was hard was memorizing the lines, or if we couldn’t memorize all of them was to read off the sheet without looking away from the camera too much. We planned our shots to for the background to have something to do with the shot or to have our hands convey part of the message. I believe we did I good job at conveying the message.

3.             As we prepare for the first project recommendations I would make would be to know the camera first, have some idea of shots, know the basic idea of the lines and make sure the camera is charged.

character in time

Just keep walking I told myself there’s more out there for you. That was one mistake you will recover. Just keep walking forward don’t listen to what they tell you, don’t give in to the rage that’s building up. Just keep walking it will all be over soon and you will move on to better things. That’s what I kept telling myself but I couldn’t believe it. As rage built up inside me I knew if I let it out I would never be able to advance I’d be stuck here so I kept walking. I walked past my past and as I neared my future I could here it calling back to me, telling me to comeback to it. It was tempting but I had to resist if I didn’t I would never move on in life. The rage built up in my more i thought about what i'd done, i couldnt hild it in anymmore. I let it out, but i used it to give me strength to break the chains that were holding me back and i walked faster. So i was running running past everything and when i stopped i took one look back at what i left behind and thought to my self, take a good look now becuase the next time you are heare you will change everything, and i walked forward. Away from my past away from my temptations and away from just giving up i walked towards my future and I didn’t look back again.

Short film review Blinky

      Video here: http://vimeo.com/channels/181611
The video used to be here but somthing happened and it got taken down

The movie Blinky is about how a good robot turns bad. In the first shots of Blinky the Director, Ruairi Robinson, use a narrow lens for an extreme close up to catch the viewers attentions and then to zoom out to reveal what is happening in the shot. This is used when Blinky is first introduced to the film. In the shot viewers are first attracted to Blinky’s eye as it is the only thing we can distinguish in the extreme close up, once the shot starts to zoom out the director uses a soft focus, and puts thee camera at eye level you can only distinguish the face of Blinky and finally they cut to a scene where the whole room is shown and you can see it is Christmas and Blinky is the main present. Ruairi Robinson uses this shot as a way to first introduce Blinky the extreme close up gives the audience time to wonder what Blinky is, which is used to show that since Blinky is so new the family doesn’t know what Blinky really is or how it will act.  The dominate color in this scene is white: Blinky, the wall and the tree, the white is used to symbolize the innocence that the boy and Blinky have before everything starts to go wrong. The texture in the shot is detailed as you can see the gears on Blinky the bricks on the wall and the T.V show on the background. The design in the room is used to show the futuristic date and how today is a happy day for the family. The final shot is an open and loose shot in which everything is in balance nothing is overpowering and the characters can move around freely, and the boy, Alex, and Blinky are at equal heights to show that neither is more dominate than the other.  

    

In this shot the viewer is attracted to the yelling boy, Alex, as Blinky is cut off is the corner. The shot has a low-key lighting, which the director uses to show how the film is becoming darker and less of a happy movie. The shot has a normal lens but puts Alex at a higher level to make Blinky seem smaller and weaker. There is no dominant color in the scene but, Robinson uses but the darkness of the scene symbolizes how Blinky’s personality has gone from a nice caring robot, to the ruthless one he is about to become. The shot uses a normal lens to show Alex and Blinky, in no particular detail. The shot does not give much visual information s it uses a sot focus to only show Alex's anger at Blinky. The shot in this scene isolates parts of Blinky to make him seem inferior to Alex. It has a tight frame that gives Alex and Blinky little room to move, and has little background so that viewers focus mainly on Alex.

In this shot we are first attracted to the blood splattered Blinky, the shot uses a low key lighting to show the darker mood of the shot. The camera is close to the action and set at an angle looking up at Blinky to show that he is the powerful one and in charge now. The dominant colors are red and white in this scene. Lots of visual information is packed into this scene this scene depicts the dark acts that Blinky has just committed. The scene is tight allowing little room for Blinky to move about, Robinson use the tightness of the shot so that you can only focus on the blood splattered Blinky and realize what he did.