101 Things I Learned in Film School

After going to the (amazing!) V&A exhibit of Hollywood costume, I brought this book which I thought was really valuable with the information it was offering. Reading through it, I came across a couple points that I thought would be valid when creating our two minute film opening. 

The first page of the book teaches lesson 1- 

Start Strong

The Underlined scentence in the photo reads-

  "The opening image should suggest a movie's central theme and prompt intrigue as to where it is headed." the text goes onto read "Working Girl opens with an aerial shot of the Statue of Liberty, establishing at once its New York City location and the central theme of a woman's independence. 

The opening image not only points forward to the theme and story to unfold, it can reveal back story: An opening shot of a boarded-up, tumbleweed-strewn town may depict desolation, while a flower on a cactus at the edge of the frame suggests the possibility of renewal."

The image of the eye above is an example given of a strong opening image after the opening scene from the movie "Chicago"

I think in terms of the opening sequence I have analysed so far (The Bourne Identity) that strong opening really depicts the movie's central theme, which I have mentioned in my previous analysis of it. 

Film Openings- Enigma

Collins English Dictionary Definition- 

"Something that is very puzzling or difficult to understand"

The list we created in class

• Perhaps something that can threaten a character in a certain way (emotionally, physically)
• A riddle/paradox
• Presenting problematic circumstances 
• Creating suspense
• Part of the unknown
• An event that alters the image of the characters in a way, engaging the audience abd causing them to want to discover how the issue is resolved

Film Openings - Bourne Identity

After our first couple of lessons on film openings, I have begun my research on film openings, textually  analysing how they create enigma and the information of the narrative and characters presented within the first two minutes. 

The Bourne Identity - Timeline of Opening Sequence

1/10 sec's - Universal production company logo. Diagetic sound slowly

             fades in of sea. Sea sounds start with the golden as the         

             golden rays of  the logo spread across the globe. 

2/10 sec's - Universal logo fades to black screen. Sound of sea 

             crescendos slightly. Screen remains black for the rest of 

             the 20 seconds into the film. 

3/10 sec's - First image seen by audience is a body floating in the sea, 

             the camera is looking up at the body from below. This image 

             alone can already reflect the character of Jason Bourne. He 

             is a man who is lost at sea, in the middle of a storm; 

             meaning he's lost in his life- he has no recollection of who

             he is, he has lost his identification and is being chased by 

             a storm (CIA) trying to figure out why it is they want him 

             dead. Although to a new audience, the symbolism of this 

             scene may not be obvious, the composition of it overall 

             still depicts one of the central emotions of this film and 

             the rest of the trilogy- the feeling of being completely 

             alone, being lost- this at least anyone watching can pick up 

             on. The image of the body appears with the sudden diagetic 

             crescendo of thunder. During the last few seconds leading 

             up to 30's into the film, we see a faint flashing coming

             from the male silhouette above. Musical drone begins 

             creating a tense atmosphere. 

4/10 sec's - Straight cut to the establishing shot of a boat in the storm

             with the sudden sound of thunder which doesn't last for very

             long on the screen. Shot of sailors, camera descends from  

             above deck, audience may assume they're playing poker. Music

             drone continues to play, diagetic sea, thunder, rain sounds          

             continue also. 

5/10 sec's - Another layer of music introduced, tittles establishing 

             location appear on screen - "Mediterranean sea, 60 miles 

             south of Marseilles." More shots of sea storm with intense 

             sounding non-diagetic music. Series of shots exploring the 

             game of poker below deck,playing for cigarettes in middle of 

             table. 

6/10 sec's - First time we hear diagetic dialogue in a foreign language- 

             man counting in Italian. Possibly a fishing boat, judging by 

             the background and location.Game of poker could possibly 

             reflect how the relationship between CIA + Bourne is like a 

             game of Poker? Last ten seconds of this minute ends on a

             closer shot of body in water, storm sounds crescendo. 

2nd Minute begins here

1/10 sec's - Camera starts to slowly zoom in on body moving amongst the 

             waves, same long shot with camera below water level. We see 

             the light on the body flash again. Shot switches in a 

             straight cut to a man coming above deck to throw something 

             over board. 

2/10 sec's - Audience can definitely guess this is a fishing boat from 

             man's costume. Shot sequence of close up of fisherman 

             switching to the body in the water, camera now above water 

             level from POV of fisherman. Another layer of music  

             introduced when fisherman realizes the floating object is in

             fact a body- main theme of film? 

3/10 sec's - Camera below water level again, this time very close to body

             -midshot and zooming in slowly. Diagetic storm sounds 

             underwater playing along with the non-diagetic tension 

             building music. Music accentuated as there is a straight cut   

             to a black screen with emerging blue tittles. Very digital 

             looking font- letters emerge from this number cloud. Tittle  

             of "The Bourne Identity" appears, into which the camera

             starts to zoom in. After tittles appear, non-diagetic 

             musical rattle heard. Music crescendos during this part, 

             main theme getting stringer and louder. Tittle gets lost in  

             the number cloud again. Colour used for font is blue + 

             white. 

4/10 sec's - Arial shot of men pulling up the body. Diagetic sounds take

             precedence over musical score. Closer shot of body being     

             hauled on board- audience knows he's either dead or 

             unconscious. Musical accentuation + main theme continue. 

5/10 sec's - Dialogue + subtitles showing translation show men assume

             he is dead. Close up shot of hand moving of hauled body. 

             Last seconds of opening show men dragging the body below 

             deck. 

Information gained from opening

• Current setting is in the Mediterranean sea on a stormy night/evening. 
• An unidentified body of a man has been found floating in the sea. The man's professional diving wetsuit shows it is unlikely this was an accident compared to if the man would be in everyday clothing, which would suggest he fell overboard, thus the cause of his presence here would create less enigma as the audience can already assume what happened. 
• The man who floating is alive but unconscious
• The Italian fishermen have pulled him on-board safely

How this opening creates Enigma 

• Audience is left curious to find out what happens when the man regains his conciousness
• Who is the man pulled on-board? 
• Why was the man floating there to begin with? 
• What is his importance in the narrative? - Protagonist? 
• Is he injured? 
• Why is he wearing a professional wetsuit? 
• What was he doing before he was found at sea?

This opening propels the story forward. Some of these questions become answered very soon after the opening two minutes, others take time to be answered throughout the movie. 

Conventions of Period Drama Series (Downton Abbey)

Having not watched a large variety of period drama series, it is difficult to distinguish all of the common conventions, however I compared my first impressions of the first episode to research that I did on period dramas in general, some points which I agreed with and some which I didn't find (yet) in Downton.

First Impressions

After watching the first episode and doing some research I concluded the following three points are above all, the main conventions of period drama tv:

• Heavily reliant upon mise-en-scene. This entails accurate period clothing and set design. 
• Based upon/or simply includes a distinguished historical events/characters/perhaps even narrative. This could could also mean the series is set during a well known time period or around the time of a famous event (for example- Victorian Era, WW1, Tudor etc...). The BBC production called "Lost in Austen" is an example exploring a famous period narrative of Jane Austen- Pride & Prejudice. 
• Addresses love, family and relationship problems- what propels the plot and keeps the series going (use of intricate story lines) 

Conventions obtained from research: 

• High production values (of course this will be due to the accurate portrayal of a certain period of time which requires a lot of thought to be put into costume + set design. This also entails the use of known period actors such as Maggie Smith and Hugh Bonneville which will immediately draw attention as these are respected and famous actors expected of a satisfying performance. 
• According to one source they "criticize the dominant ideology of the time" which I'm not sure I've come across yet in Downton Abbey. 
• Modern day ideas/themes explored strongly through the period of the time, to still relate to the audience but remain in-keeping of the reality of the time period being explored. Apparently sexuality is one theme that is quite commonly explored through period drama, this was already evident within the first episode of Downton. 

The Editing Process: Post Prodction

Editing Session 1

I think we were all surprised by how long it takes to edit a sequence and the complications within, which may in some cases result in the need to re-film (the case with our sequence). We begun by importing all of our footage into final cut pro. At this point we knew that we were missing some of the important dialogue scenes as we ran out of  time for these so we made a decision to edit all we could in our given time, whilst simultaneously arranging a day to finish all of the necessary footage. Opening with the establishing shot, we cut up the introductory shots of the sequence, alternating between the protagonist approaching the antagonist in the office getting ready for the protagonists entrance. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we discovered the convention of a quick editing pace used in action movies to capture and maintain the audiences attention at the same time as building tension, which we put into practice during the opening. We also thought from the movies we'd seen that entrances in the action genre mean a big deal, and they're often emphasized through high + low angles and up beat music (added later). When we came to editing the entrance we realized we didn't have enough footage to fill in between our principal "foot" shots which was the perfect opportunity to use one of the cliché conventions of action movies.

Editing Session 2

I felt that towards the end of this session we began to envision the "bigger picture" in our minds and started to think about how we were going to finish this on time. We began coming up with ideas for music and distinguished the areas to which we wanted to add this to, however no official song had been chosen. We continued with our piecing together what we could of the dialogue scenes and flash backs, having edited about two thirds of our sequence in total. I think this was the least productive session, looking back on it now- simply because we could only do so much without the footage we needed and our official "unit 2 filming session" would be the next day. We encountered a problem during this session, where we discovered that whilst importing our footage the camera had cut certain parts off whilst loading which presented the problem of reimporting our footage (mentioned in an earlier post).

Editing Session 3

I think this session was the most productive. I really felt we worked hard after having realised how little time we had left and how much we wanted to create a successful sequence. We managed to edit the entire sequence except for a couple areas we had left to finish off, but all in all, we had the main shots in place. The music was the main addition that made the difference to our little action movie, I was surprised by the vast difference it made having it there to support the exaggerated entrance we were trying to portray. We encountered a couple other problems to do with continuity; I remember one case, where we either needed to obtain another shot to tell the audience the character had walked over to the desk, but we didn't have the extra time to film. So what we did was we lengthened the shot before and overlayed the sound of footsteps, then switching to the shot of the character in front of the desk. This particular part of our film was an important one as we got one of the best shots here. Another problem was with the shots of dialogue following- our actress had said the wrong line in this shot but the composition was brilliant- the dialogue started out correctly but she ended it the wrong way, yet in the other shot the line was said correctly but the composition wasn't that good. It took us a while to decide what to do and how to solve this so finally, we cut the messed up one in half, so we only took the best part of the dialogue from this,then we switched to the other shot. Apart from that we were focusing on perfecting the editing, adding in effects and looked out for continuity errors (there were quite a lot to do with filming that we couldn't fix).

Editing Session 4

The only thing we had left to do during this session was tie off all the loose ends we couldn't in the previous. This included- carefully reimporting some of our footage in the areas where we left markers

Creating Our Genre- "The Awesomest Action Movie EVER!"

Our task was to use the typical conventions of the action genre and employ them in our short sequence. From the very beginning of this task we were thinking about the conventions, whether it was the plot, camera angles, music or editing etc... Personally the challenge for me, was using editing as a convention when we were stringing together our sequence either in real time or shrinking time.

Plot

• Nationality of enemy as Russian (connected to stereotypical use of Russian villains in action movies)
• Actual use of the "goodies" side and "baddies" side which is the back bone of almost all action movies
• Use of chase (typical convention is a car chase, however this was obviously unachievable)

Music

• Use of tension building music
• Powerful, guitar-heavy music with a clear and quick tempo- usually main theme for action movie (e.g. our main theme was taken from the action movie "Wanted") 

Mise-En-Scene

• Use of dark business colours
• Clothes that depict the characters to "mean business" (although I think we could've depicted this better through use of suits as costume, however this was not our priority and due to our confusing schedule of filming and focusing on other conventions) 
• Use of work/office environment/usually areas of high profile - large urban areas 
• Use of typical action props- Gun 

Camera + Lighting

• High and low angles used to depict power + status 
• Shaky camera usage
• Use of shadow during shot of the head "baddie" (this is a cliché often used where only a part of the leader of the "baddies" is shown- shadow used to hide the rest of his appearance) 

Editing

• Fairly quick editing pace used
• Special effects used to depict flashback
• Added emphasised gun shot effect

The Editing Process: Using Final Cut Pro

Trying Final Cut Pro for the first time would've been a nightmare had we not had a couple lessons to research specific areas of Final Cut Pro to help us get started with our editing. We found that this information was very useful to learn before coming to the editing stage of our Preliminary task, and that initially, we were referencing to the handouts and power points whenever we forgot certain aspects of using Final Cut Pro. 

Operating Final Cut Pro

<Toolbar

     -Arrow is the select tool. As any other select tool, this allows you to select certain clips to move etc...

    

  - The fourth tool from the bottom is called the razor or blade. By selecting this you can cut        any desired clip anywhere. 

  - Finally, the magnifying glass tool allows you to expand your view of the timeline as well as shrink it. The Advantage of this is that you can be as precise as possible should you need to make cuts in very specific areas of the clip. Simultaneously, if the sequence you have created is extremely long, by shrinking the zoom of the timeline you will be able to see your entire sequence of clips in a small amount of space, helping you determine where certain areas of your sequence are. One common misconception is that by zooming in using this tool, you are expanding time, which is obviously not true, as I have already explained; this tool simply allows you to see your sequence at a larger or smaller scale. 

                                                     Layout of Final Cut Pro

- The bottom rectangular shape is the timeline. This box, as you can see consists of layers- in this particular image there are five layers in total, the single layer above the thick grey line will contain the visual part of you clip and any layer below this line is a sound layer. 

Layers are arranged by priority (top being priority), this means that if you had two layers perfectly aligned with each other that the top layer will play first. Say you had a top layer with one minute's worth of footage and below you had a layer with two minute's worth; once the top layer would finish playing the second would start where the first finished. 

If you want to mute any sound layer or alter the volume then you click on the green button on the left side of the timeline with the speaker sign on it.

-The last box on the top right-hand corner is called the canvas. This allows you to view a clip you're importing, a clip in your sequence or your whole sequence. 

-The box in the middle is the viewer. Here you select the area of your imported footage you want to include in your sequence, You do this using in and out points. by tapping the "i" key you add an in point and by tapping the "o" key you select and out point. In between these two points is your desired section you wish to import into your sequence- you can see this in the image above in between the two arrows. The viewer also allows you to add certain filters to your footage and edit it in other visual ways (e.g. slowing the pace, quickening the pace etc...).

- Finally the box in the top left-hand corner is where you store your footage on Final Cut Pro. Here you store all your imported footage and sequences in a "bin". 

As with any piece of technology, it takes a little time for you to grow accustomed to the way it works. The same goes for Final Cut Pro. Knowing the basic information really helped us, and I think it would've taken longer to edit our sequence trying to guess what tool did what had we not learnt this before. I found (and I think the rest of my group would agree) the importing of the video most annoying. Whilst we were importing the footage, during the change between two different clips on the tape, Final Cut Pro would sometimes take too long separating the different clips, during this our footage would still be playing and as a result it would not load what it had just missed. As a result some of our shorter clips were either missing or cut even shorter. This is difficult to explain, but the point is that it caused us to take longer re-importing footage. Other than this, I don't remember any particular problems that got in the way of our editing process. Not knowing everything about Final Cut Pro is of course a disadvantage, because there was so much we wanted to do to our footage, but the pressures of time and limitations of what we knew on Final Cut held us back from achieving this. 

                                                    

The Awesomest Action Movie Ever!

Our final edit of our Preliminary task, based on the script "Pop Goes"

Info:
Directed & Filmed by - Cary Banks, Keeley Burridge, Lorna Edwards and Victoria Paul
Genre Given- Action
Key Prop- Gun
Editing by- Keeley Burridge, Lorna Edwards, Cary Banks and Victoria Paul

Representation- Female appearance in the media (Marilyn Monroe)

Norma Jean Baker

Born Norma Jean Baker and died as Marilyn Monroe at the age of 36, she is arguably the most identified female  actress and performer there ever was. We studied the representation of female performers in the lesson however, I wanted to do a post on a particular actress I thought was one of the victims of this representation and someone I admire also. I chose Norma for this post on representation because I thought what she went through with all the wrong "dumb blonde" roles, the unwanted attention and the "sex-bomb" reputation, Norma is an example of the classic representation of women in the media. Although through time, the media's perspective has morphed into different representations of women, some of the previous typical representations that Norma herself faced still linger in today's representation of females in the media.

Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn in "The Prince and the Showgirl" (1957)

Marilyn's story was sold as "the beautiful girl who got discovered by chance" hiding the reality of how much work and effort she put into being noticed. This was the first step for Norma, and she soon understood that to do this she had to sell herself.
 Norma started out as a model & making adult movies, because although Hollywood made it out to be this way, it was quite rare you'll get noticed by chance.
Women at the time in the entertaining business were expected to be "pretty" in order to be successful in entertainment- particularly in singing and acting. After Norma signed her contract with Fox, she was told to change her birth name of Norma Jean Baker to Marilyn Monroe, to make it more memorable and appealing to the public. She bleached her hair following the advice of Fox and had minor plastic surgery carried out. All of this trouble was put into enhancing her appearance rather than her acting skills. It was Marilyn's choice to pick a mentor  helping her achieve her full potential. This alone displays  just how look-driven the media is; particularly with females, as an attractive actress also meant someone to look up to for the female public and a "perfect woman" to dream of being with for the male public.

 Throughout Marilyn's acting roles, she was expected to bring nothing more to a role other than her obvious attractiveness and sexuality, which affected Marilyn's life on a large scale because she wanted to be taken as a serious actress rather than a woman who's famous for her looks. Most of her roles displayed a weak-minded, pretty female who fell for the handsome and dominating "prince" figure. Constant battles with the studio took place for better acting roles and more creative control. Despite all of this Marilyn would settle for nothing below a good performance in any role she got, pressurising herself to be the perfect performer and woman everyone expected her to be. Although now the media's representation of women has changed now, appearance still means a great deal.

Significance of Lighting & Colour (continued)

The three main sources of Lighting use on a film set

 The Key Light is the main source of lighting.

The Back Light's use helps to replicate the lighting of objects/subjects we see with our own eyes- to make the subject appear more "rounded" so to speak

Finally the Filler Light creates a softer effect on the subject by literally subtly filling in any harsh shadow or use of harsh lighting, it also helps the subject/object to appear more "rounded" in addition to the back light.

Some scenes in films require a certain filter to achieve a particular effect a director is going for. I'm assuming that this can be achieved either during filming with certain camera settings or (more professional alternative) during the editing process. Some filters may depict a particular emotion/physical feeling such as contentment or coldness. 

Angling of Lighting

Top Lighting- can be used to depict glamour of a star, could depict  weakness of a character or single a character out to appear as a victim

Back Lighting - Source comes from behind subjects/objects. This can create silhouettes if used extensively as shown below. 

Underlighting - Source comes from below subject/object. This can create a menacing look, depict danger and show the subject to be of high importance/status.