For this exercise I chose Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ‘Babel’ because it has four stories that run through the film. Each of these stories are related to each other, however the order in which each story is told is not linear which makes some of the scenes confusing. At the end of the film, the sequence… Continue reading Project 17: Time
As I work my way through Part 4 of the course, Assignment 4 looms at the end. The big challenge for this assignment is finding a topic for the documentary that: Has enough visual material to be interesting Has enough of a story to keep the audience attention In addition, whatever topic is chosen, it… Continue reading Planning Assignment 4
‘Winter’s Bone’ is a film released in 2010 and directed by Debra Granik. The film tells the story of Ree Dolly, a 17 year old girl who lives in the rural Ozark mountains area of Missouri. Ree’s mother is so ill that she is incapable of looking after the family, so this task is left… Continue reading Winter’s Bone
I had the opportunity last week to visit the EYE Film Institute of the Netherlands which is located in Amsterdam. The EYE hosts both a museum and an archive. Currently they have about 37 000 films archived, some of which go back to the very early years of film in the Netherlands. I took the photograph… Continue reading Master of Light – Robby Muller (Film Institute The Netherlands)
For this exercise I watched the film Baraka which was both directed and filmed by Ron Fricke. It was released in 1992 and was called a non-narrative documentary by its producers. The film was shot in 25 different countries and six continents. The film is made up of a series of themes that involve humanity… Continue reading Project 16 – Non-narrative films
For this exercise I am to find examples of moving camera that alters the meaning and/or feeling of a sequence. Pushing in on a character slowly This is a sequence from the movie Lucy by Luc Besson. where Lucy is speaking with Dr Norman via a television that she is now mentally able to control.… Continue reading Project 14: Camera Movement
For this exercise, two documentaries are chosen and then analyzed so that their narrative structure can be represented in a diagram. One of the documentaries needed to be of the ‘telling’ variety, whereas the second one needed to be an ‘asking’ type documentary. The first documentary that I chose was the BBC Horizon Deepwater Disaster… Continue reading Project 16 – Documentaries
For this exercise I watched ‘The Third Man’ produced and directed by Carol Reed. The movie is a classic and the story and characters well known. Trying to identify the three act narrative structure was not easy. It seemed to me that the progress through Act 1 was very quick and the vast majority of… Continue reading Project 15 – Narrative Structure
Although not part of the brief for assignment 3, I have spent some time reflecting on the experience of working with non-professional actors. For this assignment I asked some of my work students if they would be willing to act in the film. Given that it was primarily a party scene and I said I’d… Continue reading Reflections on Assignment 3 – working with amateur actors
One of the technical problems I experienced during the filming of Assignment 3 was with the over-exposure of the large kitchen window in many of the shots. Most of the actors were standing inside the kitchen and so I made a choice to expose for the interior so that it was possible to see the… Continue reading Reflection on Assignment 3 – The over-exposed window
