Ryan Reynolds In A Box

Watched Buried the other day, and it got me thinking even more about what I would want Four Walls to end up like. Somehow I got from thinking about Buried and how it relates to Four Walls for me, by Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) having different objectives and calling people, and I thought that this is what I want Jason to seem like; he has objectives. But unlike Paul Conroy, Jason has control over how the conversation plays out with him and Detective Spencer.

Buried is a 90 minute film that takes place entirely in a box. This may seem like a really boring concept, but it's one of the only films that I've had a real sense of the character. I think that keeping the story within a confined space without flashbacks or other techniques that take the audience out of the box make it difficult to not notice the character's traits. I think that putting two characters in a room will lower the audience's attention to what the character's motives are and focus more on the conversation between the two characters.

But because Jason is going to be in control for the the first two acts, it may be that the script is more of a monologue with some arguments placed to bring tension between the characters and to bring the build-up to the climax.

Because Jason has schizophrenia I want it to make it hard for the audience to know what his motives are for his actions. Also that his motives and emotion change quite drastically throughout, not so much as that he goes from crying to ecstasy within a minute. But so much that he goes from being quite aggressive, to very introverted. Or cooperative to ignorant. Changes like these will add to the fear in Jason and also make it very unpredictable as to what will happen next. I should be careful not to make his emotions repeat throughout the script though, cos no-one likes a boring movie.

Scriptings

Haven't really added that much to the script since last time, but this is the finished script. Not entirely sure of the length of this, but that can be changed in post-production with how I wanted to do this. I'll go over this again soon to see how my perception has changed and whether the script will need to change because the that change.

INT. Interrogation Room - EVENING

Artificial lighting shines down to the centre of the room. A man, JASON WARD is sitting covered by the pale light. On the other side of the DESK a detective, JONATHAN SPENCER, is sitting cross legged, with his pen held in his hand. A COFFEE sits steaming on the desk just in front of SPENCER.

JASON has half of his face spattered with blood and his entire chest and leg also spattered with blood. This is never suddenly revealed until the ending of this sequence.

JASON (V.O.)

(Stuttering)

It was around a, month ago. I met this man. In a bar. We, got talking on about his life. Mostly his, bad times. It was pretty obvious he had had a really bad day. He had been drinking for most of the two hours. Constantly. He ordered a new drink, every time he finished one. He finally said after the, two hours that he should probably go home. He left with a bit of a stumble, didn't really annoy anyone else. Most people had left. He got in his car. A 96' fiesta. Navy blue. He turned the key. I watched him as he went on his way. The next day I took the day off work. I went to his neighborhood, he said the night before, he said he lived on Greenway, went to the exit and saw him drive out in his car. I drove behind him until he got to his work. Found out from the receptionist he finished at, quarter to two. I was back at his house. He pulled into his, drive at quarter past two. stopped and waited for something. I don't know what, made me so angry. It was just him.

Jason is a character who should scare the audience, even from the outset his appearance should provoke fear or unease into the audience. Jason is covered in blood - the questions provoked in the audience are; why? how? It also makes the audience think that he has been involved with death, along with him being handcuffed makes him a murderer most likely. 

The camera shots of Jason are also going to increase the suspicion of what Jason has done to be in the jail cell. Slowly revealing characteristics of him to give the audience one new thing to focus on in each shot.

Movie Titling

We've been having training from an After Effects specialist for a few lessons now, and we're gradually getting towards a final movie ident that we're going to use in our final coursework. I've gone through a few different ideas and I've come up with a look of the font;

I think that the title is pretty cool, that's the only thing I can really say about it, as most indy film company names don't really have any kind of joke or relation to anything, they're just there. The only thing that I can say about how [Curiousity] relates to the style that it's in is that there is no reason why it is a bit distorted by the fibre filter and why the square brackets are around, which to be honest I don't know why they are there.


This was one of my first ideas that I had, but it seemed a bit weird and too childish, so I came up with another idea and let it blend into something that I thought would be a good name;

Preliminary Task

It wasn't exactly hard for us to come up with an idea for someone walking into a room, saying a few lines and then exiting. The four of us, Jake, Evie, Bill and Me all got into a group. My first idea was gangsters, which eventually turned into British gangsters who deal sanwiches at low prices of 10p and who are in a loving relationship. I'm not sure if we were going for comedy or not, but either way it turned out like that. Our project turned out as being comedy from the outset. It's set in a music department cupboard because that is all that we could find. When we got in their we could only fit two people in along with the places for the different aspects of the camera angle. Unfortunately we had to leave someone outside, which was Evie, although it was a short task so it was only for about 10 or so minutes.


Evie didn't seem too concerned about the sounds coming from inside the cupboard. And how we'd got to the final storyline inside the cupboard. We made most of the detail of the gangsters inside the cupboard, our original idea was just to have some gangsters who deal sandwiches. It was eventually extended to cover a loving relationship, cramped conditions, awkward snatching of drugs and money and a small conversation about what was in the sandwich.


Instead of telling about how weird it is, you might aswell watch it;

P.S. It's in black and white cos we're cool.

Camera Angles, Movement & Shots

Camera Angles
Different camera angles can evoke different views in the audience. There are two different extremes of angles; high and low.

High Angle- The camera high up looking down on something which creates a vulnerable or weak sense towards the subject. At increasingly high angles the subject loses it's sense of height which makes it look even smaller.

Low Angle- The camera looking high up at something, making the subject seem a lot bigger than it really is, it can also make the subject look as if it is the same height as a background object.

Camera Movements
Pan - Pivot at a horizontal angle. Normally used to set the scene or reveal something.
Tilt - Panning, but at a vertical angle.
Track - Camera following a subject, normally on a dolly tracking system.

Camera Shots

 Extreme Wide Shot - Establishing shot.

Very Wide Shot - Object is still not fully visible, but takes the focus of the frame.

Wide Shot - Subject takes up full focus of the frame.

Mid Shot - Bottom of the frame is just above the waist, leaving a small gap above the head to the top of the frame.

Close Up - Normally focusing on the face, allowing a small gap below the chin, and just cutting off the top of the head.

Extreme Close Up - Focus on one object or part of the face.

The Opening Credits

Today we had a double lesson on how to create opening credits in Adobe After Effects CS4, it was really good just to have software like this and tuition on it to produce some really professional looking animations with shapes that we had made and font that we could edit ourselves.

Whilst doing all this it really gave me some info on how I could make my own titling look unique and have a style similar to that of what I would want the film to have. I constantly had an image of the 1995 film se7en by David Fincher. The titling was one of the most memorable for me, and I would really like to mix that style of font with some animation like on Terminator. I'm not sure how this would mix together, but I think that the crazy CRT blurring on the se7en would look good with some images moving slowly in the background also with a TV signal distortion aswell.

Here's both se7en's and Terminator's opening credits:

se7en [1995]

Terminator [1984]

The Coursework Is Here...

Yeh, that time has come. But on the other hand it is Media coursework, so if anything it's enjoyable. Yeeeeeeehaaa. Ever since I started this course I knew what coursework would be involved, so I began thinking about a story for the movie intro that I would eventually make. Ideas went through my mind, I had a few ideas in mind that I waited to have my full judgement on after my first experience on a movie set, and an experience about how to work with other people on set.

Most of the ideas I had were just wiped out by what would be possible as a student. I have a few left, but I'll see what the deadline is for the task.

The main things I've been playing around with are trying to get the right look of the overall visuals of the shots. I've been watching Zack Snyder's The Watchmen recently and I really like the way his shots have a high contrast & sharpness, and most of the shots have very low saturation.

The high sharpness and moody saturation really gives an overall emotion of depression and sadness of the entire film. I'm going to experiment with a few different effects and document them on das Blog.

I also wanted to use some really smooth camera movements, like we used in the Hangover project, but a lot more slower. Some form of dolly system that doesn't have have rails, as I wanted to use it to zoom in on a character to produce tension and curiosity, and if the rails are placed in front in the same direction as camera angle, then they'll be in shot. So something that can hold a camera at around sitting height and doesn't show it's railings in shots.

I'm going to go ahead with some, experimentation...

Evaluation Time.

Come along children I'm going to read you an interesting story of what went good or bad with an AS Media Studies project.

So basically I'm gonna go through all of the main focus shots and say how I think it could have been better.

This shot was lined up really well, we didn't have a decent amount of people to have like in the original, but we lengthened the shot by spacing the to people out. The props were also limited, we were going to have some real flowers, but we were stressed out from the rest of the organisation, I think that the replacements of fake greenery still did well. We borrowed the van from one of Bill's Dad's Friends, who coincidentally was in Las Vegas. We haven't heard much from him. The font for the titling was a very close match, and the placement was pretty easy. A well duplicated shot.

This shot wasn't that tricky to set up, but on our first day of shooting, the camera we were using was low on battery towards the end of the day, it produced some really weird streaking black lines to appear horizontally on the shot. We couldn't get rid of them in editing, but we re shot all the other shots from that day. So it all went well. The cake was made for us by Evie and her Mum, which, for a home made cake was brilliant, it looked a bit wedding-y, but we didn't have a budget. So wedding cake was probably out of reach for us. The shots are mirrored, which isn't a big deal. Also the lighting in our shot was a lot darker, this was because we were getting towards the end of our shooting day, and 4 o'clock was about when Jake's house got too dark to avoid continuity errors. This was also another reason why we re-shot some of the other shots. We lit the cake with a desk lamp being held by me to focus the shot on the cake.

This is my favourite shot that we did, it was done on a wooden dolly system that Jake made in his youth and hasn't been used since. It made a really smooth shot. The lighting in this shot was perfect, it was bright, with some artificial light, but it isn't really noticeable in the short time of the shot. The layout on screen is twinned between the two shots. Our best work yet.

This shot was another great layout of the shots, with the people in the right place. Although more of the make-up girl can be seen. Not to mention the script and shot-by-shot guide left on the table. Soz. The lighting in the room made it more orange, which could have been dealt with in editing, but as this project wasn't part of our overall grade, I think we slacked a smidge. The actors didn't have to do much, but we wanted to get the weird hand thingy that the bride does in.

We were limited on the amount of room that we had, so everything was a bit more squished in, but we had to work with what we had. We got everything in frame where it should be in this shot. Including the bride in the little mirror, I thought that was a nice touch. The original shot had less zoom on, but we couldn't have made the shot perfect with the amount of room we had, this made the mirror a lot smaller and the mum a lot bigger unfortunately. Also Jake's mum in this shot is wearing my mum's scarf. Detail or what!

This shot was lined up pretty well, it wasn't particularly hard to do the second time as we'd already done this shot the weekend before and the film went all skewiff. The plant was still in roughly the right position, but because of the geography of the room, the only way we could get the flower in shot would mean that it had to be out of focus. The costume we left for the actors to decide on, so long as they wore clothes similar style to that of the original characters.

This back shot was easy to line up, but along with the area of the room again, it couldn't be matched up perfectly. We still got all the characters in frame, along with the sofa being at the same angle with the bottom of the frame.

Phil's first position shot was the first shot we did, shot in a field at the back of Tuttles Lane. We got Bill's dad to bring a very nice car to this field and we began to set up the shot. Each character was related back to the original sequence. We couldn't have someone sitting on the car, because the bonnet would most likely buckle under the weight, so we improvised. Jamie at the back did a great job of peeing in a bush for about 15 or so minutes. Luckily he wasn't method acting. Phil's costume wasn't the same, it wasn't very dirty, although we had just come straight from school. And also it wasn't a low-cut top, like the original. But in my defense it was bloody freezing.

The second position in Phil's shots was also easy, we re-aligned the shot so that something that wasn't Tuttles Lane was in the background and shot the entire conversation again. The make-up was byro, it wasn't very tasty. The alignment on this shot again was great. Although because I'm not as muscular as Bradley Cooper my feeble arms didn't stretch the same distance.

As I said the previous post, the titling wasn't perfect and could have been better, but we still did a good job on it. The original titling was small and slightly more in focus, but I still that for a AS Media project we did damn well to match it up.

My opinion of our finished work; 

Editing The Hangover

So this was our first try at editing something on this strange new piece of software called 'Adobe Premiere Pro'. I've been using Sony Vegas 9 for a couple years every now and then, so I found switching to Premiere quite easy. I found the new software absolutely amazing. It catered for all the needs in our post production, and I look forward to using it in the future. We were able to set edit the audio and video in the way we needed, and it also covered the little things we needed to do, like putting effects on the audio and color correction.

The use of it can vary from the really basic, with just creating a title and editing shots, but we wanted to get the best edit of our shots and used Premiere to the fullest extent. We were able to have as many video and audio tracks as we wanted, so we put either; opposite shots on alternating tracks or, with Phil and Tracy's phone conversation, we used alternating tracks for each of the characters. The audio for some of the tracks was a real hazard for us novices, sometimes the audio of another shot would overlay the video of another shot in the original hangover cut. We had to move around this and find a way to easily do this. It turned to be quite simple, but it just took a bit of brain work. Which we were lacking on a Monday morning. All we had to do on these was get the shots lined up, unlink each of them, remove the audio on the previous and extend the audio on the second shot. And the opposite for the video. This occurred a few times, but after the first time we had it laid out.

The audio effects were pretty easy, to get the sound of a mobile signal and phone we used a high pass filter and the volume control. Basics. We used color correction on the Phil shots, which was also pretty easy, after a technician had shown us a useful tri-wheel color correction effect, we were pretty confident on the look we wanted and saved it as a preset, then all we had to do on the other shots was to drag and drop the preset and BOOM! it was done.

The music was easy, all it needed was to be dragged into it's own audio track, then volume key points were logged in, and BOOM! another one bites the dust. The titles and credits were on Bill's part and were also pretty easy, just a quick Photoshop job on the font, dragged and dropped into the project on our computer, then placed on the shot at the right time, with the right additive dissolve added and BOOM-BANG-A-RANG another one's gone. The title of the hangover wasn't quite what we wanted, but it still showed that we had tried to copy the title's and got the effect that displays them done pretty well. It still matched up with the original well, even if it did look a bit cheesy.

:)

So that thing we did, well it's finished...

We have finished the Hangover Opening Sequence and I only have one thought.

Yes. It was very fun and really interesting to find what it's like on a 'movie set', but it also feels like a real achievement. To be able to recreate a hollywood movie introduction, with pretty close relation, only without the huge budget. I think we did an amazing job, it matches the original pretty well, even if the small details couldn't be met with a budget consisting of our own will it is still possible to tell that the finished product is definitely a remake of the Hangover.

Here's the finished product:

Omg.

WOOH!

Today we finished the production of our Hangover Introduction remake. Everything is now done besides the editing. It went pretty well, a few slip ups here and there. But, we managed to get through it.

Our main objective for today was to finish the rest of the shooting and record the audio for the overdubbing that was needed,  and some of the background ambiance that we are going to put in during post-production.

So the shooting that we needed to do was all of the people shots, as the footage on the dad shot that we had already shot had some funny lines on it, that even a technician who came into help with editing didn't know anything about. So we did all the shots of the people. The set-up we used was just the basic, with a camera and a neon head tripod for the smooth movements we were looking for. This shot was of the bride, Nicole, who did a very good job at the cheesy american accent.

We had the laptop handy throughout the entire shoot to check up on the shots of the original. Along with a paper copy of the shots and a script. The usual.

We got my parents to come along again and play the dad and a bridesmaid, we asked them to keep their costume the same, even though it didn't matter as we re-shot the old shots of them. We didn't want any continuity errors! Unfortunately we couldn't find the magazine that the dad was reading, but Jake didn't have many bikini magazines lying around.

We also did all the outside shots that were of the wedding. This was only a shot of people taking flowers out of a van, and people laying out chairs, but still needs to be in there. We borrowed a van from Bill's Dad, who seems to be a dealer of vehicles for AS Media work now or something. And we just got loads of different chairs from around Jake's house and arranged them to look wedding-y.

We also did the sound recording that we needed, which somehow ended up as Jake making random noises down the microphone to sound like background animals, and also almost ended up making my bladder empty. We overdubbed Phil's side of the conversation, because the sound was muffled by wind buzz, and also every 10 seconds there was the sound of a lorry passing by. It turned out to be a lot easier than I expected and was over in under half an hour. All we had left to do was to edit everything together.

WHAT YOU SAYIN' BILL!

Thriller

No, not Michael Jackson. The thriller genre is something that can be any genre of movie along with thriller technique throughout it. The most common is action thriller, with the likes of No Country For Old Men, The Hurt Locker and Pitch Black. These films are all thrillers, but all classed as different hybrid genres all together.

No Country For Old Men is a crime/thriller, The Hurt Locker is mainly a war/drama/thriller and Pitch Black is a sci-fi/thriller. All these films display techniques of thriller, but the settings of all of them create a hybrid genre.

No Country For Old Men is a story about discovery, a man the remnants of a drug dealer shoot out in the southern states of america, he finds that one goon has managed to escape with a briefcase of money, but died shortly after he has escaped. The man takes the briefcase and hides it under his house, then starts being chased by a hitman, who is willing to kill anyone who needs to be killed to get to the money.

The film has a plot that drives a lot of the suspense, with there being little to know about the story other than what is given in the first twenty minutes. The hitman, played by Javier Badrem, holds most of the tension in the story, with there not being much known about him, this holds a lot of curiosity in the audience and therefore not knowing what he is capable of. The introduction of his character shows him killing an innocent man for his car, this will make the audience feel very frightened of him. Where as the man who has the briefcase, played by Josh Brolin, has more information given about him, making him have a greater emotional connection with the audience, the difference in the feelings of the audience to the two main characters creates the suspense. No Country For Old Men really sets a standard for thrillers, as there is very little dialogue, lots of silence and a lot of tense moments that kept my heart racing.

The Hurt Locker still shows a lot of scenes with suspense, the main reason why it is such a successful thriller is that it is set as a film that happens. About bomb technicians in Iraq, it is a very relative film, that creates its tension through scenes that the audience can believe could or maybe have happened.

There isn't that great of a connection between the audience and the characters but, because they are soldiers, the audience immediately feels respect towards them, as they have been fighting to protect their country and other countries. Later on in the film, there becomes a very big emotional connection to the characters, with the introduction of the main character's family and a very meaningful scene between the main character, James, and his fellow troop, Sanborn. This final conversation between them summons all the emotion that the introduction of the film is missing. There is a gradual increasing feeling towards the characters as they go through their daily lives in Iraq, with them losing people and encountering different obstacles that they have to overcome together, but sometimes not at all, with there being a lot of friction between James and Sanborn.

Pitch Black is a sci-fi thriller that gets it's thrills from an alien being that lives on a planet, where a ship has just crash landed. From the outset, the crew come across things that evoke curiousity in the audience, from when they first view the planet surface, it has two suns. Creating a constant light on the surface.

The crew find a human outpost a few miles away from their wrecked ship, but the outpost is wrecked and looks like it hasn't been used for a number of decades. They venture into one of the homes, which is completely deserted, but what is immediately focused on is a planetarium that shows that both suns will be setting for a month within the next day. They quickly find that some there is are aliens living in tunnels underneath the planet, and when both suns go down, the aliens will come out of the tunnels and devour any living thing on the surface. What is added to the start the tension is that there were convicts on board the ship. All of them died, but one, who has escaped onto the planet and starts to spy on the other survivors. The tension of Pitch Black is held in the curiousity and fear around the convict, and more so about the alien race as the film goes on.

The films show different ways of creating tension, but it mostly done by convening curiosity about something on screen, this can be done visually; by not showing the audience something, or in not stating what something is capable of, or by putting the characters in a situation that could be real, but still has many other possible outcomes.

First Post!

Hey, hows it going? Good. I'm good thank you. Well basically this my blog for my Media Studies AS course, which I'm using as a way to display things I've done, different things I've tried, evaluations and things we've done in classes. Seeing as this my first post I better include something useful, so I'm gonna talk about the stuff that I've learnt about in the first couple weeks of Media Studies;

- What Mise en Scene is, and how it is used in film. Mise en Scene is, in a nut shell, what is displayed on screen. It can cover anything from; the lighting to make up. This can be used to display what the character is feeling and what status the character has in the story, say if the lighting was quite dark and didn't show much of the subject, the audience would know that they were meant to be interested in this character. It also covers the most basic of things, like the costume, if the character was wearing a police uniform, it would most likely mean that he was a police officer.

- How different shots can be used to get different advantages out of the scenery and landscape, and other shots can be used to get a better emotional effect on the audience by the subject. An extreme close up shot can be used to get a greater connection from the character to the audience. A long shot can be used to set the scene and let the audience know where the scene is taking place.

- Who Lester Burnham is. He is a character in American Beauty, played by Kevin Spacey. We studied how the opening two minutes can be used to introduce what the story will be about, for Lester Burnham, throughout the first four minutes of American Beauty, he is visually trapped to the audience. The first time the audience see him he is in darkness lying on his bed, the next shot he is having some 'alone time' in his shower, but he is still boxed in. This shows that he is 'trapped' in his own life.

- How to deconstruct a shot. We were set the task of taking eight frames that would tell the introduction of a story. We then wrote down what each frame was showing and what it was implying.

- How dividing the shot into thirds helps to draw attention to certain areas or how it can be used to make the shot look tidier. We watched a short video about how this technique is used in many films, dividing the shot vertically and horizontally into thirds. This creates a box in the centre of the frame, it is commonly used to put the subject's eye or the centre of their face on one of the top two corners of the box.