Evaluation of Preliminary Excercise

Overall the preliminary excercise was a success for our group, the shots that I personally directed were fairly technically sound. An improvement could be to make sure our panning is maybe a little smoother as to keep up with the character, we were following in the sequence. The problems we encountered were, some sloppy framing in places, we once let a characters head move out of shot very quickly, we also had a small problem with the sound boom, just dipping into shot once. There was no continuity problem in the editing, there was also no problem with the sound, i.e. no extraneous ambience or talking. In summary this excercise was a success, we made a film in which everyone contributed, and although it may not have been technically sound it certainly gave us alot of experience to use in our upcoming excercise, a link will be posted soon.

Micro-analysis of Brick

I am analysing the scene in which Brendan attempts to break into Tugg's car. The scene starts with focus on the car instead of on Brendan, this is also repeated later in the scene when Tugg finds Brendan attemptin to vandalise his car. This scen focuses on getting as much action in, whill at the same time using a mlittle camera shot as possible. There is no non-diegetic sound, and almost no sound for the majority of the scene. The intriguing shot in this is the continuous shot at the end of the scene. Which focuses on Tugg, instead of on Brendan. Odd considering that Brendan is our main character, this attention could signify that Tugg has quite a large part to play in the film. This scen overall is about going through what you have to, to get what you want. At the very end of the scene, Brendan vents his frustration by throwing a rock at the fleeing car. The character of Tugg is shown to be very domineering, until he gets into his car, because when he gets into the car, he flees from the scene, fighting as little as he has too. Overall a simplistic, minimalist scene, that shows a suprising amount about the film and it's characters.

Analysis of Film Openings 2

The other film opening I’m going to analyse is the opening sequence for the new David Fincher film "The Social Network". The film starts with a two shot of a young man and a young woman sitting facing each other, at a very neutral angle that suggests no character dominance or submission. The colour scheme of the scene is a very "Fincheresque" green colour, closely resembling the green of a beer bottle. This image backs up the inference that they are in a bar, we also here muffled talking in the background which all but confirms our theory of a bar scene. Next we get a lot of over-shoulder shots, signalling conversation. The conversation is initiated by the woman, but is quickly interrupted by the man with a new topic of conversation, the woman accepts the conversation change, a small show of submission, but also a showing of maybe a little bit of arrogance on the side of the man. We start to build a character profile for both the man and the woman. If we dissect the conversation we notice that almost all of the lines that the female character is given are questions even though we join the conversation halfway through. The eye movements are very different also, the male characters eyes continually wander throughout the scene whereas the female's are very often transfixed on the man. The only significant change in angle is a very short shot when the woman gets up from the table to leave straight after breaking up with the man, the man is shown in a high angle shot showing submission. Straight after very slow piano music starts playing, often shown to signify extreme sadness. This film excels at showing emotion in even the most emotionless of people.