Tuesday 30 September 2014

North by northwest blog (finished)

North by Northwest assignment:

In this assignment we are going to be looking at north by northwest and will be focusing on cinematography,sound,editing and mise-en-scene but the main scene we are going to be looking at is the famous crop-duster scene with the section where roger Thornhill is attempting to escape from the plane that is trying to murder him and we are going to be mainly observing the cinematography in this scene out of everything else.
The cinematography is very widely used throughout this whole scene and lots of different types are used such as the beginning shot which is the wide shot and is used to display the main characters surroundings showing what he is seeing along with displaying this sense of loneliness on the main character and isolation as he is located at that point in time in the middle of no-where with nothing around him, this shows his extreme discomfort and the fact that he is far away from the city and home, the two places where he feels the most safe, this wide shot and pan shot is also used to show how long roger is waiting for this mysterious Mr. Kaplan to show up and that he is looking about everywhere for him.
The camera will then zoom in onto Rogers face to  show a close-up shot once the plane is in motion and is attempting to shoot him, this shot is used to to how his shock and fear that the plane is attempting to kill him while he is in the middle of no-where it could also be said that this shot is used to show Rogers sudden realisation of the fact that there is no Kaplan but instead was all a setup for Roger to be murdered, this however is not an extreme close-up but instead is a normal close-up.
Immediately afterwards there is a low-angle shot to show the plane just passing over his head nearly killing him in the process and this shot is especially low-angle to show exactly how close the plane was to decapitating him.
Finally we end this sequence with a tracking show as Thornhill is running away from the plane which is in hot pursuit and thankfully the plane has to pull up just before the bullets which it is firing comes into contact with Roger killing him, all of these "special effects" such as the explosions,gunshots and the plane are not CGI, graphics or animations these are instead all done live and are all done by trained professionals so when you find out that this is all done by the crew and not the computer then this makes the movie much more impressive.
The sound plays a very important role in this whole movie as basically all of the sounds are non-diegetic and there is no music at all, all of the sounds are sounds in which the character "Thornhill" would actually be able to hear himself such as the plane flying overhead or the gas tanker exploding, or even the cars and bus driving past him, the only diegetic sound which you can actually hear during this sequence is the sharp pitches or tunes which play whenever the plane fly really close to thornhill overhead nearly killing him in the process, the use of sound is extremely effective for this movie scene as it puts us in roger Thornhill's situation as we can both see what he is seeing through the use of many P.O.V shots combined with the use of non-diegetic sound really puts us in his shoes and makes us feel like we are in his place and are in imminent danger just as he is.
North by northwest is very much a villain driven story and narrative just like many other thrillers from this movie era were, other great movies which are villain driven from the same time as this can include any of the James Bond movies from back then all the way up to the present day, the way in which you can tell that it is villain driven is that the good guy as such in this movie never really provokes the villain themselves and never will directly attack the villain instead it is just the villain which is always throwing obstacles and traps in the path of the hero which he then has to react to and in the process stop the villain from achieving that which he is attempting to (which is generally something i the way of world domination). In the case of this movie the "hero" is just an ordinary everyday person going about his daily routines until that is when he is mistaken for another person who is an agent working for the government hot on the trail of one of the biggest criminals at which point he is dragged into this insane world of heroes and villains, this is one of Hitchcock's famous devices which he uses in many of the movies which he has made it involves the audience "dipping their toe into the cold water of fear" what this means is that he is scaring the audience in the way that this kind of thing could happen to any one of them just as it happened to Roger Thornhill, this makes them worried that they too could could be going about their daily routine and all of a sudden be dragged into a world of danger.
Another one of Hitchcock's famous devices which he uses extensively in this movie is the concept of "the male gaze", this is the idea that the movie focuses greatly on what males would be looking at themselves, this works well seeing as the main character in this movie is a male the shots and scenes always see the women as objects of male erotic desire which is true within this movie as most of the movie is based around this one woman which Thornhill has fallen in love with and although a large amount of the story involves her she never moves the plot forward herself which is again true for the concept of the "male gaze" in which the plot is only driven forward by males.
















Monday 29 September 2014

Sound film and evaluation

Sound exercise:
This is our sound exercise. Although we lost the audio for half of the footage we decided to make up with it by adding in more audio and sound clips during the editing process of the video, and we also decided to add in some subtitles as well to cover the lack of dialogue. 
we decided not to spend too much time on it due to the fact that it was just a practice film which we were doing to get used to the sound and audio, if we were to spend more time on it we could have re-filmed the parts where we had no audio so that we would actually have something which we could listen to.  the main reason as to why we had no audio was to the fact that the boom had cut out half way through and left us with nothing.



We will be using this older film as a reminder that we should always check the boom is functioning properly before we actually go on to film anything and we should also save enough time during recording for us to go on and continue recording or re-record some stuff if we ever need to which is what we did not do during this one, we rushed it and did not leave enough time for us to back and do anything that we needed to do. 


Tuesday 9 September 2014

Genre

Genre 
Genre is typically a type of topic which a movie is based around, normally there is a main genre that the movie is focused on such as horror or action or sci-fi but then other sub-genres can be added in with the main one. For example you could have a romantic comedy or a action adventure or even a sci-fi horror, some examples of this include "aliens" which is both a horror and a sci-fi movie and grown ups which is both a family movie and a comedy movie. These movies with sub-genres are seen more and more commonly throughout the movie industry with a film rarely ever sticking to just one type of genre or idea. The reason why movies have genres is so that they can be classified and put into groups which is extremely useful when labelling, selling and even giving out rewards or trophies to movies, they are also classified in this way so that it is easier for the public to determine what type of movie it is and if it would be of interest to them this helps when customers purchase a film as they can look for similar films in the same genre and buy them too but not something from another genre as they know they would not be interested in it.

Monday 8 September 2014

Brief



 Foundation Portfolio: The Brief 



You have been asked to produce the titles and opening sequence of a new fiction film in thethriller genre.

The sequence should last a maximum of two minutes.
You may work in a group of 2 - 4 students.
As acting is not assessed you are free to use actors that are not members of your group.
The film is worth 60% of your coursework grade.
The accompanying blog is worth 40% of your coursework grade

Together the Foundation Portfolio is worth 50% of the overall AS Level.  

welcome blog

welcome!
hello my name is jack Broadbent and this is going to be the welcome post for both film studies and media studies as i take both subjects