Workshop 2: The 180 degree rule

 The 180 degree rule is a rule that dictates how your camera is set up to film. The 180 degree rule ensures that the audience is sure of the orientation of everything in the scene, and knows which direction everything is facing. This means establishing a "line of action", and only filming 180 degrees around that line. 

Here are some of the shots I tried:

Over The Shoulder

Over The Shoulder

 I tried an Over the Shoulder shot on both sides, this means I took care to always keep the white action figure on the right and the red action figure on the left. By maintaining that line of action, I was able to make the pictures look coherent and sequenced. I also did a Wide shot, at 90 degrees from the line of action.

Wide Shot

Feedback on "Our Pitch"

Feedback for our pitch mainly included the following points:

• Make sure to really figure out the motives behind the woman's attack. The reason behind this is, we run the risk of making her seem insane and/or the antagonist of the rest of the movie, which was not our original intention
• While we received positive feedback on our intentions to create a choreographed fight scene and create a claustrophobic effect within this small confined space, again motives where called into question "Why this elevator? why can't she wait until she reaches the apartment to attack him?
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Group Pitch: Our "Elevator" Pitch

 

Research Task: Saul Bass

 Saul Bass was an American film-maker and graphic design artist, born in New York, USA. He studied at Brooklyn College and the arts Students league of New York. He has won an Academy award for Best Documentary.

Saul Bass was best known for his geometric style, he was an avid user of symbolism and often centered his title sequences around one subject or shape. He used a lot of primary, bold colors, to bring attention to the titles, especially Red.

His title sequences captured a hint of what the movie was going to be about and set the tone for the opening scenes.  For years he worked as only as a graphic Designer for Ad campaigns, and his designs are still prevalent today. He worked mainly through the mid 1950's in Hollywood.

He is best know for his work on The Man With the Golden Arm, The Shining, Vertigo, and The Anatomy of a Murder, Casino, Noth by Northwest, Grand Prix, The Seven Year Itch, Goodfellas, Around the World in Eighty Days, Carmen Jones, It's a mad mad mad amd World and many, many more.

He worked closely with his wife Elaine Bass, on projects for big names like; Hitchcock, Scorsese, Kubrick, Preminger.

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Here are some of the Youtube videos I researched:

Group meetings (4-6) Week 2

Meeting 4

We developed our idea further according to the feedback we received from our teachers, we were advised to steer away from a "first-date" type setting because those usually happen in public and it's quite difficult to write accurately. Therefore, during this meeting , we face-timed and talked about what other scenarios could work to leave two people alone without it being awkward.

Here are the ideas we came up with:

1. In an Elevator

2. Two chefs in a pantry/freezer

3. Job interview

4. Janitor in a bathroom







Meeting 5:


After receiving feedback from our teachers, we decided to look further into the characters themselves and who they are. Each member of our group looked into two attributes of both characters, the guy and the girl, and we talked about how to develop the characters further.


Attributes we looked at included:


Their occupations:


Maybe he's the CEO? or She's a Secret Agent?


Maybe he's confident and She's suave?

Meeting 6:

Our group met over face time and discussed the ides we had and prepared our pitch presentation. We discussed, the woman, who murders the man, and her characteristics, she was untrained, unskilled, and killing the young man for revenge. We also decided to make the character younger than previously, setting the elevator in a University rather than an office. We talked about ensuring that there was as little dialogue as possible, and what we wanted the characters to be wearing, holding, and stereotyped like. We're also considering exploring the idea of presenting this as the possibility of a Rom-com turned thriller, by setting up the two character's like tropes of that genre. The girl seemingly clumsy and naive, and the guy being charming.

Workshop 1: Rule of thirds, composition and depth

Today I researched rules of thirds, depth, and composition, I went around my house and outside to take pictures and create interesting shots.

(Shot set-up)

First I looked at this vase of flowers, in this case, the overhead lighting yellowed the picture, so I turned it off and pulled the curtains of the window pack to light it with more natural lighting, I then aligned the corner of the room and the vase itself along the right-top, and right-bottom lines of the grid, to leave empty space to one side and create focus.

Final Product

(Final product)

(Shot set-up)

(Final Product)

My second shot I decided to focus more on depth. With a more busy and interesting background and foreground, it was a better place to create focus, the elephant, my subject, was centered in the top right axis along the grid. By moving the camera angle down, I was able to create depth of field and make the elephant look much further away than it was.

(Shot set-up)

 For my third shot, I looked at camera angle or perspective and how I could use it to my advantage. I tried to make the trees in this shot look long and dynamic, so I played a lot with depth and angle, making the trees look elasticated almost. By aligning the trees along the center square lines, they all tilted towards the center, making them appear longer, higher, and more imposing.

(Final Product)

Group meetings 1-3 (Week 1)

Meeting 1:

We, my group and I, face-timed and went over our ideas that we hadn't had the chance to cover in our time slot in class. Tegan presented her idea about a Sci-Fi opening scene, where a groups of teenagers become gangs and fend for themselves since all the adults have disappeared and society has crumbled. I presented my idea on a 1950's serial killer, preparing for a date and cleaning his car as the narrative switched between him and his victim trying to escape to contrapuntal music. We all decided we wanted to explore the concept of murder and motive more and would like our opening scene to have it.

Meeting 2:

We decided on out two ideas, Tegan's 1950's tea party murder mystery (thriller), and Fin's espionage casino idea (action) as our backup. we narrowed it down based on what we think we could shoot and capture in the 1-3 minutes we had and with our limited experience and resources, eg: no car chases because it would be extremely hard to film, and no filming at night, because we only have a day to film and can't control the weather.

Meeting 3:

We had just previously met with our teacher to run over our idea, they pointed out two main problems.

1. It is very difficult to film in a specific time period.

2. It is hard to capture and conceptualize a poisoning, which was our original weapon of choice, as we though it fit the "tea party" theme well.

In our third meeting we decided that instead of having multiple people at a party, we would have only two people, so it became a date rather than a party. This was beneficial because we still aren't sure what will be allowed due to Covid-19 restrictions.

We also decided that the woman would kill the man with a gun rather than poisoning, of course now that it was a "first date" she needed a motive, so we created this idea that she wasn't really his date, rather, she had killed his date and was here to kill him too, because she was a serial killer.

We also decided than rather set it in the 1950's specifically, we would simply draw inspiration from the era and dress our actors in formal attire.

By setting this as a first date, we could use our peers as actors, rather than a married couple, which would've had to be adults.