https://vimeo.com/108434062

The clip I chose comes from a student’s film project, which focuses on the city culture that I am familiar with. The clip starts from the beginning of the film. A bunch of students running towards the camera, and the camera rotates a little bit as they passing by. This scene introduces the main characters and their relationship, which is one against five. Then the narration comes out, and the scene cut responding to it. The camera angles high, and is in medium shot in the next few scenes. After finishing the narration, the camera dollies out a little bit and starts tracking. It tracks from the first row of the class all the way to the end; then it dollies into another main character, the bully. Then cut to a medium shot, exhibiting in low angle, emphasizing his facial expression. This part is purely handheld, and I think it promotes a comedy like effect. 

Actually, it’s my film project. I’m just curious how it feels like to analyse my own camerawork. Overall, it is weird to analyse my own work and it makes me realize the  continuity and camera movement need improvement.  

Camera for Interpretation (Sean Strelow)

I really loved this reading. I’ve been into film for a long time now and this reading reminded me why I love it so much. Little things, like the telephoto shot towards the end of The Graduate where he seems to take forever to get towards the camera, are why I love film and got into it in the first place. I always have trouble remembering the specifics of depth-of-field and the kinds of lenses, but this article articulated very well exactly what each means and does and did it very succinctly. One of my favorite lines was right at the end, when the author says, “camera technique, then, is not simply a matter of recording subjects and action on film or video, nor is it a matter of creating pretty pictures. Camera technique is the creation of an illusion of reality that exists on the screen” (192).

The concept that the article really seems to want to hammer home is that, in watching a film, we as an audience are inherently looking through a camera. Thus, manipulating the way that we perceive images as such is a necessary aspect of filmmaking and is, in fact, the crux of filmmaking as an art. I can dig it.

I’m going to analyze the opening scene of Drive for this post. In it, Ryan Gosling provides the getaway car for two burglars. The only problem is, one of them takes a little bit too long, and the police are on the chase. The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, makes heavy use of telephoto lenses and carefully placed shots to place us in the mind of Ryan Gosling’s character, the Driver. As the Driver finds himself behind a cop car, he slows down. We find ourselves looking in a tight over-the-shoulder shot of him looking at the cop car. The telephoto lens blurs everything that is in the car; we are only focused on the cop car, just as the Driver is. When the car makes a turn, the camera racks focus to Gosling’s face in the mirror. He’s safe, and the focus of the scene has shifted from that car back to our main character. This rack focus takes us from the subjective point-of-view of the Driver back to a more objective point-of-view of watching the scene, or perhaps to one of the burglars backseat. When the helicopter flying overhead spots the Driver, we cut between shots of his face with extreme lead room and speeding shots with the camera attached to the car. The moving shots allow us to feel the intensity of the moment as he rushes to try to escape the police’s gaze, while the shots of his face looking intently ahead are made more powerful by the lead room provided. We get to see the space that he is staring into. When the Driver encounters a cop car across the intersection staring at him, Winding Refn provides us with a canted angle inside the car. Not only does this allow us to see both the Driver and one of the burglars backseat, it also makes the viewer uncomfortable, due to its skewing of horizon lines. We are made to feel uncomfortable, just like everyone else in the car. The scene uses the radio dialogue along with a faint bass humming sound to heighten tension without any actual dialogue, and we understand that the cop car is a danger to the Driver and the burglars simply by the over-the-shoulder shots of the car (giving us the Driver’s point-of-view) and the canted angle, tension building shots. The camera slowly moves closer to the Driver’s face in one shot, again, slowly building tension as he waits at the red light, and highlighting the stress he feels, which we can see in this close-up even more clearly the closer it gets. The ending of the scene, where the Driver reveals that the game he put on the radio was all part of his backup plan, is just icing on the cake. A dope scene from a dope movie.

Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdqbdEKeJ_4

On Media (Sean Strelow)

One thing that stuck out to me in Hovagimyan’s piece is the part where he mentions that the invention of photography brought about a decline in the paintings of heroic battle scenes. This was due to how people could see what battle actually looked like, namely, grimy, bloody, and not fun. I find it interesting, then, that photography has been used, through film, to make many films that glorify war in spite of its grimy reality. Our perception of war may have changed, but we still have war heroes. We still draw glory out of war despite the grimy truth we have learned about it with the aid of photography. This idea has carried through to the development of film as well. Post 9/11, the War on Terror has brought about a new, especially grimy reality of war, and films nowadays such as The Hurt Locker and American Sniper depict that, while at the same time making heroes out of the soldiers who fight. For example, this clip from American Sniper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF40oKgQ9Jg

In it, the cinematography highlights the grittiness of the moment. We see the rival sniper through cracks in the net of tarps covering him. Close-ups of Bradley Cooper and the other sniper heighten the tension, as does the rhythmic editing. The shot sizes get closer and closer, making the audience almost uncomfortable. The palette is a drab brown and gray. The grittiness is embedded in the heroism; emerging from this, Cooper shoots the bullet, and in slow motion we see it travel through the air and hit his target. Cooper, or Chris Kyle, is a hero, as a result of the grittiness of war. This is how we still draw glory out of war despite knowing its reality: we embrace that reality, and play it up in a heroic way.

I believe that Hovagimyan’s point about how photography could capture the “actuality” of war ties into his larger idea that in the modern, “Post Media” days, media seems to interact with art at an almost seemless level in the technological space. Photography seems like the beginning of that idea, providing reproducible art that portrayed stark reality.

Jack Scardino Re: Camera for Interpretation / In-camera editing

The discussion of in-camera editing and use of the camera makes me think of the new film Birdman.  The film is very technical, and exemplifies many cinematic aspects discussed in this article.  Point-of-view, angles, and focal length are critical to how Birdman tells its story.  The wide angle lenses are very noticeable when the camera films in close-up or extreme long shots.  In these instances, the distortion of the image creates a massive depth of field, making faces appear to jump out of the frame at times, and at others making hallways seem long and vast.  Birdman also relies heavily on handheld shots to follow characters in the scenes.  This is because the film is composed as being a single fluid shot from start to finish.

This is probably Birdman's most popular (and successful) technical aspect.  The performances in the film are theatrical, fitting because the story has to do with an actor putting together a Broadway show.  The use of the camera therefore is also somewhat meta in this way, and quickly calls attention to its own use due to the tracking shots and editing.  I wish I could post the Times Square scene from the movie here for reference, because it is an excellent example of in-camera editing and cinematography.  Birdman is too recent a release, however it does remind me of the famous Copacabana long take from Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas.  The camera is used flawlessly in conjunction with mise-en-scene to create an incredibly impressive scene with totally authentic atmosphere.  The positioning of the camera in relation to its subjects and framing in such an exciting environment is highly effective in creating a fly-on-the-wall feel, and of course the direction of all actors and actions in the scene is also very impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=OJEEVtqXdK8#t=8

Danielle Rennalls: Camera Interpretation

The video I choose to analyze is that of Beyoncé’s entitled XO that was released in 2013. In this video, Beyoncé not only uses various camera interpretations to enthrall her audience, but she challenges several issues surrounding the topic of media, ranging from the incorporation of the an audio clip from NASA’s Challenger shuttle disaster to clips from interactions with her fans.  Though I will not analyze the entire video, I will choose parts that illustrate the various camera interpretations the director chose to specifically captivate us as an audience.

At the start of Beyoncé’s XO, the first glimpse we get of her is through that of a close up showing us only her head along with her neck and shoulders. The camera then switches to a wide shot giving us a sense of Beyoncé’s environment, then switching to a medium close up while simultaneously changing the angle of the shot in order to exhibit her facial expression to the audience. At twenty-one seconds we are also given a view of Coney Island through the use of a wide and high angle shot. When Beyoncé enters through the door into the bumper car zone, the concept of motivating the move comes into play for we can see the camera panning as to give the audience a sense of sharing this moment with Beyoncé and being in the same space. At forty-four seconds we see a trucking movement, moving sideways to grab our attention to an image on the side of a boardwalk stall. At forty-seven seconds when Beyoncé is on the roller coaster, we get to experience her fear through a medium low angle shot. Furthermore, at a minute and eleven seconds we see a crane shot, taking the viewer on another ride within the park.

Two shots that I was unsure of how to categorize are located at a minute and sixteen seconds and a minute and fifty-nine seconds. In the case of the former, since the camera was exhibiting a rotating form, I was unsure of the type of movement it could be categorized as. Though my instinct tells me that it is a pan, I believe it could also be a tilt of a zoom movement. Furthermore, in the case of the latter, we are given a view of a man dancing on the boardwalk, which I believe is a trucking shot, however I also think it could be a pan shot.

Though I only analyzed about a minute and half of the entire video in this post, it alone demonstrates the vast amounts of camera interpretations located in this video. Though majority of Beyoncé’s XO is done through a medium or close up shot, there are various different camera movements and angles demonstrated throughout the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xUfCUFPL-8

Camera for Interpretation-Anna L.

For this blog post, when given the prompt of finding a moment in a film that I thought was shot beautifully, I chose a moment from The Young Victoria. I primarily chose it for the transition into this scene that unfortunately I couldn’t find anywhere so I’ll have to describe: Victoria steps onto the dance floor, in a medium shot, with the camera placed in what feels like the middle of the floor and Victoria seems to magically float to meet Albert there. We can tell that she isn’t walking, and based on the reading I’m guessing that ratchet might be the best way to describe the focus since Victoria stays in focus as she pulls forward and the audience is blurred in the background. Up until this moment the film is shot in a way that seems realistic, and while this article gave me a deeper level of appreciation for how any minute decision impacts the viewer’s perception, this moment stood out as a moment when I “saw” the camera, but in a way that I thought beautifully reflected how we experience time during adrenaline-filled landmark moments-like like time is suspended but whooshing past you simultaneously.

Another prominent technique is the moving shot that rotates around Victoria and Albert as they themselves rotate, and I felt that this successfully engaged me in the feeling of the waltz. At the very end of this clip it seems like the director plays with time by showing one moment (when Victoria drops her arm to Albert’s shoulder) multiple times from different angles around them. From Victoria’s perspective, this could be another sign of time seeming to stretch, or it could also be a commentary on how the audience viewing her all take different active stances on criticizing her?  In any event, I feel like the risks paid off in this scene and stood out as special, and the content and placement in the storyline allowed it to work well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiuloBasqf4