Production Journal 2 - The Chase Project

Today we had the formal interview. We presented our project and storyboard with all the camera angles, different rolls, and equipment to Mr Dunn, Mr Keller, and Sr Sandro Calderon. We still have to present them the schedule of our time plan of when and where are we going to film.


I think they liked our project as we had the storyboard done correctly showing everything we were required, although we still have to make the portals more marked and recognizable. But apart from that our project is OK.


After we were done with the interview we start to make the time schedule of when and where we were going to do each scene, this is very important because we need to be really organized in order to have the whole project done for the exact due date, already edited.


Next session we are planning to start, so we need all our costumes and equipment ready for next week.

Production Journal 1 - The Chase Project

In the first session of this project we had an introduction of what we were supposed to do, we saw different chases from other IB students to see the different portals they had and what is the idea of using this technique. After watching the different projects we had time to decide our groups and start planning our ideas, portals, and to start creating the storyboard as next session we have to present the storyboard as formal movie planners in a real case interview to Mr Dunn, Mr Keller and Sr. Sandro Calderon.

For the interview we need to have our storyboard planned including all the different camera angles, settings, number of scenes, and the list of what member of the group is doing what. We should also start to get our schedule done of what days we are going to film, where and what will we use.

We have decided that our director is going to be Oscar, I am going to be the actress being chased (victim), Deborah is going to be the actress chasing the victim, Cristina is going to be the blamed one of all the chase/problem, and finally Yoko is going to be the camera director with Cristina as an assistant as well.

Analysing the Hitchcock's Documentary.

Scene 1:

· First a woman turning around and screaming because she sees a dead body.

· Train in a railway coming out of a tunel. (footage of film of Hitchcock))

Scene 2:

· 2 women running in a beach watching something we don’t know and putting a frightening face. (footage of another film of Hitchcock)

o     He make the audience feel what he wanted them to feel.

Scene 3:

· A scared woman in a train (footage in the train)

Scene 4:

· Still photo of Hitchcock

Scene 5:

· Archive footage of a particular area in London and in the time they are talking about to explain the historical footage.

Scene 6:

· Still photo

Scene 7:

· Still photo of somewhere in London where Hitchcock is from

Scene 8:

· still photo of his father

Scene 9:

· Another still photo of his father as well

Scene 10:

· Still photo of some children probably at the same time he was a child.

Scene 11:

· Archive footage showing how his work was

Scene 12:

· Sill photo of Hitchcock and the man is talking and then it changes to the man talking, they have blurred the photo.

Scene 13:

· Archive footage of a building, park and important places of London for Hitchock

Scene 14:

· Date and name shown in one of the footage of his first film (subtitles)

· As long as someone is talking you can have a long footage playing.

Scene 15: 

· The cover of a film (3rd film maybe) blue tone.

· Always had crime and sex as a theme (subtitles).

· Then it goes sepia.

· When they talk about someone the photo of that person is shown.

· He always has the man in a run and a mistaken killer.

· Un-naturalistic makeup.

· Lots of shadows.

· Imaginative and inventive his techniques are.

· He appears in the first 10 minutes so the audience don’t spend the rest of the movie looking for him, and he appears in the background (signature)

Scene 16:

· Footage of one of his movie, many movies

Scene 17:

· Still photo with his wife, and then it shows another one of a similar flat where he lived the photo starts moving up.

Scene 18:

· Showing a film projector with a blue background (color established for the documentary)

Scene19:

· Lots of still photos

Scene 20:

· Blue background again

Scene 21:

· Locations stillphotosand then the credits of a movie which shoes us how they where in those days.

Scene 22:

· Footage of one of his films with sound included

Scene 23:

· Another introduction to one of the themes he had with a footage of his movies... the idea of strangers, people with different accents

· When you introduce a new reporter you have to put the names above.

· Another stylistic technique: we have points of views of characters

· Recreation show a cup of tea and then a wall with a cup falling and breaking

· Innocent people, a child and a dog killed.

· Always had typical Hitchcock hero, the innocent man

· Mystery and Sense of justice

· CONTROL

Film Authorship : the director as auteur

1. Watch this clip of a typical Hollywood director in action

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxA47OuE7i4

2. What does a film director do?

– what’s his or her role?

• He is the decider of everything
• Tells the actors what to do
• He gives the shape to the film
• Creates the sujet
• He works directly with the cast.
• He decides the genre

What does he NOT do?

• He doesn’t writes doesn’t film or does the sound
• He doesn’t makes the makeup

3. From what you’ve learned about the film-making process so far from class work and the practical activity -- What’s your view of the film-making process and the role of the director?

He is the most modern (up to date) worker in the process of the film maker but at the same time he is the more lazy of them all. He is the most sublime person as well. At the end the audience will identify and put all down to the intelligence and creativity of the director.

4. Read the quote by renowned American film critic Andrew Sarris on the screen:

5. What does this quote say about the role of the director? And what does it say about the industry in which he works?

6. So how important is the director and why?  Let’s look at some examples:

(20-minute task) Split into groups of three to look at three of the directors we have looked at so far: Alfred Hitchcock (North by NorthWest, Psycho), Quentin Tarrantino (Pulp Fiction), Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Jurassic Park, ET)

Answer the following questions in your group:

Spingbelrg

What is distinctive about this director? – What raises him or her above the crowd?

Discuss in relation to:

Mise en scene and Mise-en-shot

Key structures of narrative (cause/effect logic, key narrative devices, ordering of events)

Narration (omniscient/restricted, voice-overs)

Themes (subject matter)

Dialogue

Sound (diagetic and non-diagetic)

Any other distinctive qualities in their films

What are your conclusions?

What makes this director special?  

- He is known as the master of the sounds and effects. He is really interested in the unknown and his films are really uses emotions to get the audience really emotional usually sad emotions through the relationship connections he introduces in his movies.

How would you relate the role of the director to people working in other areas of the visual arts, literature or music?

He has to have the final decision and the final check of all of the areas. He has to decide and criticize his own decisions and has to make sure everything fixes and have different meanings to play with the audience minds. He also changes something of the script so that they fix in with the actors he has so that the audience can relate the different personalities, also he might change the language depending on the historical context he is doing the movie on. And in general all of the areas need to change depending on the genre the director decides to do. He main audience group is really big, he is very popular with the people

7. In Europe in the 1950s– some film critics came up with a word to describe this ‘special’-type of director:

They called him or her an (fill in the word here)

This is the title that some FRENCH film critics led by Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in the 1950s started to use to label certain film directors including Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles (Citizen Kane).

It became known as “(fill in 2 words here)”.

Definition: (Auteur policy) assigns a director the title of artist rather than technician. Auteur critics study the (style) and (themes) of a director’s films and assign them status of artist or auteur – if they show (consistency) of style and theme.

Those who don’t show these qualities are called (metteurs-on-scenes) and are seen as technicians not artists.

8. What are auteur critics saying is the role of the auteur/director in a film?

What areas of the film-making process is he responsible for according to the auteur policy?

It is a very important person which is above of all the others. He is the final decision maker. They make the key choices they decide how everything (all the areas) are visualized in the film.

KEY QUOTE: “The auteur policy values the personality of a director precisely because of the barriers to its expression. It is as if a few brave spirits had managed to overcome the gravitational pull of the mass of movies.” (American Cinema)

Example of an auteur?

Andrew Sarris – American film critic. Responsible of bringing the idea of the auteur from france to EEUU

Genre Study

What is it?

• Category
• To study a film as a genre involves grouping together a large body of films according to characteristics that they all share
• There are two different approaches to identify these characteristics, de descriptive approach (describing the attributes of the film, mood, setting, and theme and then you put all together into a genre), and the functional approach (what a film is design to do: define the function and purpose of the film).

Genre study vs. Auteursim:

• Contrast between two approaches
• Genre study is all about thinking the characteristics which make a particular film fit into a group as many other.
• Auteursim is all about thinking what makes a particular film different from any other according to who directed it.

Why study films according to genre

• Makes sense to films (breaks down different types of movies)
• Compare particular characteristics of films
• Helps us to trace and understand social development and how it has changed over years
• Satisfaction of expectations as you already know what the theme of the movie will be depending on the particular genre it has.

Problems with the descriptive approach to genre study

• Boundaries between film genres are fuzzy – some films are hard to categorize.
• Overtime genres develop(change)
• The function of the same film can often be read in different ways
• Different interpretations
• Who define the genres? Film critics, the film industry, or movie goers.

Criticism of genre study

• Artificial and contrived

Examples of main genres:

• Action
• Adventure
• Comedy
• Crime and gangster
• Drama
• Epical
• Fantasy
• Horror
• Musicals
• Science fiction
• Thrillers
• War
• Westerns

*There are also sub-genres which are inside a genre itself.