Gere Research Heist

My group decided to research heist here's what we found
Common Camera angles, movement, and shots:
-Establishing shot, crane shot that tilts down and out
-A lot of track shots and pans that follow the main charter in the scene
-Heavy use of close ups, especially in intense or emotional scenes


Mis En Scene:
-Very dark lighting
-realistic looking costumes and make up
-City. casino, warehouse, bus, hospital, etc settings, very realistic
-A lot of cars, guns and other realistic props
-Not very colorful, very dark as well, very little natural light, until action slow down.


Editing:
-A lot of jump cuts
-Eye-line matches for the main charter are common
-Slow motion during flashbacks
-occasionally uses fades
-Some graphic matches

Sound:
-Heavy use of background music to build the mood
-Good use of ambient sound (sirens, gun shots, screams)


Elements of the movie:
-The movie follows a desperate father whose daughter has cancer, and cannot afford for her surgery. He is brought an opportunity to rob the casino he works for. The heist eventually goes bad and they are forced onto a bus to make an escape. This causes a massive police chase as they try to solve their predicament.
-The main conflict is between the man protagonist and his morals, as he tries to trick those who want to ruin his journey to save his child.
-The movie tries and succeeds in making everything very action packed and suspenseful.


Elements I liked:
-A lot of very intense and engaging conflicts
-Good at building emotional relationships with some characters
-Unexpected ending


Elements I disliked:
-Some of the turns are a a bit ridiculous
- Some of the scenes were over the top
-Lighting too was dark at times

Finalizing our Gnere

My group and I researched Dramas,Thrillers, and epics. We decided to pick a thriller since it correlates with our movie idea more. Since were making a movie about someones life changing I figured it would either be a thriller or a drama. We decided on thriller since our movie will follow a boy whose life changes for the worse their won't be much fighting or arguing but more or so personal problems. Since it only involves our own character theirs not much drama to be had instead it keeps the viewers un easy about what could possibly happen to him. This is why we decided that our Final Exam would be a thriller.

Genre Research Two More Genres

My group researched two genres Epic and Thriller
Drama Research

Common Lighting: One common progression of light in epics is from dark and brooding at the beginning to happy and bright near the end. Another being the dimming of lights as the movie progresses

Common Camera Angles: Wide shots, Establishing shots ,and Bird eye views.

Common Movement: Zooms into wide shots are commonly used, and lots of tracking shots during fights.

Mis en Scene: Location: Somewhere historic or far in the past. Costume: lavish and elaborate costumes. Set Design: Usually high budget and quality.

Color Design: Tends to have a tinted or sunkissed look

Elements of Genre: Large Scale historical movies that use a lot costumes and mix in drama.

Common Sound: Tend to be extremely dramatic in order to emphasize intense scenes using loud booming sounds or fast paced music. When there is a scene where its suppose to be happy the music lightens up. And in scenes showing villains they use low pitch sounds.

Examples of Epics: Gladiator, Star Wars,  Lord of the Rings, Spartacus.

Now here is our research that we collected on Thrillers.

Common Lighting: Usually have darkness in scenes that are emotional and near the end show the sun shining bright or have some form of bright light to show how everything is good now. Most scenes don't have a lot of brightness.

Common Camera Angles: They use wide shots to show the area, if there are fight scenes they use a multitude of shots like birds eye view,medium shots, and two person shots depending on whats happening.

Common Movements: They use track shots during fights and zoom ins to show the importance of certain objects.

Mis En Scene: Costumes: tattered clothing, or dull looking clothes they don't usually use anything to special. Actors: they use people who can really create emotion in people. Makeup: they use fake tears or blood to show physical pain or emotion. Props: They use breakable props in order to not hurt anyone. Setting: Usually dark and changes ending up being light near the end.

Elements of Genre: Tend to have a lot of emotional plot points and try their hardest to evoke emotion by using things like children or characters you can relate to.

Common Sounds: Use songs that create emotion in people with things like violins or pianos. In fight scenes use up beat fight music. And they sometimes use eerie sounds to create a sense of uneasiness.

Examples of Thrillers: Glass, Crawl, The Silence of The Lambs, US

One common progression of light in epics is from dark at the start of the movie, to bright at the end. (Ex. the Hobbit )
One common progression of light in epics is from dark at the start of the movie, to bright at the end. (Ex. the Hobbit )

Genre Research PowerPoint

These are the slides from a PowerPoint my team and I did early in the year. We had to do research on the genre, Drama.We looked at many elements of the genre. We also looked into a lot of different movies in the genre. Finally we looked at common camera angles, movement, and editing. Drama is a very interesting genre that includes a lot of realistic traits. They usually involve a story line pertaining to love and romance. However, I don't know if the classification of genre would be good for our film. We want more action than is usually included in a drama.

Final Pitch

We narrowed the three pitches to two, as requested. We decided to stick with the first and the second idea from the previous blog. I am of course referencing my comic hero obsessed kid, my personal creation, and the bank robbery gone wrong. We picked these two because these were the only ones that we could agree upon. Additionally, the third idea of having only one person in the world or town would be unobtainable. That and uninteresting. I mean really, who wants to watch a movie about nothing. Someone who slowly dies of starvation is not entertaining. Also trying to get the silence that would be associated with trying to shoot two minutes' worth of film without any human "movie bombing". Overall, that was just not an option.

However, the idea about the kid who is obsessed with a comic book hero is an idea that would be easy to accomplish. All you would have to do is simply get a set of comic books, an action figure, and maybe a mask. Overall the kind of thing that someone, four kids, could easily get their hands on. And for cheap. This is probably our best idea for our project, but just my opinion. Alternatively, the other option would be to try to stage a personal home robbery. That and fake shooting someone, hard to do with practical effects and not CGI. But we probably could accomplish something and fake money could be used as bait fo the robbers. In addition, we could also make a short montage of them getting ready.

Overall, we decided to go with the superhero superfan idea. Just to recap this story will be about a kid who is obsessed with a real-life superhero to the point where after his parents die in a similar fashion he starts to go insane. I am hoping that for this story one cool twist would be for the kid to have a split personality that planned the death of the parents. It would kind of be like in fight club but in a much cooler way. We could start out with a wake-up montage but with tons of hidden relics. This would end in a mirror shot with the kid walking by happy [innosent], but a replica smiling maniacally. from here things slowly start to go wrong until the assassination attempt. this should be both a fun project and a fin idea. I am looking forward to all of the excitement that we will go through. Now to just come up with a name...

Start of Final Exam

    With School coming to end I think this would be a great time to talk about myself and other teammates. My name is Timothy and I love this class its so much fun getting to work with such wonderful people with the assistance of two great teachers. I loved to play games and always enjoyed a good time which became a problem in the long run but I still resisted my urges in order to complete my work. My teammates on the other hand were a bit stricter they tried their hardest to get all the work done but they to enjoyed a bit of rest and relaxation. Kyle was a great editor and director. Jake was an incredible actor and was a jack of all trades helping with editing, story boarding, and filming. Carter was always there to give support and ideas. And I was the main planner I planned dates, places, and did the storyboard for our videos. I am truly sad that this class has to come to an end I had fun hanging out with all of them.
    But not only did this class help me come together with some great people its taught me many things. I've learned a variety of definitions and terms to use in the long run while also learning how to use a great amount of technology. This class made me a better editor teaching all the camera angles and types of edits I make. I normally stay behind the camera but this class has showed me that I much more enjoyed planning. Overall this class has turned me into an amazing planner I now properly make backup plans for everything we do while also thinking of the possible downfalls that ideas have. I also learned how to properly work a camera though I usually plan this information was great to know. Tri pods, Cameras, Editing software's I've learned how to use them all even though I'm a simple planner. Without this class I wouldn't have improved so much as a student and as a person.
     Now the first thing we had to do was decide on a pitch. A pitch describes an idea where a film is summarized in 25 words or less. Our group thought about it and we decided on three of them. Our first a Bank Heist a man named Chase McBride who was a former con artist who has now changed his ways has been tasked with robbing a bank but is conflicted whether or not its the right choice he gets his crew together and they target a bank. Next a reverse kidnapping it follows a guy who was an infamous kidnapper but also was mentally deranged it shows how he is slowly pulled back to reality becoming a better person due to the people that he meets. Our last idea is about a child who idolizes a famous comic hero he strives so hard to become him that he goes to the extreme to make these things happen.

Music Video Editing Blog

   With filming done our last plan of action was to edit our videos. The first thing we had to do was download all the files off of Google docs. We use Google Docs so that we can access our files throughout any computer. This makes it so even if our computer doesn’t work we can just use another . The only problem was re downloading everything when ever our computer didn’t work which happened three times during editing. Downloading took long and for each computer that didn’t work we’d have to do it again. But after we downloaded everything we still couldn’t start we’d then have to upload it to pinnacle studios. This was the worst part and took the most time to finish each computer we had to swap to had to go through the same process.
   After finishing all that we were finally able to start the editing process. Our first plan of action was to let everything render first. This was so when we finished our project everything could look as high quality as it could be. After waiting a bit we started editing. Firstly we had to start cutting our clips and putting in order with the storyboard we made. This made it so our video was in line with what the storyboard said following it in order. We then went ahead and put a grey filter on some of the scenes. This was so we could portray a flashback and make it so seeing the past and the present in the video was easy. Lastly we had to add the music which was Gary Come Home by Spongebob. We didn’t need to do much editing so our editing process was pretty easy.
    We still wanted to add more but couldn’t with how slow the computers ran these task were the only ones we were able to do. We had to think of a way to edit outside of class. We ended up deciding our best plan of action was to send our best editor our footage that we edited and the clips that came with it. I also have him my storyboard with notes on what we needed to edit and when. With our teammate editing at home he’ll be using a much smoother editing software of his choice. This will make editing incredibly easy and smooth. Now all we must do is wait once finished we will submit our video for as high of a score as we can possibly get. All and all though there were twist and turns editing went as planned.