Celine C.

YES, and finally the BIG BAD K-Film is completed! We worked very hard on this project, so I hope our audience like it too!

In addition to that, this is the Julius, Celine & Loan’s K-Film Essay

I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo today as part of my Histories of Film Theory course. And I must say, this is the first time I find myself so engaged in a film screened in this course. I walked out of the theatre shocked, speechless and just left in awe. Every aspect about this film is just so fascinating; the storyline and the camera work.

The storyline may be a little complicated but Hitchcock puts it into film and made it looks so effortless, as I could follow every step of the way.

Here’s one camera work example in a scene which intrigued me at 0.53 sec during the opening scene of Vertigo

Source: YouTube

James Stewart’s character fear of heights is illustrated the pulsating image of the view below, which I felt gave audience a strong sense of what he is experiencing. The strong sense of the pulsating image is intensified further with the sound effect, a sound effect that gave the feeling of terror and fear. Such a sound effect is considered very much cliche in modern movies.

Another aspect I found interesting and has worked very well in this film is the discolouration/tinting of the footage.

Source: YouTube

The tinted effect that lasted throughout his entire dream, accompanied with the high-pitched music is just nerve-wracking. The purpose of the tinting worked very well to suggest to audience that James’ character is somewhat psychologically disturbed as he cannot let go that his lover has committed suicide. Furthermore, this tinted dream footage is actually a clue that is related to later scene, an aspect of the film that Hitchcock has so cleverly done. The prolonged tinting effect gave me an eerie feeling even I feel like I’m being hypnotized or going insane. This is because I associated the seeing colours to the likes of seeing stars in cartoon when one is being knocked unconscious – not being in the right state of mind.

This is another example of a camera work that I adore so much in this film:

Source: YouTube

Hitchcock shows an extreme close up of the bouquet of flowers and then moves the camera (instead of a cut) to the very-similar-looking flowers on the portrait and does a zoom-in on it; and the same follows for the similar hair style. In my opinion, the camera movement and zooming from the item to the zooming of the item on the painting was SO beautifully done. It just worked perfectly well. Notice also, Hitchcock uses a mixture of soft and hard lighting, but more so of the soft one in this scene, which in my opinion only intensifies the mysteriousness. Hard lighting can be identified as there are shadows cast against the wall when James’ character walks in the museum and there is shadow cast on the bench where the flowers are laid.

I have much more to talk about this film but it may seem that it will be never ending.
This film was so good that I refused to leave my seat for the toilets. And I walked out of the theatre dreaded because Kim’s character Madeleine/Judy dies (for the second time) at the end of the film and it just rolled the credits there, leaving me with such disappointment because I wanted so much for Scottie and Madeleine to be together after being so convinced that they were made for each other having gone through so much.

Vertigo is definitely one of the old films that I’d recommend friends to watch. It is not only a great example to look at for inspirational camera movements and angles, but also for interesting plot line.

My Sketch Film

My Sketch Film Reflection

Robin gave a really good lecture this week about the importance of lighting in film. He said that anyone can operate the camera, but no everyone have the skills in operating it well. At the end of the day, the quality of the film goes down to the basic control of the F-stops. (Reminder to self: Bigger F-stop (smaller aperture) = Greater D.O.F)

F-stops determines the depth of field in the shot, the continuity of a film. Continuity is needed such when a part of scene had to be recorded at a different time or location and that the exposure has to match the already-recorded footage.

Following this week’s lecture, Robin encourages us to deconstruct films when we watch them, and using the film language i.e, terms like hard light, back light, etc. Thus, I will be deconstructing a scene from Bridewars (Gary Winick, 2009).

Source: YouTube

As Kate Hudson’s character is seated at the hair salon, there is a mixture of hard and soft light, but more on the soft light’s side. I am saying that because there are no harsh shadows, but there is more key light on the right hand side of her face.

As the scene moves to the hair stylist in the back of the room preparing the hair dye, the lighting is pretty hard from above. This is so because I could see the shadow of his hair resting on his shoulder and the shadows of his hands on the table top.

But when Anne Hathaway enter the scenes, I could immediately tell it has a soft light as the lighting is overcast.

Coming back to Kate at 0.23, it is again a mixture of hard and soft lighting, this time with the key light on the upper left of her face. It looks like it is natural lighting from a window, but I can’t be too sure. Either way, it proves that the filmmaker has done a good job with the lighting.

Later, the hair stylist is seen with a very soft lighting as I could not tell where the light source is coming from.

In my opinion, Kate’s character and the hair dye is given a harder lighting to illustrate their importance in this scene. It is logical, the hair dye is switched with another colour, which eventually ruins Kate’s hair.

Robin did mention in the lecture that it is very difficult to get the lighting perfect, even professionals struggle. One example that he showed us in lecture was a Hollywood film where they had a scene on a boat at sea and the effort in creating continuity was awful.

It is only today that I finally understood the function of IN and OUT keywords in the SNUfying process of Korsakow. What Seth has been explaining to me all this while has finally start making sense in my brain. It is the IN keywords that are like central nodes that branch out to other nodes, which are the OUT keywords.

Before today, I had more than 5 IN keywords thinking that more is better. But I’ve not understood is the IN keyword of a video is actually an OUT of another video; and the cycle continues, and thus creating a network of interlinked videos. The aim of the Korsakow project is to make audience think of the linkage the author has made between the videos, and what is it that links them.

The SNUfying process actually makes me think of YouTube as a comparable example. When you type to search for a video, eg. Justin Bieber (good example indeed) in the search column, YouTube automatically provides you a list of suggestions of searches before you even hit the search button. Let’s say you choose to just search for ‘Justin Bieber’, then a whole list of videos appear, which includes his official music video, as well as as fan-made (not to mention haters) videos. And when you choose to watch a video, YouTube provides you another list of related videos; whether related to the video uploader or to Justin Bieber (again!). Also, when you have finished watching a video, YouTube once again, gives you a suggestion to watch other related videos.

Source: YouTube
URL: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=justin+bieber&aq=f

So as you can see, the effort made to link videos in YouTube is just never ending. which is just like clicking the ‘infinity’ life option for each video (we have no choice considering that our video database is very small) to ensure that the linkage is continuous.

The footage in this video was gathered and recorded over 3 days using webcams, camera phones, compact cameras and a Skype video recorder. The music was obtained from Garageband and the footage was put together in iMovie.

This is brief video of myself getting up in the morning in preparation to travel out to uni.
The footage in this video was captured using a Sony TX-9 and edited using iMovie. The soundtrack was created in GarageBand.

This time round, I used my Sony TX-9′s video recording function to film footage in the clip above. Music are obtained from GarageBand and I did video editing using iMovie.

I’ve also finally managed to export it according to the specified specs by tweaking the ‘settings’ options after clicking ‘export via quicktime’ in iMovie.

The footages in this video was captured using an iPhone’s video camera function. I then edited the footage using iMovie and added music from GarageBand.

I tried embedding the video using <video src=” “> but it didn’t work, so I had to upload it directly via the WordPress media gallery.

Christine talked about scriptwriting and the importance of creating believable characters that audience would like to watch. One interesting thing that she said during the lecture was that never use “It’s all a dream” as that would just be as if you’ve been playing with your audience’s feelings as most people who go to the movies want to feel like they are in the movies, and thus being real.

So, I roamed through YouTube, browsing at videos. One video that caught my attention was the trailer to “Eat Pray Love”. People watch this film not only because it is made based on a true story but also Julia Roberts portrayed her character in a believable way.

Christine also talked about how the film should revolve around the central character as that is what makes the drama, which is vital, because that’s what makes the film interesting to audience. A film usually either have an extraordinary situation or an extraordinary character. From the trailer mentioned above, Julia Robert’s character is an ordinary woman but deep down inside, she has an extraordinary dream of being free from her usual life, wanting to travel the world. More drama unfolds as she pursues her dream.

I have yet to watch this movie but from watching the trailer itself, I could sense a good grasp of its storyline and genre.