We were given the task to use our knowledge of camera and editing skills to present the school in two different perspectives; positively and negatively. This will help our narrative skills when we come to create our own film noir. To show our school in a positive light we filmed a lot of scenes outside as it was a sunny day. We highlighted the fun students had in extracurricular areas such as sports and music as well as joking around with each other in the study rooms. We also focused on the newer areas of school such as the sixth form block. When it came to editing, I used quicker shots and cuts, upbeat music and bright filters. On the other hand, when we created our negative film, we chose empty corridors in lesson time, the old, more run down buildings and empty classrooms. We asked our friends to act in a more upset manner. When I edited this footage, I put over lots of darker filters so the lighting appeared low key and shadowy as well as a rainy special effect, which made the outdoor scenes appear more gloomy. The cuts and shots are much slower and I added melancholy piano music over the top which changed the mood completely. This is the final film.
We were given the task to recreate any scene from a film of our choice, using the same camera shots, script and editing techniques. We chose the following scene from the film "10 Things I Hate About You".
Our first task was to find the original transcript for the film to give to our actors, which was available on the internet in the public domain.
Michael leads Cameron down a set of concrete steps to a secret gathering
of dating candidates for Kat.
MICHAEL
Now, I have gathered a group of guys. Couldn’t be more
perfect. Padua’s finest.
They enter a dank room, wherein waits a very motly crew of the most
unlikely specimens one would expect. Cameron shoots Michael an
unsatisfied grimace.
CAMERON
Hi. How ya doin’? Would any of you be interested
in dating Katarina Stratford?
What follows is a truncated interview process, where each candidate
in turn sits in the interview chair and gives his response.
CANDIDATE 1
(laughs hysterically)
CANDIDATE 2
(stares blankly)
CANDIDATE 3
No, I’ve never been that ripped.
CANDIDATE 4
Maybe if we were the last 2 people alive, and
there were no sheep... Are there sheep?
We then made a note of which lines were used in which shot, and the order they went in before we were ready to film. We had the original scene on our phones as we filmed so we could try and position them in the same way (or as close to this as we could achieve in a school setting). Below are the side-by-side examples of how we tried to recreate each shot.
Then we copied our film to the computers and used Final Cut Pro X to edit them. The cuts were all straightforward and there were no obvious special effects. After cropping and ordering the clips, we simply had to lay sound over the top. We looked up the film soundtrack to find the song and added that over the top as well as the digetic noises such as the school bell and scream at the end, which the microphone did not pick up. We found both these sounds on copyright free websites.
Overall, the two pieces match fairly well. Some of the dialogue is fairly hard to pick up at the start, because we did not have access to a microphone when we were filming; for our film noir we would obviously have to find a boom mic for better quality audio. There is also a continuity as one of of actors was wearing a hat in the first shot and was not in the second; this was something we only noticed in the editing process and could not work around in order to remain faithful to the scene. When we make our film noir we will have to be stricter with our actors and more specific with our costumes to create a stronger sense of character. As we had to film in lesson time we were obviously restricted with the number of actors, so two of them had to play multiple parts, however this would not be an issue when we make our own film. To conclude I am pleased with the similarities between the two scenes, especially how the soundtrack compliments our scene and makes it much more like the original.
