Thursday, 11 December 2014

Film Evaluation (Truth): De-constructing My Product

This is the first shot of our film and it takes place at a stonewall. This is done because a stonewall can mean avoiding responsibility for something or being evasive, which is what the main character and her grandmother are doing at the beginning of this film - they are avoiding what has happened to Roseanne's parents. Also, the titles as the beginning go away as the actor walks passed them which is done to look like it is interacting with him. The two capital letter's on the words 'Productions' and 'Presents' are both in red as we were going for the theme of love (Roseanne's love for her family) and death (both her parents' death and the people she is going to kill). It also fits in with the Sin City vibe of having certain things in colour when the rest of it is in black and white. 

Here, we have a shot looking down the steps (a high angle shot) as there is a close up on the feet. The leaves in the background give it an old feel and as the leaves are dead from the trees, it links in with the theme of Roseanne's dead parents and what is in the lett the man is about to post through the door. The shoes an trousers he's wearing are all black which makes it look dark and he looks like he has something to do with death or about to bring bad news to someone. But it can also look scary as well.

Here we have a shot of the main character sitting at her desk. This shot was made to show everything that was on the desk. We wanted to emphasise what kind of person she is. There's a laptop on there which shows she does a lot of work, there's also a picture of her parents on the side which becomes more noticeable as it goes on, we thought it would be a good idea to subtly put it there. We placed an incense candle in the shot as well in order to make her look a bit mysterious and like it's quite dark. The actress' name appears in the corner as she is the main character and she is also on the screen, therefore we decided that would be the appropriate place to put the title. The capital letters are also in red again for the same reason they were last time. 


This shot is an over the shoulder shot put it's also made to look a bit like a point of view shot. We did this to do two things: 1) show what was on the letter 2) to establish what the main character's name is. After this she then walks off and we can see a bit of her face.






Here we have a high angle shot which was done to really show how big the stairs was so we could make it look like the grandparent was wealthy and had a lot of money. The colour of the banister is also very white which makes it look pure and stands out from all the other darker colours around the setting - particularly the floor. When we first made this shot, the camera looked a bit jumpy at the end however we managed to change it by having it swap camera angles a couple of times, this made it look a lot smoother. The shaky camera was actually a big criticism on our first cut that we made. 






This is another over the shoulder shot but this time two people are interacting. We also did the same shot but from Roseanne's shoulder. When we did this, we had to make sure we kept to the 180 degrees ruler so it looked professional and not out of place. The window in the background also looks very white so it looks a bit mysterious as we don't actually know what's outside, it really makes it feel like these two characters are the only people that matter at this moment in time.

This shot is a low angle shot. We made this for two reasons: 1) So the grandparent looks like she's the one who's in charge of the family; she looks dominant. 2) So we were able to catch the emotion that goes on on her face. We also wanted to make it clear that she was looking at the picture on Roseanne's desk and she felt someone sad about it. There is also a voice over that goes on at this point which explain why the photo is making her sad.

As the narration about her dead parents finishes, we have a close up shot of her photo which is now blatantly obvious what is is: her parents. This is done to make the audience feel sad about what happened. We had to take this picture on the day of filming so we had to make the main character look much younger than she actually is. We wanted to put them in front of a painting as stereo typically in films, wealthy family photos are usually taken next to some sort of painting. 
For these two shots, we used extreme close ups both times. For the scene, we wanted it to look like there was nothing but herself and the letter in the room. We did this by having an extreme close up of Roseanne's eyes and her hair blocked out the rest of the room, so it looked like she was in a black room. And when it cut to the letter, there were extreme close ups on each letter that were important to her parents death. We tried to make sure none of the room was shown in the background so it really didn't look like they were in the office room. Also, the writing on the letters were printed with old styled writing, and we thought it would look effective for the old noir style we have.



This is one of the last shots we used in the room. It starts off as a long shot and slowly turns into a medium shot. We did this by moving the tripod on the dolly closer and close to Roseanne as she stood up, however as the tripod moved, the camera moved in a different direction in order for it to look effective and quite a bit more professional or cinematic along with the music.




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