Yesterday evening, I watched the new oscar-nominated movie, Jackie. Natalie Portman was nominated for her leading roll as Jackie Kennedy, in the short period of time before and after her husband John F Kennedy's death. Although it is classified a biographical-drama film, I believe that it is very intense, and a lot of the movie gives one a feel of high anxiety. Therefore, in my opinion this could be classified as a drama-thriller.

Arrival

Today I was finally able to watch 'Arrival' - the new sci-fi thriller. It is set in the present day, when several UFOs land across the planet in specific areas. It follows linguistics professor, Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and her attempts to translate the Alien language in order to discover why they came to earth. Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker star as well in this highly rated Alien movie. Surprisingly though, there is little to no action in the movie, and it rather focuses on the fight to communicate peacefully with the other worldly beings.

WHAT I THINK: I have to say that I did indeed enjoy the movie very much... until the last 20 minutes. It had the potential to be an excellent movie, but, the ending I feel kind of ruined it. Firstly, it all feels to rushed; the build up to the answers in the movie is so slow yet so enticing, but finally when the answers are revealed, its as if the director squashed everything together, lacking the steadiness and patience which made the rest of the movie so good. Secondly the answers we are given in the end, are a bit anti-climax and strange, just not what one would expect from the rest of the movie. Lastly, although it is a good place to work towards, the film highlights the importance world peace and unification, which is of course great, but it overshadows the sci-fi feel of the movie in the end. Maybe the director is just to indulgent in his ideas, that he kind of made a mess of it in the end.

All in all I rate it: 6.5/10

THE DEPARTED

THE DEPARTED released in 2006, and is about Boston state police trying to crack down on an Irish gang, but whilst there are rats on both sides. The gang and the police attempt to figure out who is the rat in each of their groups, as tensions begin to rise. Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Matt Damon star in this dramatic-crime-thriller, directed by Martin Scorsese.

WHAT I THINK: This is personally one of my favourite movies, and I have seen it quite a few times. You are always on the edge of your seat when watching this masterpiece of the crime-thriller genre - the stakes are always high, and the atmosphere is very tense. Surprisingly, there is a hint of dark comedy to this movie (particularly in Jack Nicholson), which make it just that little bit better. All the actors do exceedingly well with their roles, leaving the movie in my eyes as one of the best.

I rate it 9.5/10

WORK TODAY

I think we had a very important lesson today in class about thrillers. Now we have not started writing treatments yet for our thriller ideas, but todays lesson provided great insight on what thrillers are really about; the structure of a thriller, the tropes, the key elements and ideas etc. I believe this will been influential on my treatment, as now I am more confident to express my ideas.

SHUTTER ISLAND

Seen to many as one of the best recent psychological-thrillers, Shutter Island is about two US Marshals who go to Ashecliffe Hospital, a fortress-like insane asylum located on a remote, windswept island, after the implausible escape of a brilliant murderess. Leonardo DiCaprio stars along side Mark Ruffalo and Ben Kingsley, in this mind bending roller coaster.

WHAT I THINK: This has to be one of my favourite thrillers ever made. Every moment of the film, you are held in this aura of complete tension and suspicion. Martin Scorsese perfectly tailors the exact atmosphere needed to make this movie what it is. Also, the actors, specifically Leonardo DiCaprio, all do so well with their roles, just to make it inch perfect. In my eyes it is pretty much flawless, although I do advise concentrating whilst watching it, as you can get caught up with different ideas and get very confused.

I rate it 9/10

Room Opening

Room Film Opening

Abrahamsen. The opening title sequence - audience is given several conventional thriller techniques

Typical - many conventional techniques, for example, the misen scene creates an obscure gloomy atmosphere, silhouettes out of focus, only fragments of body.

Audio - breathing, low pitched bassy, rumbling sound. Non-digetic sound (voice over with eco - giving non realistic narration, either from future or inside head).

Hybrid Genre - family drama/thriller

Narcos Opening Title Sequence

Art of the title's 'Narcos' opening title sequence is an ideal opening sequence for a show or movie about drug cartels in South America. It involves all the bits an pieces linked to a cartel lifestyle - e.g. cocaine, cash, girls etc - along with the consequences it causes, such as destruction, police investigations and war.. In the opening sequence, there are layers of images that fade from each other, and there is a spanish guitar song, to suite the mood of the show.

THRILLER

Today as a class we began to focus on the task of producing a thriller opening, having finished our preliminary tasks. This blog will now involve research to do with this project.

Genesis Cinema - East London

Independent cinemas have an important role in London and the rest of the country in distributing independent films. Any films that are niche, or maybe just low budget, are chosen by independent cinemas across the country in terms of popularity and quality of the film.

Genesis cinema used to be a music hall, but now is an independent film cinema. Its niche not mainstream, for a specialist audience. 

Rogue 1 – Background

Rogue one: A Star Wars Story

Tickets for the film began selling out in the UK on November 21 and in the US and Canada on November 28 at 12:01 am ET/9:01 pm PST, just after the Thanksgiving Day weekend. Similar to what had happened with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, quite a lot of ticket buyers stormed online ticket selling sites leading to popular sites like Fandango and MovieTickets.com to either crash or made patrons "wait in line" for about 20–30 minutes before they can purchase the tickets. This led to many people resorting to other platforms like Atom Tickets, since there was lesser traffic.

Due to the release of the film Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation in July 2015, promotion for Rogue One was originally delayed. Paramount Pictures registered and cleared the title with the Motion Picture Association of America in January 2015, well before Disney announced the title of its forthcoming Star Wars spinoff. Because of similarities between the titles of Rogue One and Rogue Nation, Disney and Lucasfilm had to reach an agreement with Paramount over promotion in order to avoid any confusion in the public mind. Disney agreed to an embargo promotion on Rogue One until after mid-2015, with the exception of a very short teaser which was screened at Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim that year.

Preliminary Task

PRELIMINARY TASK

My first attempt at filming and editing in shot-reverse-shot.

FILMING PRELIMINARY TASK

Today Charlie and I filmed our preliminary task. With setting up the camera and putting the gear away included, we took only 45 minutes to film it - in just a few takes. We were able to produce good shots efficiently, and is a good sign that I can work well with Charlie.

SCRIPT FOR PRELIMINARY TASK

(Charlie enters through the door and sits down opposite Dimitri)

Charlie: Yo D

Dimitri: What you sayin

Charlie: Wag1 this weekend

Dimitri: Umm, dunno, what you doin?

Charlie: Come my yard… man’s gotta free!

Dimitri: My guy, I’ll be there. What’s the mandem saying?

Charlie: Bare people are coming.


Dimitri: Say nottin

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER REMAKE

Hi there! This is Bruno's, Kaya's, Charlie's and my attempt at remaking the opening of

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER

Finishing Saturday Night Fever Remake

Today Charlie, Bruno and I,  were tidying up our Saturday Night Fever remake. All we had left to do was insert the titles in order and after that we were finished. Although not every shot is exactly the same as the original opening, (which caused a little difficulty in putting in the titles - especially in the shot below), we managed to make it work in a professional way that still appears very similar to the original opening title sequence.

Billy's Stanley Kubrick Presentation
(BASIC INFO)

Kubrick's films typically involve expressions of an inner struggle, examined from different perspectives.[204] He was very careful not to present his own views of the meaning of his films and leave them open to interpretation.
Kubrick was notorious for demanding multiple takes during filming to perfect his art, and his relentless approach was often extremely demanding for his actors. Jack Nicholson remarked that Kubrick would often demand up to fifty takes of a scene.

(Additional INFO)

• The Shining: Box office - $44.4 mln. 
• Uses long take shots and reshoots a lot.
• Uses ECU and no dutch angles
• Clockwork orange: Visceral filming 
• Eyes wide shut: Box office - $162.1 mln 

 Josh's Tim Burton Presentation
(BASIC INFO)

•   Actor's used: Winona Ryder, Johnny Depp, Helena Boham-Carter, Cristopher Lee.
• Binary opposition used a lot - A lot of blonde women are used as characters, 
• In movies he can use very saturated or dull colours.
• Uses point of view shot - places yourself in the shoes of the character.
• Aerial shot is used - either with a special helicopter or drone usually.
• Shot-reverse-shot also.

    Charlie's Quentin Tarantino Presentation
(BASIC INFO)

•   Uses actors repeatedly, i.e: Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, The Hateful Eight), Samuel L Jackson (Hateful Eight, Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained), Uma Thurman (Kill Bill 1 & 2, Pulp Fiction), Cristoph Waltz (Inglorious Bastards, Django Unchained).
• Famous shots include; trunk shot, close up on eyes, close up on women's lips. 
• He satirizes action scenes.

LEARNING TO USE CAMCORDERS

In anticipation to filming our Saturday Night Fever opening remake, as a class, we have now finished learning how to use the camera (i.e; what buttons to press for specific actions) and how to mount it to a tripod to steadily film shots. It seems fairly simple to me now after practicing a bit, so we should be good to go for making our opening.

Montages

A montage is a sequence of shots in a movie or video that usually portrays a passing of time in the story within a short period accompanied by music. In most occasions that a montage occurs, it is used to put the development of a character in a movie over a period of time in a nutshell.

Examples of movies that have montages include:

Team America: World Police   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFrMLRQIT_k  

In this movie, a montage is used to show the training and improvement of the main character over a period of time – from an untrained actor turned agent to a highly skilled secret agent. In this example though, the song used actually describes what a montage is and that it is needed for this scene.

Rocky IV   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SUzcDUERLo

The montage in Rocky IV portrays once again the training and improvement of Rocky, in preparation to fight Drago – a super strong boxer that uses performance enhancing drugs. This example uses quite a song that goes well with intense exercise, improvement and excitement in preparation for the big fight.

 The Karate Kid (1984)    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zamE9cvC6u0

The montage in the original The Karate Kid involves Daniel doing a series of chores for his Karate master and eventually having enough, but his master reveals (at the end of the montage) that the manoeuvres he would perform while cleaning and painting, are the same of those needed to fight properly. 

Foley Editing

Foley editing is the reproduction of every day sound effects that are needed and placed in movies, videos, or other media productions. It involves using a range of objects to create sounds very similar to real life sounds (i.e.; the sounds of punches, a horse's hooves, a car drifting etc.). These sounds can be created with almost anything, for example, some movies use the sound of a baseball bat hitting celery or raw meat to recreate the sound of a punch or kick. Below, is a photo of a Foley artist at work.

Filming Remakes:

Today we are going to be learning and getting used to using the camera and all the other equipment necessary to film our movie's opening titles remakes.
We will undergo potentially a few more sessions of getting used to the camera.
My group will not be filming today, so we are going to help the group remaking the opening title sequence for the movie Fahrenheit 451, set up and use all the equipment.

Learning to use ScreenFlow

ScreenFlow is yet another application I will need to master in order to complete this year's coursework. Rather than for putting together my opening sequence, this is to edit my evaluation, and with this I can record my actions on a computer screen and add it to the evaluation video (i.e; youtube video). Today we began to get the basics of it.

Learning to use Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro is an editing program, in-which we will edit and put together our thriller's opening sequence. There is a lot to get used to, as it is quite complex, but, it is made in a human friendly way, that makes it quite simple to get the hang of. 

Pre-Production for Saturday Night Fever

• So we started off this week by being put into groups, and within those groups we would recreate the opening title sequence of any movie.
• I was put into a group with Charlie, Bruno and Kaya, and we decided on the movie we would recreate - Saturday Night Fever (1977). We all seemed to have a mutual agreement that it was the right movie
• The first part to our remake, involved us deciding which jobs we were in charge of, and I was allocated the job of finding and producing all the props we need, and of course, to play the role of John Travolta when shooting the remake.

• Deciding who was to play John Travolta was a difficult one for the rest of the group and Nouray. The candidates were Bruno and I, and the audition involved Kaya judging whether me or Bruno did the better walk (in other words John Travolta's walk in the opening scene) and after half an hour or so of repeating and trying to perfect the walk over and over again, the judges came to the conclusion that I was the better fit to play the role of John Travolta.
• The rest of the week's work involved me searching around for props, which went rather smoothly. Me, Kaya, Sapyr (a friend from KAS) and the drama department were able to provide us with all we need, apart from two items - red italian suit shoes with an extended heel, and a paint cannister, with a specific orange and white lable.
• I will spend the begining of next week making sure that these props are sorted.

An Introduction to My Blog

Hi there, i'm Dimitri Cassina, and for the next school year I will be updating this blog on my film studies and AS Media Studies course.

I will be focusing mainly on film and television, and will document my progressive understanding and thoughts of the course as it goes on.

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy it!