AICE Media Studies

Mickey and I partnered up for this week's project, co-directing a short film showcasing the various editing techniques put forth by film theorist and director Vsevolod Pudovkin, which can be found at the link below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIYSuFS-TiI Leitmotif: For our leitmotif, Mickey filmed a guest star and I performing a popular dance move today, the "dab," which acted as the recurring theme, or motif, that the leitmotif capitalized upon. Parallelism: For our edit utilizing parallelism, Mickey again acted as the cinematographer, and he filmed the parallels between Josh and I as we each wrote in two separate situations. Our actions are parallel, but the contents and context of our actions are different, demonstrating parallelism. Simultaneity: In our simultaneity edit, I finally got behind the camera and filmed a suspenseful shot, cutting between Josh and Mickey walking towards each other at the same time until they finally crash into each other in the...

Camera Angles The Giver (2014, dir. Phillip Noyce) For this week's assignment, I decided to watch and analyze the use of various camera angles in the 2014 movie "The Giver," based off of the novel by Lois Lowry. Since I'm a huge fan of the book, I thought that it would be interesting to see how the director would adapt certain scenes from the book into visual form, what kind of camera angles and framing he would use, and things like that. One of the first shots in the film is a tightly shot, dynamic REACTION SHOT of the main character, Jonas, as he experiences his first glimpse of color. In the movie and the book, everybody is colorblind, and maybe I should have expected it but for some reason I hadn't really considered that this would translate to the movie being in black-and-white. With the reaction shot, the audience is put in Jonas' shoes as he first sees color, and with some clever editing the audience experiences that too, as some light blue and ...

After looking at both Lily and Kiley's blog posts collecting a dozen different shots each, I analyzed the emotions evoked by some of each of their shots, and my responses to those shots are collected below Lily The tilt shot captured an air of mystery as the camera slowly revealed more and more of the strange figure.  The framing of the follow shot makes the scene rather dramatic, as the camera follows closely behind Erin so it's hard for the viewer to see the what the subject can see, lending to the tension of the scene.  The over-the-shoulder shot puts the observer into the shoes of the character, and it creates a sense of empathy so that we can better relate with her.  The point-of-view shot also put the viewer in place of a character, and the subject matter is slightly humorous and inspires a gut reaction from the viewer.  Kiley The extreme close-up shot makes me feel a little bit uneasy, because of how the girl's eyes move back and forth, evokin...

For this week's assignment, we had to collect a number of different shots. My friend Mickey and I decided to partner up, so most of the shots below are going to feature him in some capacity. We decided to have some fun with it, so we came up with a (very loose) plot and decided to go from there. This is an example of a CHOKER. It was pretty difficult to get close enough to fill the frame without falling out of focus, just due to technology constraints, but it was definitely fun to shoot! Here is a LOW-ANGLE SHOT, which I most definitely had to scuff my jeans to get. Since we didn't have a tripod or a gimbal or anything like that, it was hard to keep the camera steady for long enough to get a good shot. This is an OVER-THE-SHOULDER, because we wanted to show some dialog and we figured this was the best way to do so. We roped in another one of our friends to guest star, but I wasn't sure how to judge how much of the frame should be filled with his shoulder...

I decided to take AICE Media Studies the week before summer started, because I was bored. I felt stifled in many of my classes, like my teachers and my school system couldn't care less about me or my personal expression. There was nothing creative about my classes, just empty work and endless quizzes and tests on subjects that I felt meant little and mattered less. None of them inspired me, and I didn't feel like I had any choice in my studies. My hope is that AICE Media, while educating me on the more technical aspects of visual media, will allow me to pursue creative projects and personal expression and reward, rather than punish these efforts.