Director Journal Week 9

For this week, Dr Azlan requested us to explain about the slideshow that had been taught by him. Dr wanted to test us whether we understand with the lecture. However, it is quite hard for me to understand some of the concept because I don’t have much experience on film production. I think the best way of learning is we will apply the theory what had been taught by Dr when we face the problem during the process of the production.

Besides that, some of the members in our group had to attend the test which done by the lecturer from UPM. Although I didn’t take part in it but I still try to study some note about film production. Hope I can use these theories someday. 

Lizzie McGuire the Movie movie review

The Lizzie McGuire Movie is a comedy film and the film was released by Walt Disney Pictures.

This movie is the first Disney Channel Original Series to have theatrical film.

The Lizzie McGuire movie had reached number two in United States box office on 2003 because the film serves as a series to the television series.

The film is about Lizzie McGuire has graduated from middle school and takes a trip to Rome, Italy with her class. And what was supposed to be only a normal trip becomes a teenager's dream come true.

From the style of the movie, I think the main audience of the film are teenagers. Therefore, the movie use an interesting starting to attract their eye's ball.

The starting of the movie using the cartoon of Lizzie to create an interesting and funny atmosphere. 

The director using the animation of cartoon Lizzie to introduce the casting and the crew. 

Animated Lizzie represented the inner's thoughts of the Lizzie and addressing the audience directly in the manner of the Greek chorus. The advantages of the animation is to reflect a live-action character's innermost thoughts.The animated Lizzie can show visually illustrate the main character interior monologues.

The animated Lizzie was voiced by the main character, Hillary Duff.

The other interesting part of the opening part of the movie is the main character start with singing and dancing happily.

This scene had showed that Lizzie has a star dream. At last, she finally made it on the stage and shine on the stage. The opening of the movie can be said related to the end of the movie.

Reference

The Disney (2000). Animated Lizzie. Retrieved from http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Lizzie_McGuire.

Super 8 Movie Review

Act structure explains how a plot of a film story is composed. 

The three acts are labeled as act 1 setup, act 2 confrontation and act 3 resolution. 

The first act is usually used for exposition, to establish the main characters, their relationships and the world they live in. The first act usually comprises the first quarter of the screenplay around 30 minutes.

 In the movie Super 8, the first act refer to the start of the film. The mother of the main character Joe Lamb has been killed in an accident. Joe was more attached to his mom than his dad who is Deputy Jackson Lamb who never really been there for his son.

Later at the Lamb's house, Louis Dainard pays a visit. He was blamed for the death of Jackson wife's death and forced him out of his house and puts him in his squad car. As Joe watches his father take Louis away, his gaze shift to a silver locket in his hand.

Four months later, Joe and his friends Charle get summer break and they has been shooting a Super 8 film which is a detective story for a film festival in Cleveland. The crew include Cary, Preston and Martin. Charle had rewritten the story so the detective now has a wife. He invited Alice to play the character. 

The group arrives at the Lilian Train Station, where Charles intends to shoot a scene with Martin as the detective of his story, trying to get his wife Alice to leave a zombie infection. As they film the scene of the train thundering past the station, there is a explosion of the train. The train-wreck site scattered with strange little white cubes. Joe picked up one of the white cubes and the strange events started to happen around in his life.

The second act also referred to as rising action, typically depicts the main character's attempt to resolve the problem initiated by the first turning point, only to find  him or herself in ever worsening situations. The main reason of the main character seem unable to resolve their problems is because they do not yet have the skills to deal with the forces if antagonism that confront them. The second act comprises the next two quarter of the film around 60 minutes.

The town devolves into a state of crisis after the train- crash. There are many report about the missing household items and dogs. Later Jackson grows concerned when the Military begins to roll into Lilian through radio frequency.  

Shortly after hearing the transmission, Jackson encounters Alice's father Louis, who tells Jackson to keep Joe away from Alice. Jackson demands that Joe keep away from Alice, but Joe claims that Alice isnt like her father. They two reach a wordless impassses before Jackson under arrest and locked away by General Nelec.

Joe heads over to the cemetery after this, where he sits at the headstone of his Mother's grave. He hears some loud noises coming from a garage near the tombstones. He is surprised when Alice appears in his rooms. They watched the home movies of his mom and suddenly the strange white cube that Joe picked up at the crash site started to vibrate before shooting through a nearby wall and leaving a hole behind.

After that, Alice heads home and saw his father drunk and smoking. She rushed away from the home with bike because disgusted by his father. Alice was taken by a large creature at that time. Because of this incident, Joe intent to get back into town and rescue Alice. They discovered some secret of the large creature before they under arrest by General Nelec. They managed to escape and they rush off to the cemetery. 

They saw and heard strange things from the garage. Eventually, they found all the missing people at there and the large creature eating the limb of another human.

The third act features the resolution of the story and its subplots. The climax is the scene or sequence in which the main tensions of the story are brought to their most intense point and the dramatic question answered, leaving the main character and other characters with a new sense of who they really are. The third act comprises the final quarter of the film around final 30 minutes.

Joe, Alice and Cary return to the surface safely. As they do,a ll sorts of mechanical objects in the area become magnetized to the water tower's top area. The water tower burst after the locket of Joe flies up to the magnetized watertower, where he metallic objects and the white cubes morph into a spaceship. The creature climbs on top of the water tower and disappears. The watery content raining down on the people below and all of the family reunion again. Alice and his dad and Joe and his dad seem to remend their broken relationship because of this incident.

Reference

Sidney Lumet(2013).Three-act Structure. Retrieved from http://www.cod.edu/people/faculty/pruter/film/threeact.htm.

Stephen J. Cannell (1998). What is the Three Act Structure? Retrieved from http://www.writerswrite.com/screenwriting/lecture4.htm.

IMDb(2001). Super 8. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1650062/synopsis?ref_=ttpl_pl_syn.

Director Journal Week 8

Our group had to finish the real shooting by this week. Therefore, I had got some advice from the senior in order to make sure the shooting go smoothly.

            The thing that he had mentioned was always have a back-up plan. If we ever organized shoot dates, no matter what plans that we had made, we might going to encounter some problem to extend the real shoot. For example, he told me that he planned to split up the shots at different place so there was a mix of difficult and easy sets- up.

            I think his advice is very useful therefore we might follow the advise that he gave to run our real shooting.

Director Journal week 7

The crew member set up for the living room.

Our rehearsal shooting run on last week and we conducted our rehearsal on the studio media faculty.

Before we started the rehearsal shooting, we had to prepare well all the props and camera setting.
We used main studio as living room and the pantry of the media faculty as kitchen.

We used around 3 hours for the rehearsal shooting. In the process, Ariff as the director and giving instruction to the camera man for the shooting angle.

After rehearsal shooting we realized that cooperation within the crew members can make the job finished in shorter time and do better.

Next time I think that we can do the best!

Dark Skies Movie Review

1. A supernatural thriller follow a young family - the Barrett family who living in the suburbs. The Barrett family consist of father Daniel, mother Lacy, eldest son Jesse and the youngest son Sammy. Daniel has been out of work at least three months which become an issue they fight for everyday. Sammy communicate with Jesse from their beds via walkie-talkie and reads scary stories about the Sandman to him in order to distract him from their parent's fighting. The family start to experience an escalating series of disturbing events which involving their family safety and peaceful. From that time, Sammy tells Lacy that the Sandman had came to his room. Daniel and Lacy try to brush it off but the incidents become more intense. When the myth become clearer, Daniel and Lacy realize they targeted by an unimaginably terrifying and deadly force. Daniel and Lacy take action to solve mystery of what is after their family. However, they failed to protect their children from being taken away by the Grey - aliens that have traveled millions of light years to experiment on human. Three months later, Lacy realize that the walkie-talkie begins to crackle and Sammy pick up the walkie-talkie. He hears Jesse call his brother's name.

2. Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginative content such as futuristic settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, parallel universes and extraterrestrial life. 

The Dark Skies different from other movie that marked as genre sci-fi because the film add horror genre into it. The director manage to generate some tense and creepy atmosphere in the film such as the ransacked kitchen, some paranormal furniture rearrangement and a convoluted camera monitoring system. Besides that, the director try to create the feeling of terror in this film by using the sound effect. The director first using the quiet scene and suddenly using increasingly loud tension chord to shock the audience. For example, the way of characters banging their head against glass or staring agape into the camera. Despite all these scenes, the director didn't use the visual effect of  the alien " grey" directly at the front part of the movie but his choose to build up the emotion of the audience to feel the tension of the character. Therefore, the Dark Skies different from other Sci-Fi movie such as ET, Men In Black and more that using a lot of imaginative content and futuristic visual effect.

3. The time background setting of the film is 20th century.  We can know that the idea of the film present is 20th century because the convenience of the internet accessible by the character and there is no futuristic setting gadget for the film.

The place setting for the Dark Skies is suburbs - a usually residential area or community outlying a city.

There are a lot of scenes showing that the resident around the area doing activities around the residential area.

Some of the important props that use in the film are

bicycle

walkie-talkie

food can

the dead bird

gun

wood 

drawing paper

4. Here is the shot types that had been used in Dark Skies.

1) WS (Wide Shot)
The subject takes up the full frame, or at least as much as comfortably possible.
AKA: long shot, full shot.

The starting of the movie show that this is an ordinary family. 

2) MS (Mid Shot)
Shows some part of the subject in more detail while still giving an impression of the whole subject.

After Jesse heard some voice that cannot be hear by other, he become unsound mind.

3) MCU (Medium Close Up)
Half way between a MS and a CU.

Lacy was trying to protect her children so she was looking up and down for Sammy and Jess. However, she didnt not realiaze that Grey is standing behind of her. She end up with locked alone inside the room.

4) CU (Close Up)
A certain feature or part of the subject takes up the whole frame

Lacy realized Daniel wasn't in bed and when he found Daniel, she saw Daniel in this expression and later he was nose bleeding.

5) Cut-In
Shows some (other) part of the subject in detail

Daniel realized that he had some allergic symptoms on his left ear in the morning.

6) (OSS) Over-the-Shoulder Shot
Looking from behind a person at the subject. 

Lacy was talked to her client at that time after that she walk to the glass and started to bang to the glass which shocked client.

7) Two-Shot
A shot of two people, framed similarly to a mid shot.

Lacy asked Sammy whether he know who did about the prank of the ransacked  kitchen and Sammy answered her it was done by Sandman.

5. One of the critic of editing style in the film of Dark Skies is that the film using jump cut.
Jump cut is a cut in film editing in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary slightly. The jump cut usually have to avoid in the film. However, the Dark Skies using the jump cut well and bring a good effect.
 Here is the comment of the audience about the jump cut that use in the film
"One of my favourite moments is a P.O.V. shot that turns expediting jump cuts into otherworldly temporal blips by amplifying the disturbing soundtrack hum at the point of each edit. It's more effective, frankly, than the one or two awkwardly-rendered shots we get of the "Grays," who are at least used sparingly. "

As a conclusion, if the jump cut use well in the film, it will add a sense of speed to the sequence of events.

Reference

Bill Chambers(2013). Dark Skies (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet. Retrieved from http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2013/05/dark skies.html#sthash.ebyhl2Oa.dpuf

Bordwell, David; Thompson, Kristin (2006). Film Art: An Introduction (8th Edition). New York: McGraw Hill. p. 254. ISBN 978-0-07-331027-5.

Shaun Munro(2013). Dark Skies Review: Laughably Derivative Sci-Fi Falls At Every Hurdle
. Retrieved from http://whatculture.com/film/dark-skies-review-laughably-derivative-sci-fi-falls-at-every-hurdle.php.

Kyle Anderson(2013). Interview with “Dark Skies” Writer/Director Scott Stewart. Retrieved from http://www.nerdist.com/2013/02/interview-with-dark-skies-writerdirector-scott-stewart/.

Media college.com. Shot types. Retrieved from http://www.mediacollege.com/video/shots/.

Rotten Tomatoes(2013). Dark Skies Movie Info. Retrieved from http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dark_skies_2013/.

Director Journal Week 6

Tonight there is not presentation on our production meeting.

Dr Azlan gave us time for the production team to discuss about the preparation of the rehearsal shooting and the real shooting.

We will having the rehearsal shooting on tomorrow.

Therefore we discussed mainly about the preparation of the props for tomorrow.

For the rehearsal shooting and real shooting, it is quite important to have a reference for the shooting angle such as close up, high angle shooting, wide shoot and more so we have to prepare a storyboard. A storyboard is a graphic representation of how our video will unfold, shot by shot. Maybe it will take a little time to put storyboard together but in the long run it will save time because it save time to explain the vision to the people that working on the video shooting.

We will having shooting according to the storyboard that we had drew.

Reference

Video Maker Tips（2014). What is a Storyboard and Why Do You Need One? Retrieved from http://goanimate.com/video-maker-tips/what-is-a-storyboard-and-why-do-you-need-one/.