Dystopian Trailer Progress Assignment

For the dystopian trailer project I am the scriptwriter. I have just finished the script and all we need to do is figure out when to go and film. There are 10 scenes in our trailer and each scene has multiple shots. The trailer will start out with a news report that we will film talking about artificial intelligence. We show that report one more time later in the trailer. We have a variety of shots from the front and back, establishing shots, medium shots, and close-ups and we also use both dialogue from the scene and several voice-overs. We are using the dance edit of the song Like a Criminal by District 78 to undertone almost the entire trailer. It's a techno song that represents the cold life that the people live being controlled by cell phones. When we have shots of the buildings we are likely going to put our propaganda poster on a few to demonstrate the propaganda aspect of life.

The story that is to be told through our trailer is that in a world where the iPhone 27 has gotten so advanced people don't think for themselves, they are practically zombies. The main character has a best friend which is uncommon in this society and one day the best friend suddenly vanishes. When the main character asks her phone where her friend is, the phone shows no recognition of the friend ever existing. That part is similar to people being "vaporized" in 1984. We then show the main character sneaking into a guarded library and finding a book that tells her who invented these cell phones. While we never show her actually obtaining a police uniform and traveling back in time, we show her in a police uniform running through crowds of people nothing like the ones previously shown in the trailer with a voice-over briefly explaining it. Through a few different shots the audience sees her go up to the person who invented the robots.

Our five dystopian characteristics are restricted thought (machines trying to get the main character to stop thinking about her best friend), figurehead or concept is worshipped (people think cell phones are making their life perfect), constant surveillance (a cell phone tells one of the police about a specific citizen and has the police go back in time and destroy them), dehumanized state (people walking around zombie-like), and the illusion of a perfect utopia (people think the phones are helping them).

5x5 Video Project

1. Driving to the golf course
2. Video of a green
3. My golf bag
4. Geese on the course
5. Someone's put

For this project I just used my iPhone and edited it with iMovie and it ran very smoothly. I didn't run into any problems while editing this project and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

I think that for our next independent video project we could get into groups and maybe make a short documentary about something that we're interested in. It would only have to be about 10 minutes long and wouldn't have to be very complicated.

Dystopian Trailer Assignment

Equilibrium. Kurt Wimmer. R. 2002
In the near future everyone's actions and emotions are rigidly controlled by the Cleric, and the highest ranking Cleric (Christian Bale) soon discovers that the government he's working for is not so great when they arrest his wife. He joins the resistance and plots to overthrow the government, while still being employed as a Cleric.

This trailer does an excellent job showing the different aspects of a dystopian society using a combination of words and clips from the movie. There is a good ratio of words to film and enhances the audience's understanding of the plot. There are voice-overs in the beginning explaining who the main character is as he bursts through a door surrounded by gunshots. This is a better way to effectively show who the main character is instead of just having text or just having film. The editing creates a basic plot of the movie but doesn't give the resolution, making the audience want to know how it ends. I would like to implement the editing techniques of voice-overs and text throughout my trailer to convey the characters and plot. I also want to have a few establishing shots mixed in to show the lack of freedom in the society.

Personalized Learning Article Reflection

For this assignment I read the article "Preparing Students to Learn Without Us" by Will Richardson. It wa about the new concept of personalized learning for students. Personalized learning/personal learning is basically where a student creates their own ways of finding out information while still meeting state standards. Students in a few high schools with this program create their own lessons and how they are going to learn and present the information. This allows the student to learn about something that really speaks to them and so they're more interested in it. "Through these activities, the student aligned her work to the standards she chose." is an important quote from this article because it summarizes the whoe idea of personalized learning.

I was surprised that this concept has been introduced to several schools around the country so quickly. I think that personalized learning is a great idea and that it could be an easy thing to do in this class. We could all choose something about filmmaking that we find interesting and then go off on our own to find ways to learn and reflect what we've discovered. It would give us all an opportunity to learn what we wanted which would definitely make at least me more interested in school. I would definitely like to learn more about both the editing and the actual filming aspects of making a film. Instead of spending a few classes each on scriptwriting, filming, directing, and editing, this would give me a chance to have more time to learn about the things that I really care about.

Here's a link to my annotated article

Movie Review Assignment

I read a review of The Dark Knight Rises by Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. He starts out talking about the previous Batman movies and then gives a basic summary of what's going on at the beginning of the movie. He provides the background for this movie by referencing the previous ones. He then starts to get into more specifics of the acting and talks about Christian Bale and how Anne Hathaway's character got Batman "out of his shell and back into his batsuit." Next he talks about the villain, Bane, and how even though the character wears a mask throughout the film, the actor does an excellent job with his voice. Following that there's a short paragraph about the "visual pow" of the film where he mentions that IMAX cameras were used for a majority of the shots. Then he mentions the characters that have a bit less focus and their part in the movie. He sums up the review with a few sentences expressing how good he thought the movie was.

I think for our quarterly movie review we should be given a good amount of freedom. There should be basic guidelines, but for the most part I think we should be able to structure it the way we want to. A list of what we need to put into our reviews (key points and such) would be helpful and then we could show those key points in several different forms. Another idea would be to not always have a written review. One quarter we could get into groups and create a type of news report that would review the movie, that way it would continue to be interesting.

Here's the movie review I annotated.

First Blog Post Assignment

My name is Cherie and this is my first blog. I am in CAP 10 at Blair and we are creating blogs for film class. I would like to go to South Africa and watch great white sharks leap out of the water when they eat. I'm interested in the editing part of filmmaking where you put everything together on the computer. Last year I really liked the infoflow opens and the news shows. For the infoflow show open my group filmed several shots of people dancing and making the letters that spell "infoflow" with their bodies and put it to music. For the news show another person and I filmed the interviews and edited it all together. Then I was the switcher when we recorded the show. We could use our blogs to talk about our change projects across the different groups and to discuss ideas and opinions for different assignments.

Image Source: Great White