Use of transitions in "Serenity"

Joss Whedon's "Serenity", the sequel to the series "Firefly" uses four distinct different scenes in the opening. What interested me about this was the transitions between these, which were all done in an incredibly smooth and planned out manner, and is very effective at linking together seemingly irrelevant scenes.

The film starts with an overview of the Serenity galaxy, explaining how humans dominated the skies. the camera zooms out, revealing the entire scene to have been an educational video, where a young River, who becomes one of the crew of Serenity, is being educated. River speaks up against the teacher, who then stabs River in the head with her pen. The mise-en scene all changes besides River, who now has a needle, not a pen in her forehead, and is strapped to a chair in a laboratory. She then escapes with the help of her brother, and before they get away, the film rewinds, zooming out to reveal that someone is viewing their escape through a 3D security camera tape. Although only simple cuts have mainly been used, each one fits together very fluidly. This has the effect of showing that the time, place, and characters have all changed, but link each one together, explaining a complex story.

I am studying this because we are near the end of the editing for our thriller, and transitions are one of the things we need to smooth out, and so learning this new techniques could be beneficial to the thriller. However, all of our shots are in the same place, time and star the same character, so if transitions are treated anything like the average paragraph (which from experience I think they are) then there should only be a fade in/out, fluid transition, etc when the place, time or protagonist change. We are currently looking to cut between shots on the beat of the song we have chosen, (which has been finalized as "The Four Of Us Are Dying") which will have the effect of engaging the audience and combining the non-diegetic sound and video to make them fit smoothly together and seem natural.

Continuity task

For our continuity task, we were asked to, in groups, film a simple piece where a person opens a door and sits down on a chair. This was a good way to learn how to use the cameras and to find out what sort of result we can be expecting in our thriller. The project did not take us very long to film, and showed us the basics and the limits of editing, which turned out to be very important when filming for the thriller task.

We learned three essential different techniques to help us in this project: The 180 degree rule, shot reverse shot and Match on Action.

The 180 degree rule states that two on screen characters will be given a side of the screen to work with, left or right. This avoids confusing the viewer who subconsciously assumes the character will always by on the same side of the screen, and is a very effective method of showing which character is which, even when they look very similar.



This scene from "The Lord Of The Rings" is a very good example of this. Although the scene uses the 180 degree rule for a different reason than we are going to , as this scene still would have worked without it, but its use strengthens the view that Gollum/Smeagol has a split personality, and the camera changing adds tension to the scene. It shows the split personality by assigning each one to a side of the screen, (left=evil, right=good)



Match on Action is a rule which ensures that the order of the shots is chronological and simple for the audience to understand. This is normally sorted out during the editing stage, as parts of a film can be shot in any order. This is normally standard in most films unless there is a flashback or other exceptions. These are normally made very clear what is happening so to not confuse the audience. However, some films (especially thrillers in particular) such as Memento deliberately play with the order of the shots to create a unique effect.

Shot / Reverse Shot simply shows a shot of the subject, and then rotates 180 degrees, and shows the viewer the result. The technique allows the viewer to see a person on screen, and then what that person is looking at, creating the effect that we are seeing what that person is seeing. The best thing about this shot is that it can easily be used to make it look like a character is nearly anywhere in the world very cheaply. For example, I could have a shot of myself against a wall and then flick to a shot of the Caribbean, making it appear as if I were looking at the Caribbean, presumably because I was there.



This is our finished continuity task. We would have liked to have created something of more quality, but we were still learning and tried to focus more on learning techniques for the thriller than spending too much time polishing this video. This is clear through the badly timed cuts, the wrong amounts of time used for each shot, the overall length, the lack of any character development or personality and of course my horribly stale acting. By the end of this project, we had learnt to use the camera fluently and the basics of the editing software we used, Adobe Premier Elements 1.0. There are several techniques we used in this which we carried through into our thriller, and several things which we didn't think worked and therefore changed, such as the camera angles used in the speech section, which were dull and identical. In our thriller we used a variation of shot types during speech to emphasize the emotions of the character.
As this is what we set out to do, and the skills we learned were invaluable for creating our thriller, I would consider the project a success, even if the actual end result was less successful.



This diagram shows the positions of the cameras, people and objects in the rooms we used for filming. Note how we never break the 180 rule, although we push it to the limit by placing the cameras exactly in front of the two actors. To compensate for this, we make them tilt their bodies towards each other, which creates the same effect as the 180 rule, so you can tell which character is which by the direction they are facing. We filmed in the same order that it is viewed, to avoid confusion on our part, and you can see from the diagram that we start at the top, following Tanwyn, then we have a shot of the door opening, and finally the shots in the room of us both talking. We shot the talking parts separatly, meaning that we did all the speech for one character, and then all the speech for another, and then spliced them together, as we only had one camera, and it saved us time, as well as meaning we would not have to move the camera from one person to the next constantly. We used the shot/reverse shot when we see Tanwyn walk in through the door. We see a shot of him open the door, and then a shot of the door from 180 degrees (or close enough to). This shows us that Tanwyn has walked into a new room.

The Wilhelm scream

I was recently rewatching "Kill Bill", and I noticed that a sound effect used during the Crazy 88 fight scene was very similar to the one used in "Star Wars: The Return Of The Jedi", as a man is thrown into the Sarlacc pit (a sound heard during a good half of my childhood) . After some research, I discovered that the two sound effects were the same, and had been used in countless films, including at least four times in various "Star Wars" films. This video (not complied by me) should give you a good idea of what the scream is.

Although i'm not sure how I would relate this to any of our projects, I find it interesting that a sound device can be used in so many different popular films with so few people noticing. The effect is now a cult tradition for sound designers. I also noticed that it was in a lot of Spielberg's films, much like the shooting star which also features in most of his films. If there is no copyright on this, I would like to use the effect for our thriller simply for the link to so many famous films, although I am not sure where I would put it.

Colour to create style

Recently, I've been keeping an eye on the popular video game, "Mirrors Edge". Although I could write an essay on what I know about it, what I'd like to focus on is the colour theme of the game. The game mainly uses very bright, simple colours, mainly only white, red and blue. This clean, modern look is very deliberate, making the city look bright and cheerful, which is one of the key themes of the game. In the game, the colour red is only ever used as a pointer in the game, highlighting objects which the player can use to progress. This can be seen in the image above. Colour is used in other media too, for example in "The Matrix" and "Kill Bill". In "The Matrix, each scene has a distinctive colour theme, from the dirty green which is used a lot while in a building the matrix, the orange used in the oracle's house and the white in the empty room in the matrix. Each of these colours have distinct meanings; the green is used to emphasize how diseased and wrong the matrix is, as well as relating to the florescent greens seen in the code of the computers; the orange is used to make the room seem warm, comfortable and cosy, which is significant in the scene, where an old lady is seen comfortably baking cookies while talking to Neo; and in the bright white loading room, where white stereotypically shows hope and confidence, the completely empty mise-en-scene lets the white take on a new meaning: potential- Neo is faced with a room to be filled. ("Guns. Lots of guns")
The highly stylised Kill Bill uses the same techniques, especially in the scenes near the end of the film, the crazy 88 fight scene and the final showdown in the snow. The crazy 88's are all dressed in black and white suits, which makes them all look the same, which fits in to the idea that the crazy 88 is one pack. Although not visible in the DVD version of the film, the original kept that scene in colour, so the bright yellow jumpsuit makes The Bride stick out clearly, which keeps her separate from the rest of the monochrome characters. The fight against O-Ren Ishii is even more carefully stylised, featuring O-Ren Ishii dressed in a white kimono against a backdrop covered in perfect white snow. In the other corner, The Bride, dressed in yellow stands against a yellow background. This separation of colour shows that The Bride has dominated the yellow building, and O-Ren Ishii has the garden, covered in her colour; white. The characters now use these places as their sides, much like in a boxing match with the red and blue sides.

Although our thriller intro is already filmed, there will be a lot of time to change many things in the editing stage, and colour themes are one thing I will definitely bear in mind, even if at a simple "black = evil; white = good" stage, although our film is very ambiguous when it comes to good and evil, so even this may be difficult. I would like to play with the way that strong colour can create a pathway for the character, like in "Mirrors Edge". This could be achieved using silhouettes in our thriller quite easily. Using colour to show which side a character is on could also be useful, and we could try to mix this in with the use of the 180 degree rule to further separate the characters, or maybe even to separate the characters from objects. This has a lot of potential, and I will write about if or how we used colour in our thriller in our conclusion at the end of the project.

Women in film. And then Twilight.

Hollywood is a male dominated scene. In 2001, only 6% of directors were female. The worst thing about this figure is that the year before, in 2000, there were 11%, which means that the number of female directors is falling. Although I can find no data on more recent years, I still found it amazing that even with roughly half the population being female, so few of them were directing in Hollywood. As Hollywood is undeniably the most dominating scene in film for English speaking countries, this lack of female directors can give millions of people a very biased male opinion on issues brought up in the film. The same goes for actors. Although there are some films and shows that try to break the stereotypes, such as "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" or "Kill Bill", most shows and films mainly feature male actors, especially in the main roles. When females are included, they tend to be stereotyped or included as sex objects, to appeal to young men, the primary target audience of Hollywood. Look at a James Bond film for example. In "Casino Royale", females are portrayed to be weaker and less important; as tools. For example, both Bond and Le Chiffre, the two arch enemies of the film use women, Vesper and Valenka respectively to do their biddings, to distract the crowd or to drug Bond's drink. This portrayal of women subconsciously sinks into the mind of the viewer, and as there are so few films to contradict the stereotype, it gets used more and more in reality, which can be dangerous.

But i'm going to change course a little bit now. See, originally, this part was going to further discuss the roles of women in films aimed at women, and how even that can have a very adverse effect. And then I went and saw Twilight.
I think I ought to explain myself. See, in 2005, a womans romance novel called "Twilight" was released, written by a previously unheard of author. Because the book had a few interesting online reviews, and a really nice front cover, I spent 12.99 on the hardback. I really enjoyed the book, and read it at least three times before the sequel, "New Moon" was released. By this time, the unheard of author was beginning to get pretty famous. I bought the books in sequence, and they now sit very proudly on my bookshelf (the last book sits slightly less proudly, but thats another story).  
Twilight is a book aimed at 13-30 year old females, and the film is clearly aimed at the same audience, so as a 17 year old male, maybe I am biased when I say that it was the worst film ever made. It's not just my biased male perspective though; I went to see it with two 17 year old girls (fans of the book), who found it just as pitiful as I did. Reviews for the film mirror this, on average receiving 5/10, which is very average. I can only assume that all the gross of$303,777,506 came from devoted, foolish fans like myself.
Before I begin my large list of bad points, I should list the good ones.
Peter Facinelli - He was a great actor; he got all the right emotions across, and none of his lines sounded tacky.
Jackson Rathbone - His Edward Scissorhands impression was great, even if it wasn't deliberate. I found him very entertaining, which was a real breath of fresh air.
The fight scene - Everything was perfect, it got you very engaged in the action, and you could feel the power that went into each blow due to clever camera techniques and a very powerful mise-en-scene (a dark room full of mirrors). I was happy with the very shocking end to the fight scene, where they graphically break the antagonist's neck and throw him onto a fire. It was a very powerful way to end the fight, and received several shocked gasps from the audience, which makes the scene even more effective at showing the raw power and emotions of the characters. No messing around with the usual "spare me!" Hollywood clichés.
With the good points over and done with, I can continue with why it was an awful film. Due to the target audience of the book, Summit Entertainment realised that the director would have to be a fan of the books, and female, as to best relate to the female main character and target audience. They chose Catherine Hardwicke, which was obviously a mistake. She must have realised that that the film was targeted at the fans of the book, and so sticking closely to the plot of the book and requesting the opinions of fans would have been a good way to find out what the fans wanted. But no. I'm not going to bother to explain why it was bad, I'm going to let the fans do it for me. Here are some heartwarming messages from some fellow fans of the books on IMDB.

"Catherine Hardwicke, you don't have the faintest clue how to tell this story right and you never should have been allowed to be anywhere NEAR the first film, let alone any of the others in the saga."

"This story had the potential of being an absolutely amazing film. It was not."

"I agree...Twilight was just awful directing. Seriously...the dramatic eye crap she had the actors do was so overplayed...it looked contrite and high school musicalish."

"People are super pissed of that she ruined a wonderful book."

My point is that when a woman director finally gets the chance to revolutionise the film industry, she creates an awful film, and now the sequel, "New Moon" is being directed Chris Weitz, who, as you may have gathered, is male. The way I see it, Catherine Hardwicke just pushed any chance of women getting an equal part in film making back by several years.

Oh, and Catherine Hardwicke? You made a horrible continuity error with the tubes on Bella's face near the end of the film.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jul/05/filmnews.gender
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=twilight08.htm

Thriller Filming

We finished the largest part of the filming process as planned, on the 27th of November. All went according to plan; all the props and equipment was brought with and used, and our worry that waving a fake gun around might attract unwanted attention was all for nothing, and we ended up making the gun more public than we ever thought we would be able to, allowing us to get more and higher quality shots than we could have ever hoped for. This was partly due to the lack of public interference, which was very low considering our location. Although people walking through our shots was a problem, it was far less of one than anticipated. The only problem we had which might affect our end result was that the floor of the car park where most of the filming took place was still being used, and so people parked their cars in the middle of out mise-en-scene every now and then, but we don't think it ever became particularly noticeable.
As predicted, some parts of the original plan were changed on the day either because we could not get them to work, or we found a better idea. This includes a shot on the roof which was never planned, because the roof was not available during location scouting. We thought the urban cityscape could provide us with some good shots, and so we spent some time filming bits on the roof, even though we don't expect to use them as they don't fit in to the plot very well.
In total, we recorded over an hour of video before the batteries ran out (which was long enough, and did at least 3 takes of each shot, far more for some shots. This helps keep it likely that we will not need to return to film a part again. If anything, we are worried that we have too much film, as there is a two minute time limit on the intros, and we are sure that we have far more than that in useful film. Just in case, we have postponed the rest of the filming we were going to do. We will edit all the best film together shortly, and if we definitely have too much, then we may cancel the remaining amounts of filming, as the other parts are not as essential to the plot, and we could make our film work without them.
Overall, it was a completely successful trip, and with much luck, we'll have no reason to return.