Thursday, 24 November 2011

Analysis of thriller clip

Market Research- The Departed

This is a clip from the thriller movie "The Departed". In this clip Costello is quiestining Billy about who may be the rat. the costuime codes in this movie help the audience to understand who is incharge as Costella is wearing a clean cut suit, smoking a cigar, this is what the audience conventionally believe a mafia boss to look like, where as billy is looking scruffy tyring to represent as looking like a rat. Jump cuts are used to represent the intensity in the scene as it is a constant back and forth battle, it also helps to keep the audiences attention whilst watching this non conventional thriller scene.

The lighting in this scene is used to create suspense and a mode of interrogation for the audience, as the artificial light is a single spot light shinning down on the two characters faces, this is what we would conventional see in an interrogation scene, the fact that the two characters lean in and out of the light symbolizes when one character is speaking, and how has the power shifts from one character to another.

It is quiet easy to spot who is in charge through the use of over the shoulder shots, as when Costello is talking Billy is always in the camera shot as well, showing Costello's power over him, this helps the fact that this is an interrogation, on the other hand, Billy is always by himself in the shot, showing how he is vulnerable, all this adds to the suspense in the scene.    

The smoke from Costello's cigar, also creates a sense of enigma for the character, as it gives off the sense that he is hiding being this wall of smoke, as it is clear he is frustrated in the scene this gives the character depth instead of making him out to be a conventionally "gangsta" type character, as well as this the cigar does also conform to what our belief of what a mafia boss type character should look like, along with the suit and gray hair.

The character of Billy is constantly being portrayed as weak, shown in many of the pictures above, this is shown by his eye line which is point at the floor, this conventional shows weakness in a character, but the use of lighting to cover half his face, creating a sense of enigma shows that perhaps past events have made him become this, this is the sort of thing we which to achieve in our task.

The DVD cover of the Departed does conform to a conventional thiller DVD cover, as is uses dark colours, and low key lighting, in our porject we too are also going  to incoorparte this into our project, we are espically going to use the lighting to create a sense of engima so that our characters have depth to them, conforming to thriller protagnists

Saturday, 19 November 2011

Evaluation prelimanary task

The original idea that we got given, was to re-create a conventional gangster thriller scene, our group was split up successfully, Emily and Ciaran were directors, Ishmael the camera man and me playing Paulie and Eduardo play Al Casino. We spent most of our time focusing on camera shots and angles, such as match-on-action and the 180 degree rule, this shows our audience that it is a thriller scene. we made sure that we concentrated most on camera angles because this is the thing that is going to make the audience realise that it is a thiller movie.
We found our production paper very useful, personally I found the analysis of existing products most useful as it gave me an idea of what need to be included into a scene and how to make is successful. To help organisation our storyboards and scripts were most useful as it gave us and outline and structure to what we would have to do in the scene. we referd to the story board all through out the scene to make sure that we stick to the structre of a conventional thriller scene.
Emily was most responsible for the executing of the final idea, as new ideas were coming in the shooting of the product, for example the close up on Al Casino putting out his cigarette. This did work as it keep the idea fresh, and when we do our final product I don’t think anything will change as it worked well in the pre production tasks.
I found that my personal technical skills were good considering none of us has never used this type of equipment before, but Ishmael was the most skilled with the camera and also using final cut to edit the product. The camera was positioned well and we took our time in choosing the right shots to use. 

My role in this final production task was to act in the scene, there was alot of communication needed from the director and cameraman to make sure i was in the right place at the right time, we did however communicate this well between each other. i personally feel that my performance went well as there was no need to take many cuts of each scene and overall i did enjoy acting.