Film Foundations

  Recently, I worked on a poetic film, which I am overall very satisfied with. My goal with this film was to create a pastiche of the works of authors such as Clark Ashton Smith. I do feel like I was somewhat successful at aping that style in the script. My process for writing the script consisted of coming up with a few sentences that sounded interesting, and later coming up with 'filler' sentences in between them. While this made the writing process easier for me, it also meant that I did not go into the film with an overarching idea in mind. The film (to me) feels a bit aimless, and that is something I could have remedied by coming in with a strong concept.     While coming up with shots, I tried to make each of them match the script. As a result, there are a lot of shots with trees, water, and leaves, words I repeated a lot in the film. My biggest issue with the film was that it was very silent. I tried adding music to fill the silence, but nothing sounded quite right...

     This was our first real attempt at a narrative film. Previously, our films have not had much going on in the way of plot, but we remedied that with this film. With this film, we wrote a more extensive script than we had before - our script totaled about three pages, in contrast to our other films, which have all been one at most.      We experimented with the lighting a lot in this film, which (at least I felt) worked to great effect. We also used a variety of camera angles and reshot each scene multiple times from different angles.     The one thing I am not happy about is how after the first half, the film was entirely improvised, and we stopped using the script, but overall I am satisfied.

         Recently, we watched the 1997 film Good Will Hunting , written by now-famous actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. The film was very interesting in how it utilized mise en scene to tell its story. Good Will Hunting uses Mise En Scene to contrast Will’s world and the academic world. In scenes that revolve around Will’s world, there is always movement in the background, while in scenes that take place in the academic world, there is little to no movement in the background. Note, for example, this scene where Will (Matt Damon) is talking to his friend Chuckie (Ben Affleck). There is always something going on in the background, even when not much is happening.   And note how in this scene, there is nothing happening in the background. This helps contrast the tumultuous nature of Will's personal life and the sterile nature of his academic life. This contrast can be further shown in how the resplendent colors in the bar scene contrast with the mut...