Star Wars Film Review

Today I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens directed by JJ Abrams and starring Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Oscar Isaac. I found the film very enjoyable and overall a fantastic film, which managed to keep faithful to the tone of the original films but at the same time introduce new and in-depth characters.

The music is such an integral part of Star Wars that I found myself getting shivers as the film opened with the main theme, other people in the cinema whooped. Obviously this reminded me of how carefully we are going to have to chose our music when creating our film opening.

The film uses a lot of different shot types but most notable were probably the epic establishing shots of spaceships and new planets and the tracking shots and fast cuts of action sequences as well as the obvious high and low key lighting used to portray the Light and Dark sides.

In my opinion, Abrams managed to balance the funny, tragic, and bitter-sweet moments of the film perfectly, giving the audience the right amount of time to wipe away the tears before leaping into another space battle. The old characters felt like they had in the first films, and the new characters like Finn, Poe, and Rey, felt like they belonged. Abrams has been criticised in the past for his arguably excessive use of lens flares when directing the Star Trek reboots, but for this film, the cinematography and overall tone really fit with the original films so it just felt like them, but modern, which I thought was really effective. The film ends with quite the clliffhanger, meaning I will definitely be going back to see Episode VIII in 2017.

Jessica Jones Opening Titles

Netflix's original series "Marvel's Jessica Jones" is a thriller about a former superhero who becomes a private investigator in New York.

I found the opening titles of the "Jessica Jones" very interesting and thought we could use them as inspiration for our film opening titles as they share a genre, even though they are more abstract than the titles we will create.

Throughout the opening titles, you cannot see the character's faces, which means that nothing is revealed about them, they are just mysterious shadows. The music behind the titles is very tense and speeds up as the titles reach their ending. We would hope to use music similar to this in our film opening. In addition, there are several slow cuts throughout the titles, which again adds to tension.

Se7en Film Review

Today I watched David Fincher's "Se7en" (1995) starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. The genre is thriller and so fits with the genre that we want our film opening to fit.

Overall, I felt that the film was very well shot by cinematographer Darius Khondji, using the rule of thirds throughout the film. In addition, the camera was often fixed down, allowing the characters to move around in the frame, rather than moving the camera to follow them, adding to the tension as sometimes the camera stayed fixed on the characters and their reactions rather than what they were looking at. An example of this would be when Morgan Freeman's character sees what is in the box towards the end of the film, but the audience never sees, which only adds to the suspense. Many of the shots had a long duration, which built tension in the scenes also.

An example of the use of the rule of thirds in Se7en

Music was also used very effectively in "Se7en", as the music began to crescendo whenever the two detectives were close to finding a body. The music helped to unsettle the audience, which added to the disturbing tone of the entire film.

Below is the theatrical trailer for "Se7en".

Filming Day 2 Vlog

Here is the vlog of our day of filming:

Filming Day 2

Today was our second day of filming and overall I feel it was a success. We encountered a few problems, including high wind speeds and near constant dog-walkers but managed to get all the external shots we needed in about 3-4 hours, which meant that our lighting stayed fairly consistent. Here are a few photos of our day, taken by Kirti. Vlog to follow soon.

Myself explaining to Saanika which shots we planned to get at the location

Saanika and I mapping out where she needed to walk in the frame

Kirti trying to find the best angles at the location

Myself trying to capture audio so that there would be minimal work on diegetic sound in post

Slightly manic faces after a long and cold day