Character Project Reviews

Katie Everett
http://katieeverett.blogspot.com/2011/02/character-and-movement-hero-and-villian.html


Nate Hoover


Andrew Kellogg

Character Development

Meet "The Good". A confident hero I created, this cowboy's motivation is to stop "The Ugly", his nemesis, from destroying the town's lovely image. Luckily for The Good, The Ugly isn't very smart, and their fights tend to be more of The Good teaching The Ugly a lesson and having the sad, lonely villain go on his way, back to the drawing board to plot another scheme.

This is "The Ugly", a villainous character created by my partner:

Here is an animation giving you an example of how the two characters move and act. Enjoy!

Video Joke Project

Summary:
As a group, we picked a joke out of a list of ten and had to write a 2-3 minute script of how the joke was going to be told. After we chose our two favorite scripts, we had to then make a 2-3 minute movie telling the story of the joke. The genres we chose to film were Film Noir and Buddy Movie.


I was the editor for Le Bar and the camera operator for What's Your Number?.


Le Bar 

What's Your Number?

Comparison
First off, the main affinity between the videos is that we were trying to tell the same joke. The contrast is shown in the way the scripts are written, and how we tried to get each joke across. Le Bar went for a film noir feel, and had a narrator help keep the story going. What’s Your Number?, on the other hand, was present day and dealt with an internal thought process instead. We felt that both videos did a good job of telling the joke and that they were both successful. The scripts chosen for both jokes were also didactic; they were very straightforward and gave the audience all the information they needed to know. If we didn’t have the narrator or internal thought process then the audience would have needed to do a lot more thinking on their own, and in a 2-3 minute video, we weren’t sure if we would’ve gotten our joke across as well. 

Le Bar consistently tried to manipulate line, shape, and rhythm, while What’s Your Number? manipulated space and movement. In Le Bar, we used both active and virtual lines. The male character was constantly looking at the femme fatale, which created virtual lines in their eyesight. Actual lines in the booth, the pool table, the bar and the horizon line created different senses of power between the two characters. We also used rhythm in the type of shots created consistently in the video; this created a sense of distance between the characters, so the audience would get the feeling that they weren’t going to be together in the end. In What’s Your Number?, we used movement to keep only one or two characters moving throughout the frame at a time, so that they were the sole focus of the shot. To manipulate space we used a variety of types of shots (WS, MS, CU) to create focus, as well as using the rule of thirds, the 180º rule, as well as the rule of 30 in order to change how the space was perceived.

Video Game Clip Analysis

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood
E3 Trailer, North America

Analysis:

How to Be Creative

“How to be Creative” – Hugh MacLeod

http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/6.HowToBeCreative

Movie Scene Analysis

The Princess Bride (1987)
Scene: The Battle of Wits

Sorry about the sub-par video quality! The good clips wouldn't allow embedding
Analysis: 
 

Re-imagining Visual Framing

 

One of the main reasons I was drawn to this piece of Ben Goossens’ work is because of the composition.  One thing we talked about with his work is how you will see a lot of pieces where there is one larger object on one side and a smaller on the other, and this one is another example of that.  I was also drawn to the colors used, because they are pleasing and natural to the eye, because of the grass and sky. I also liked the image because it seemed like it wasn’t as dark as a lot of the other ones, which really made it more noticeable to me.  The main reason I reframed the image the way I did was because I think the elements in both photos have the same vertical visual movement, and I wanted to show this by using two objects in the frame, rather than just a more direct vertical one and keep an affinity to the original image. I also wanted to follow his example in the frame of having one larger object and one smaller object. Both images have a consistent visual rhythm and a nice mix of vertical and horizontal line, which reinforces the rhythm. I think Ben Goossens framed the image the way he did because you can see both objects fully, without them being cropped out of the frame. They are also framed so that there is not a lot of extra space around the outside of the image. This image also uses the same theme as many of his other works of art, which make it a piece stylistic of him. I also think the original image does a good job of expressing the rule of thirds. The first thing you look at is the window, then the top of the chair, then the intentional blank space at the bottom, and lastly the owl sitting on the chair. Looking at the picture, I also don’t feel that they have much tension. They seem pretty straight forward, possibly just slightly confusing to figure out the composition and why the objects were chosen to be in the frame.