Since I learned at the beginning of the semester that we would have to put together a short film, I’ve been trying to pay attention to some film techniques that I felt could be done for our films. The thing that I really want to try is making sound effects. We learned about how many sound effects were made I was very interested in. The first time I realized that people on the set physically created many of the sounds on a movie was when I watched a special on Wishbone as a child. It takes much more work than I first thought. The sound effects for a film can be found anywhere if you have the knack for making them. This will require a lot of creativity, but I feel that if the people in my group put our heads together we can come up with something worthwhile.
As far as the structure of the film is concerned, I really liked the way Sunset Boulevard was set up. It started at the end and the whole movie was like a flashback. I feel like we could do the same with our short film and it would give it an interesting spin on things. It requires that we have a good transition from the beginning scene and the rest of the film; the viewer must know that the first scene was actually how the story ends and the rest of the movie is a flashback. This structure is something that I have seen in many books I have read and I have actually tried it out when I started writing a book over the summer. It leaves the viewer (or reader) wondering how the story will lead them to the end.
As far as filming is concerned, I think it would be a challenge to produce a scene that is made of one continuous take. We talked about this in class; it seemed like something that can seldom be pulled off. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t try. I don’t know that I’ve ever noticed in the films I’ve seen but the fact that it will be difficult makes me want to try. I’m not sure what type of scene this would work best with so it may be a little of trial and error, but I feel like it could be pulled off with enough effort.
Overall, learning about the various techniques and structures that can be used in filmmaking has made me very excited to try them out in my own film.
I think that it would be really neat to start our movies at the end like sunset boulevard. At first I thought, "that's awful to know the end at the beginning", but now I think it isn't as much knowing how things end as it is knowing how the end came about. I guess a love story wouldn't really work showing the end at the start. But I think even an action film could follow the same pattern. Who cares if William Wallace is killed or not at the end? The great part of that movie is all the story in between.
ReplyDeleteLong takes are very impressive -- and take a lot of planning!
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