Group 17 - Film Practices

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Fiction Film

In order to see more posts about the fiction film, please take a look at our “Likes” :-)

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POV: the interviewee. After a second day of shooting interview sections with our delivery drivers we headed out into the streets of Amsterdam in order to capture some nice b-roll shots. The weather was not on our side though....At least, one of our interviewees agreed to film parts of his shift with a Go-Pro!

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Next up: Our documentary! We started interviewing delivery drivers and of course had to provide them with some snacks as well ;-)

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Shoot day 4: This time, back in the same park as in shoot day 1, we found a more quiet and definitely more beautiful location to shoot our exterior scenes.

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Shoot day 3: After changing locations to a supposedly quieter place we were left with no choice but to find yet another place due to heavy wind. Yuck.

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Shoot day 2: This time, we shot all the scenes inside the apartment. Luckily, we were able to use Josh’s place!

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Shoot day 1: After decisions about the costumes were made we were ready to film :-)

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Prep for the shoot of our fiction film: Hand-painted toy-guns and accessories.

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This week´s progress

This week during the Monday class we gave a presentation about our genre research and how we want to implement the cinematographic elements from the two films we chose into our own short film. Like I mentioned in the previous blog post at the end we ultimately agreed on combining two genres: spaghetti western as well as romantic comedy into our own hybrid. We all found the idea intriguing and were curious about what results we´re going to accomplish, however, we didnt know exactly how weŕe going to execute it. Thus this week we dived more into details about what we want to convey in our process of filmmaking. What really helped us with narrowing down and specifying our vision, so to speak was pondering on and answering specific questions, such as what exactly is the original scene about? What are the themes of our film? Who is our film directed at, what type of audience would find it intriguing and fascinating? If we take a look at the original scene, we can clearly observe an escalation of the criminal chase. The scene is full of tension, and without a doubt keeps the audience on their toes. In our adaption of the scene, we want to twist it into a conflict, not afflicted by criminal misdeed, but rather a romance-based entanglement.

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More brainstorming

Last week of our progress in terms of video making resulted in producing genre research paper. Initially I would say vast majority of our group was leaning towards spaghetti Western, however upon sharing this idea with our teacher (who strongly suggested to reconsider it) we came to the conclusion, that spaghetti Western combined with elements of romantic comedy would yield in much more surprising, original results. Spaghetti Western without a doubt is way easier to execute and more of somewhat obvious choice, if we take a look at a dynamic between the main characters. But we really aim at exercising our creativity, and our final choice of mix of these two genres is hopefully going to reflect that. In our research paper we went over every single element of cinematography, analyzed the original text and described how we would alter it in order to match it with the mix of our genres. Every member of our group decided to focus on a different part, with accordance to our crew positions. Our film producer, Elizabeta  focused on analyzing editing as well as acting in our two example films, Amelie (Jeunet 2001) and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (Leone 1966). She noticed that both films were edited in the continuity style, which then indicates, that scenes were shot from multiple locations, different shot types and so on. In terms of acting, the dialogues were filmed in the shot-reverse shot patters, which is typical of the western. 

In terms of acting both films have comedic and dramatic elements. In The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly mixes with classic western themes of revenge, duel and fight for honor. The main themes of Amelie are also, quite typical in terms of their genre category - romantic comedy. Amelie helself is a shy Parisian, waitress who struggles with loneliness and dreams about pursuing an intimate relationship.  On top of that we also payed attention and thoroughly analyzed: sound, lighting, mise en scene and art direction. We hope to recreate something that will include all of the elements, from the films we took an inspiration from.