Inglorious Bastards and Miracle at St. Anna comparison

COULSDON COLLEGE: MEDIA TEXT INFORMATION SHEET

TITLE:

Inglorious Bastards

YEAR OF PROD:

2013

TYPE:

FILM X

TELEVISION

DOC.

MUSIC

ADVERT

MUSIC VID.

OTHER:

DIRECTOR

Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth

PRODUCER

WRITER

Quentin Tarantino

PRODUCTION COMPANY

Universal Pictures, Weinstein Company

KEY CAST /ARTIST

Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Eli Roth

KEY CREW

Eli Roth, Brad Pitt

GENRE

Adventure, Drama, War

BUDGET

$75,000,000

BOX OFFICE

$120,523,073

THEMES

AWARDS

NARRATIVE: In Nazi-occupied France, young Jewish refugee Shosanna Dreyfus witnesses the slaughter of her family by Colonel Hans Landa. Narrowly escaping with her life, she plots her revenge several years later when German war hero Fredrick Zoller takes a rapid interest in her and arranges an illustrious movie premiere at the theater she now runs. With the promise of every major Nazi officer in attendance, the event catches the attention of the "Basterds", a group of Jewish-American guerrilla soldiers led by the ruthless Lt. Aldo Raine. As the relentless executioners advance and the conspiring young girl's plans are set in motion, their paths will cross for a fateful evening that will shake the very annals of history.

KEY SCENES:

COMPARABLES:

PROGRESSION OF KEY CONTRIBUTORS:

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The Man from Nowhere - 1500 words, final draft

The scene I am going to write about in my film is where the protagonist, CHA Tae-shik, right after being shot with a pistol, while in agony being treated for his wound he experiences a flashback into his cruel but gentle past, where he is seen as young and clean going to visit his girlfriend who is pregnant with his child. The Man From Nowhere had been produced by Cinema Service, Opus Pictures, United Pictures and was directed by Lee Jung Boem and been released for Korean cinema in 2010 belonging to the crime, action and thriller genre. In this scene, Tae-sik attempts to struggle and rescue his young and only friend, So-mi, he takes So-mi for the reincarnation of his unborn daughter, murdered along with his wife in retaliation for his work as a special operative and assassin for the Korean government.

The cinematography from the beginning of this scene presents a close up of the protagonists hand onto where the wound from the gunshot is. This shot is used here to present to the audience through the visual codes where he had been shot and how much the protagonist is suffering through how we can tell how much blood he’s losing. The close up is important a

s it conveys the message of all these that the director intends to convey and signifies the importance of the wound that the protagonist has as it’s life threatening. As his hand is shaking while realizing how much blood he’s lost from the close up, the performance here shows how much he’s in pain and how much anger he is bearing in order to protect the young girl who’s closest to him with addition to the struggle he has to undertake in order to save her. The director Lee Jung Beom, utilizes this without needing to show how the protagonist is feeling with a close up on his face to show his facial expression, rather just using a close up on the wound and his hand to show this.

The non diegetic background music adds to the scene to generate an effect of suspense and tension within the audience as this is a crucial turning point in the protagonist’s life in the film. The soundtrack additionally goes well with the scene as it makes the audience understand how significant the tension and seriousness of conflict between the Korean mafia and the protagonist’s current affairs are, as the director uses the non diegetic sound to highlight this.

Straight away from entering this flashback, it’s extremely noticeable how the colour scheme changes in the scene of the flashback compared to the rest of the film from the exterior. There is a clear use of bright colours, especially on the furniture in the hospital and the shopping store. The use of the bright colours while in the hospital gives off the meaning that at that present time, the protagonist was experiencing the most positive moment of his life with the one person he loves the most. Additionally, there is frequent use of white colours in this setting which symbolizes peace and proximity which adds to the mood while also representing the new life that had been due to be born.

The colour of the car that his girlfriend is waiting in is also white, along with- the babies clothes he purchases in the store which also relates to the colour scheme of the environment used here. The frequent use of white colours definitely has a calming effect on us and reaches out to us on an emotional level: such as the ironic feeling of love in this scene, protection, humility, innocent, youth and kindness. These themes are also explored throughout this film and within this scene. The lighting here also symbolizes life and is used coherently along with the bright colours which works well along with the setting and environment inside the hospital building and shopping store.

 

However this can be taken very differently due to the widely different cultures and therefore separate audiences to cater to. Unlike in Western culture where the colour white symbolizes peace and purity, the use of white colours in Eastern culture, white is considered to be a colour that represents death. The colour white led to its traditional use as the traditional colour of mourning. Considering this is a Korean film, this audience may have taken these hints as an incident related to death that was about to occur.  This is a very smart technique that the director, Lee Jung-Beom has employed that gives a deeper meaning than just using an ordinary colour for no deeper reasoning.

The low angle close up shot of the detectives shoes as they’re walking shows how important the people are even before showing the audience what they look like. This is to display a dominance of power within these stock characters also this is a way that Lee Jung Boem can introduce them simply through their performance and mise en scene of the detectives walking at a busy pace as a group with formal suits on, along with the cinematography of the low angle shot to symbolize dominance and importance.

His hair is also appeared to look long and unhygienic, which shows how he doesn’t care much for his life right now until he has a purpose to live. Compared to the flashback scene, Tae-shik looks very clean and positive compared to his negative vibe on his other appearance. He has a calm sense of ease to himself and looks like he could cause no harm to anyone at all. On the other hand, throughout the first half of the film up until this flashback, the way the protagonist is portrayed creates the mood that death is always lurking over him, how he attracts danger everywhere he goes which was also the cause of his pregnant wife’s death and also symbolizes how he is regretful about how he lived his life so far up towards the end of this flashback.

I believe that during the scene where Tae-shik walks over to his girlfriend and sits down with her, he asks to hug “both of you” (yet-to-be born child), once he hugs them we see a trimester scan photo of his child. He has the photo scan in his hands and we see a close up shot of him grasping the photo with force to the point where it creases up, foreshadowing that an unpleasant incident involving the unborn child is going to occur. This action is also relevant to the murder of his wife, who gets crushed by a truck driven at full speed.  The cinematography used in these scenes works excellent accordingly to the transition into the protagonists past. As he is undergoing surgery to ta

ke out the bullet from his stomach at the beginning of the scene, a close up shot is used on his face to show the pain and how traumatizing the experience is to him because of the same experience he faced long ago which ties into this scene here. The close up is also shot on his face in order to show his facial expression and portray his current emotions to make us, the audience, feel involved and share his current sense of sorrow and . As the camera focuses on the protagonists facial expression as he is in pain from undergoing emergency surgery, the cinematography in this scene creates a swirl effect to generate an accurate representation of the pain the protagonist is going through. This is an effective technique that the director employs as he is intending to portray the protagonists emotions to the audience through cinematography techniques as well as use of performance.

Overall the cinematography and mise en scene are all effectively used to address the scenario and portray the themes of hope, vengeance, suffering and redemption of The Man from Nowhere. 

Spider-Man Weekly Film Analysis

Film Analysis: 71

The British film industry never found a Vietnam-type genre in the violence of Northern Ireland, maybe because there wasn’t the same sense of us and them: the republicans were never as far-off and exotically faceless as Hollywood considered the Viet Cong to be. But this traumatic era – almost over, but not quite – might yet prove a rich seam. Screenwriter Gregory Burke and first-time feature director Yann Demange have made a cracking movie debut with ’71, a behind-enemy-lines war movie reeking with bad blood and bad faith, perhaps best described as an action-conspiracy thriller. It is interestingly free of the tone that dramas about the Troubles traditionally assume: a tone that you might call tragical correctness.

The film is set in west Belfast in the early years of the conflict, a year before Bloody Sunday; a time when Northern Ireland was still routinely referred to on television news as “the province”, like an outpost of the Roman empire.

Its central figure is played by Jack O’Connell, a terrific actor with the charisma of a young Albert Finney. He is Gary, an English lad from Derbyshire who has joined the Parachute Regiment, and who perhaps finds in the army the comforts of a replacement family. At the beginning of the decade, he is shipped out to Belfast, where the army must participate in the fiction of being merely present to assist the civilian police (the Royal Ulster Constabulary, as they were then called) in their duties, rather than directly imposing martial law.

A house-to-house search off the Falls Road goes horribly wrong; the resulting confrontation triggers a riot situation in which Gary is left behind by his retreating unit. He finds himself in a no-man’s-land where that well-honed phrase “the enemy within” appears to apply both to friend and foe. It is a world in which the authorities are running high-level informers and supplying arms to loyalist paramilitaries to maintain a deniable, proxy war. Gary’s commanding officer, Lt Armitage (Sam Reid), finds himself at odds with the furtive, plain-clothes intelligence operative Captain Browning (Sean Harris); and the Provisionals’ fiercely committed Haggerty (Martin McCann) and the eerily blank-faced Sean (Barry Keoghan) are plotting against their own chiefs. Meanwhile, a former army doctor on the republican side may be Gary’s only chance: he is Eamon, played by Richard Dormer (notable for his excellent portrayal of Terri Hooley, the punk music promoter in Good Vibrations).

Post It - Short film - Analysis

The short film posted on YouTube titled ‘Post It’ was released in 2014, directed and both written by Michael Evans. Produced by ‘Go For Broke Films’, this independent short film gained a lot of recognition on social networking sites which had made it gain attention to distributors around the world to be released in various countries, most notably Japan by the distributor ‘Pacific Voice Inc.’ To add to the film’s success, this film also won the third best place for the title of ‘Best Screenplay’ at the UNLV Spring Flicks film festival. The short film is a comedy followed along with the directors aim to make the audience laugh coming from a rather saddening opening to the film to the introduction of the post-it notes to act as a purpose for the two protagonists Elroy and Clare to interact together and spread their happiness to other strangers who look like they need it or deserve it. The narrative also follows a simplistic linear narrative storyline seamlessly as the plot avoids confusion.

The film also incorporates themes and sub-genres of romance, backed up through the cinematography techniques such as the two shot of the two protagonists of the film conversing on the bench to generate a interest in each other along with the non-diegetic background music to create a mutual mood between the two that the director wants to convey through both the performance and sound delivered through the visual and audio codes. The title sequence at the beginning of the film that’s used to present who the production company is, the editing used to display the production companies ident is written on a post it note using visual effects which connote what the narrative is going to be about before the film has even started.

The use of lighting is well employed by the director in this film because it is used in a way where it helps the audience understand what mood or state of mind the protagonist is in or coming out from. A scene where this is presented is in the first scene where Elroy is exiting a building from the main entrance. His back is turned coming through the door facing the opposite view of the camera, exiting a darkly lit building. This could mean that Elroy is being troubled by something or is facing a harsh time in his life which is emphasized through the technical codes for example Elroy carrying a heavy object as to bear these burdens that acts as a metaphor in the film. The sound used here adds to the depressing mood of the shot. As Elroy walks out of the shot towards the camera, the light brightens on him to suggest the escape from

Elroy’s character is performed superbly as it feels natural viewing the film from an audience standpoint, however I feel that Claire’s performance is too forced as the director makes her seem unnatural the way she keeps intriguing on Elroy’s personal life and invading his personal space while creating an unrealistic attempt of interacting with the protagonist which in turn makes myself and the audience deviate from the film as the performance of the actor is undeniably too ‘acted’ out. 

-- Finish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVgeJ5eqlSM

Film Analysis - Short Film - One Minute Time Machine

One-Minute Time Machine is a short film directed by Devon Avery and written by Sean Crouch. This film was actually created on a very short budget of $1,000 USD, produced by the production company ‘Empty Box Productions’ and won seven wins and three nominations as an independent film. The film has gained a surge in popularity on the video sharing website, ‘YouTube’, which went viral and amassed 2.9m viewers. The genre for this film is comedy and romance due to the comedic and romantic elements retaining from the two contrasting characters and the object that brings their encounter together, the one minute time machine. However I could also argue that this short film does harbor sci-fi elements which lead to this film’s sub-genre, science fiction, judging from the main subject of the film that’s used that is a fictional time machine.  

Themes explored within this short film include happiness and lusts, deriving from the failed attempts of James’ pick-up lines resorting to using time travel to restart the communication between the two in an attempt of trying to initiate sexual chemistry between Regina and himself, thus leading to a potential relationship. However as the narrative continues to progress, James is unaware of his actions from continuous attempts of pressing the red button on the one minute time machine to go back in time, which leads to the downfall of the protagonist until Regina takes control of the time machine. Here she uses it against him in favour of bringing him back to his past self. I feel that the director uses this narrative technique as a great plot device to keep changing back the plot, making it stay on the course of what the audience wants.

At the beginning of the film we are introduced to the title sequence which states the film’s title along with the audio codes, the non-diegetic sound of a piano melody is there in order to create an upbringing positive mood which is a convention of comedy and romantic genres, therefore connoting how the narrative that will follow. The editing in the title sequence fits the narrative of the film as the visual effects the audience is presented with is a zoom into a traditional clock system which additionally connotes what the narrative is about; the protagonist transporting back in time. This non digetic sound is also coherently used when James learns about the consequences of using the time travel machine from the information the book had provided Regina with. The editing used here shows very quick/frequent two shot camera techniques of James dead in a series of parallel universes that the director uses to show Regina’s different reactions to him dead on the bench, presented in a comedic style to make the audience laugh. The editing of these shots being fast paced and quick cut techniques used is well employed as it gives the audience the chance to laugh frequently.

Right after the title sequence a two shot is shown of both the actors within the film, James and Regina. This type of shot is taken to show the contrast between the two, while there to take note of what type of clothing the characters are wearing which foreshadows what personality they both have and what object they’re holding, lastly what environment the film is set in. From this shot alone we can notice from the visual codes that James is wearing a casual style of clothes  that connote his casual personality while Regina has the smart look to possibly show dominance in the future conversation that they have and has a further emphasis her social status in society. From this we can presume she is on her work break and James has free time on his hands, not busy at all.

Both protagonists carry an object with them from the start of the film that would act as an important asset for the narrative of the film later on. The book is used as a tool for both Regina and James to relate to each other throughout the film, as the book she was reading is a science book based on time travelling, while coincidentally James uses a time travelling device with the motive to possibly fulfill his sexual desires.

This film is therefore a non-linear narrative as the basis of the film is to continuously manipulate time and space, ultimately leading to a chain of past and future events that have already taken place within the films world. 

Visual Effects Artist - Alan Clappison - Presentation Thoughts

Guest: Alan Clappison 

I was quite surprised that someone who had worked on many famous films such as the recent sci-fi film, The Martian, which was distributed to local cinema’s such as Vue (where I watched it), came in to Coulsdon College out of his presumed busy schedule to teach us about what it’s like working in the VFX sector in the Film industry. This was extremely intriguing for me as I was deeply interested in what techniques and programs he uses for his work and learning about the route he took to break into the film industry as a whole. Alan had explained the various types of 3D modelling programs that he uses, since I’m familiar with the program ‘Cinema4D’, I know that they use this in the film industry. However I was quite mistaken as when I had asked Al, he told me that the program ‘Maya’ was the default program that they use in the VFX industry; though Cinema4D isn’t completed blown out the water.

Guardians of the galaxy was another film that he worked on and had detailed how tedious it was to render out using hundreds of computers and showed us a clip of the development and animation of the CGI created characters. Finally he made a presentation about different aspects of Visual Effects and what different skill sets and techniques industries require such as the Video Game industry or even just commission editing for businesses. His speech and presentation was well laid out and I liked how we got the free opportunity to ask him questions throughout his time in class.

[Guadians of the Galaxy 3D concept - Autodesk Maya]