Week 1 Journal

Wednesday 13^th December 2017 with TAL

In today’s lesson, we watched the movie Catch Me If You Can, a movie directed by Steven Spielberg in 2002. The movie told a story of a young man who adapts his life towards fraudulent crimes and undergoing fake identities to earn cash and live a wealthy life. During these session, we are focusing on the idea of Heroes and Villains and this certain movie toys with this idea. The heroic side of Frank Jr (Portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio) could be he is doing this to support himself and his family, by earning cash he is able to survive and support his mother and father. However picturing Frank Jr under the villainous light, he is undergoing crime as we see, he is a fraud and goes against social morals as he is tricking everyone to believe that he is a pilot / doctor / lawyer / policeman. During the movie, we are positioned with Frank Jr from the start, we see him as our protagonist as we remain with this character and we consistently are attached to them, the antagonists are the police force group lead by Carl (Portrayed by Tom Hanks) who is set out to arrest Frank Jr for his crimes again society, we are led to believe that they are villains as they are putting our ‘protagonist’ at risk.

I personally thought that the movie was well made, acting was top quality and very believable as it was indeed inspired by real life events, the authenticity of the film was accompanied by a great and powerful soundtrack composed by John Williams who is best known to often work alongside Spielberg.  

Thursday 14^th December 2017 with NEIL

Today’s lesson consisted around scripting, this is the time to begin to full plan our films. I had initially started a rough draft of my script, but this lesson taught me a lot. While reading the script I noticed that I had quite a few flaws, the first was it was too descriptive, scripts are short and to the point and don’t go into much detail when it comes to location because that is up to the director to judge what the scene’s aesthetics will appear on screen. I noted down the location to a high detail, which can be quite boring to read after a while and could waste time when writing. At least in reality I learnt about this flaw as I clearly now have an idea on what my scenery would look like when it comes to filming it. Secondly, I had formatted my script incorrectly, I had studied scripting in the past but not too much to make me a guru in producing script upon script, I had laid this out like a basic list script, with a long description and character dialogue on the sides, as I learned I did not include time, a short description, scene numbers, type of voice (spoken / voice over) etc. This session helped me understand how to form a script in a proper format, I was pointed toward the direction of using the online software Celtx, a free online site which enables users to write scripts in the correct format, I used this to my advantage so it eases my writing sessions and reduces time in making lengthy formatting edits, instead the software does this automatically for me! Which saves time and effort drastically! I had shown Neil my draft and treatment, he was impressed with my idea and dialogue but like I expected he advised me to re-format the script to make it more readable and appear professional. To help all of us understand why scripts must be formatted in a certain way, Neil showed us an excerpt from Rian Johnson’s 2012 film ‘Looper’ (and to celebrate the release of Star Wars The Last Jedi of course, and he did say ‘No spoilers!’), this helped us form our knowledge in scripting and also he gave us a talk on why they had to be this way, this is so actors and crew members can read it easily and understand it, and so the director can make open judgements in how the scene looks etc.

After learning this technique and with the support of Celtx, I could create another draft. This time with shorter descriptions and refined dialogue to further create a sense of realism.

During the time of re-edits and our lunch break we were called back into action and we presented our ideas, I read out my script and it was definitely a great experience, reading out my script helped me decipher how my characters would sound and act like and try out different tones and mannerisms. My script seemed to gain positive feedback and even made some people laugh which is what I want as my film is aimed to be a comedic short. With the good comments, like structure is spot on and the dialogue is great, some questions were asked like ‘why is Louise / Mark acting like that?’, which made me answer some quite complex questions and it helped my self confidence in talking in big groups, I managed to answer these questions and I was given these tasks to do to improve, it was told to:

-        Build up tension by making Louise’s anger levels rise instead of an immediate outburst at the end of the film,

-        Refine some dialogue lines,

-        Minimise the level of closeness between Mark and Louise as they only just met, instead of her touching his arm and appearing quite intimate toward him a stranger, maybe make Mark look at her without needing to make physical contact etc.

This is when I took those that night and produced a third draft, with those tasks above met.

Friday 15^th December 2017 with ERICA

We once again focused on the topic of Heroes and Villains, this time we watched ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (Arthur Penn 1967), like the movie Catch Me If You Can we are positioned with the antagonists Bonnie and Clyde, these two characters are criminals who rob banks and are involved in shootouts, like CMIYC it is based on real life events. This film similarly puts us into the perspective of Bonnie and Clyde being our protagonists and the law being the antagonists, this film decides to take an interesting PoV as back then moviegoers has rarely even seen a movie in the villain’s perspective. The character of Clyde especially is quite sympathetic as he lacks the ability to ‘love’ and he even gets upset when he accidently killed a man during their heists, he even said to a civilian in the bank to keep his money, this could hint that Clyde has some social morals and he is not all that bad.

This movie was great like CMIYC and I even got the same feel to it in the sense of that the heroes and villain’s roles has been reversed in these two movies.