Director Study - Steven Spielburg

Steven Spielberg

Filmmaker, director and producer Steven Spielberg was born on December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio. An amateur filmmaker as a child, Spielberg moved several times growing up and spent part of his youth in Arizona. He became one of the youngest television directors for Universal in the late 1960s. A highly praised television film, Duel (1972), brought him the opportunity to direct for the cinema, and a string of hits have made him the most commercially successful director of all time.

Steven Spielberg is now known as one of the most influential film personalities in the history of film. He is one of Hollywood’s best-known directors and one of the wealthiest fim makers in the world. He works with many genres of film, one being tragedy drama which I am going to explore.

Spielberg has many features that he regularly includes in his films and has been for some years now, here are a few:

Track-in Shots

One of these features is Track-in Shots. In this type of shot, the camera physically moves in on the subject, typically going from a medium close-up to a tighter close-up. The movement is smooth, the background is usually blurred, and it is typically used to draw attention to a significant moment in a character’s story. We see this type of shot throughout many of Spielberg’s work, especially in his tragedies. This is because it’s a very deep shot that helps us connect with the characters, a very important feature in tragedies.

One tragedy film that gives a good example of this is “Amistad” – here is a link to a clip from the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee8NvgURCZs  (Technique starts at 0.50, ends at 1.00)

This track-in shot is a typical one. The background is blurred and the movement is soft and slow. Also, it’s going in to the character’s face, letting us connect with him more.

Mirrors

Spielberg often films shots using multiple mirrors. This is mostly for emphasise on the character, through appearance or something deeper.

Here is an example from the film "Catch Me If You Can"

 Sideways Tracking Shots

Another feature that is usual of Spielberg is Sideways Tracking Shots. In this shot, the camera moves sideways over an area. His sideways tracking shots can be very long, typically tracking with two characters that are walking and talking. Spielberg changes this shot to add considerable visual skill to the shots by putting all types of objects and extras between the camera and the two main subjects, to enhance the richness of the frame and visual perception of movement.

Here is a like to an example from the tragedy film "Saving Private Ryan" 

http://movieclips.com/DTa9Q-saving-private-ryan-movie-needle-in-a-stack-of-needles/

This sideways tracking shot is a perfect example, tracking two characters walking and talking. Spielberg adds hundreds of soldiers in the shot and around the characters, a common skill of his.

Framing Through Objects

The next feature that I looked at was Framing through objects. Spielberg often films sujects through objects (often circular) or through another persons arm. This is my favorite technique of Spielberg's.

Here's an example of a circular object from the film "Artificial Intelligence":

And here is an example of someone else's arm acting as the frame, from the film "Minority Report":

Wide Lensed Shots

A third feature that Spielberg likes to use in his work is 'Wide Lensed Shots'. He uses these lenses usually to film over-the-shoulder shots, tracking shots, close-ups, and any other shot in which he wants to make the foreground subject dominate the background. He can be very bold in his use of wide lenses, much bolder than most other filmmakers. 

One film that has a great example of this is Schindler List, here is a link:

42-59

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jri0U57iWWM (Technique starts at 0.42, ends 0.59)

In this clip, the wide lens is used to show the amount of people in the crowd. The group of people are the subject that Spielberg wants the audience to focus on.

Font Study

Hello!

As you know we have been playing around with some font styles for our credits on our movie. To help me get some ideas I decided to have a look at some film credits from films in my genre or similar to my genre.

The first one I looked at was 'Panic Room'

The credits for this opening are a grey colour. Grey is a very plain, empty and depressing colour which helps to illustrate the story. The credits are also all in capital letters which give us a sense of desperation and urgency that helps create an idea of pani, also illustrating the story. The last thing I noticed is that the colour blends in with the background, perhaps illustrating an urban city life.

I like the colour of these credits and think that they would be good to use in our opening as our story is very depressing which is a connotation of grey. 

The second credits I looked at was 'Virtigo'

The font for this film is styled so the letters only have an outline, not a fill. This creates an emptiness feel, represented by the empty letters, this illustrates the story. Also, because of the style of letter we focus straight away on something that is missing, illustrating the story further.

I love the style of this font and think it is definitely something to consider for our own film. I think it would work really well with our story line and help represent the characters.

Next I looked at 'Sherlock Holmes'

The font for this film is handwritten, this makes the film and the story feel more personal to the readers, almost at if we are being taken through a personal diary. 

I like the style of this font and think it is another style to consider for our own film. The reason I like the personal feel is because it is very important in a tragedy to be able to connect with the characters and get to know them and become comfortable with them to the point where they can place themselves in the character's position.

See you soon

Age Certificates

Hello

We have recently learnt about the different Age Certificates and what the film has to include to be given its certificate. To research this I looked at 4 different subheadings: Violence, Sex and Nudity, Imitable Behaviour and Language.
Here is the research I carried out:

After this we needed to decide what age certificate to give to our film. To do this we went through each category and decided upon a 15.
This is because:

Language:
In a 15 the BBFC allows strong language and in our film we will only be using moderate strong language. Therefore, a 15 rating would be accepted.

Violence:
Strong Violence is allowed in a 15 and in our film, we have one strong violent scene where a man gets shot. This is expected in a 15, however it is not acceptable to dwell on pain on injury, which we are not planning to do. Therefore, a 15 rating would be accepted.

Sex/Nudity:
There will be none of this featured in our film.

Imitable Behaviour:
This is the main thing that tips our film from being a 12 rating, to being a 15 rating. This is because in a 12 rating, you are able to include harsh behaviours such as suicide, however you can not include any instructional evidence at all. In our film, we have a suicide scene where a young girl ties a school tie to a tree. This can show children how to easily do this action as they will all be able to tie knots and will have a school tie. Therefore, we have to boost our certificate up to a 15.

See you soon.

Film Theories

Hello!

We have recently done some research on people's film theories. We looked at eight different theories that people believe exist in films or are what films are. 

Here is a bit of research that I did about the eight theories:

After looking at these theories, we had to decide what theories best fit our film. I chose two theories: Vladimir Propp's and Victor Shklovsky's. Here's why:

Vladimir Propp’s -

Our film includes most of the characters in Propp’s theory. Therefore we want to follow his structure of characters. However, we will have to discard some of the theory. Because our genre is tragedy, we do not want our structure to be something that the viewers expect. We want to make them feel uncomfortable and on edge. A tragedy can’t be a tragic story if the viewers feel at ease and comfortable with what is happening in the film.

Victor Shklovsky -

All good films have a fabula and a syuzhet.  This is important because to make the film realistic, you have to know the background story and why the characters and what and who they are. Because our genre is tragedy, our story is very heavy and deep. Especially at the opening of our film the fabula is very important. We start from the middle of the film then flashback, therefore the viewers wont understand the story behind the actions at the beginning. We, therefore, have to make sure that we are clear on this so that we can ensure our story flows and is realistic. 

See you soon!

Mood Boards

Hello!

When making a film, one of the most important things is understanding your chosen genre. We have done a lot of genre research but to understand it further we decided to explore our genre in a different form. We thought a visual representation would be best, so we decided upon a mood board. We created two mood boards, one is about our genre as a whole, and one is about our opening. 

This one is the Tragedy Genre mood board:

For the genre we focused on films in this genre, common characters, settings, camera angles, emotions and things that represent and relate to the genre.
For example, bottom left we have a picture of a family being torn apart. This is to show that tragedy films usually focus around a family. The tear in the picture is to represent that the story line is usually something to do with a tragedy within a normal family, causing the family to fall apart or be torn apart.
The first picture on the top left is a picture of the film 'Titanic'. This is one of the most popular and most famous tragedy films. Joining this is the front cover of the films 'Romeo and Juiliet', 'Reign Over Me' and 'World Trade Center'. We have also included the front cover of the first ever tragedy film 'Romance of a Jewess'.
For settings we have included a picture of a town, a normal family house and a hospital bed. These are three very popular settings that are regularly seen within the genre. 
We have four different camera angles on our mood board. We can see an over shoulder shot at the bottom of the mood board, these are generally used to show the emotion and reactions of the characters, allowing us to connect with them. Next to this is a close up shot of a character, generally used again, to show the emotion of the character and allowing us to connect with them. Above this is a head and shoulders shot which helps to show the emotion of the characters through body language and facial expressions. And lastly on the left hand side of the story board, we can see a character sat on a bench. These shots of wide setting are regularly used to show loneliness, stress and isolation. 
Joining this we have two pictures of eyes with tears in them. This is to represent the sad and dark feel of the films and show that generally the story lines are very sad and hurtful.
Lastly we have a picture of a 'real life' sign and a 'tragedy' mask. These represent the films as most tragedy films are based around real life events, such as 'World Trade Center' and 'Titanic'. The tragedy mask is the symbol of tragedy films in drama.

This is our second mood board of our opening:

For our film we focused of important props, costumes, settings and potential shots that we wish to capture and include. 
Firstly lets look at settings. We chose pictures of possible shots and settings that we want to include in our fim. The first main setting is a forest. We have four shots of forest settings that we know we could capture in the area that we are filming in. The first one is bottom left and it is a shot of wet steps in a forest. We originally wanted a shot like this and this picture really shows the potential we were hoping for. We have also got two pictures of a walkway in a wet forest, one with a person walking far away alone the path. And lastly a log which we will need to use for the storyline in our opening. We chose a forest as it is usually a very scary and daunting time, especially when it's rainy and wet. Also, it is very effective to show iscolation and loneliness.
Another setting we have captured is a town environment and a family home, which we can see at the bottom and top of the mood board. We want our film to be set in a town and house as this is a very popular setting in tragedy films and it is what our audience chose.
Also, we have three pictures capturing the costumes we wish our main character to wear. One of the pictures is a pair of ugg boots, which are everyday boots that teenage girls wear in the winter. Secondly a black coat that is an everyday wear coat, and lastly a picture of a teenager in hat and gloves. These pictures capture the setting of our film which is going to be in the winter, a very dark and cold feel. Also, the clothes are every day clothes which are very common in tragedy films as it makes the viewers connect with the characters even more because they can relate with them.
Next we included three very important props that we will be using. The noose at the bottom of the page and the tie in the second row are connected. This is because our character uses their school tie as a noose. The school tie also helps to capture the costume of the main character. Secondly is a candle. For the setting of the family home, when filming in there we want to make it quite dark but a warm, homely feel. This is because the usual situation of the house is very homely, but the situation has put a very dark twist on the family. Also, candles are usually often with death and daunting things. For example, they are featured in horror films a lot.

We feel that these mood boards really help us to understand the genre better and explain our opening very well. In the next blog post, you will find the overview plan of our film!

See you soon.

Credits Timeline

Hello!

As the making of our final film is drawing closer, we have been looking at a lot of drama openings. One of the things we will have to focus on is the credits, as these come in the opening of films. Therefore, our teacher set us the task of creating a credits time line. To do this, we looked at two film openings and noted down what credit comes up and at what time. 

The first film opening we looked at was 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo". We found that this film had a lot of opening credits that flashed up very fast. The pattern was the important people came up first, followed by a list of actors, then came the different producers and designers, then the last credit was the director's name who came up again. One thing that we found interesting was that the Director didn't only come up twice but he had a gap of 13 seconds before his name came up. We think this is because the audience will then focus on this name and the director is one of the most important people in the film so this is very important.
Here is the timeline we created:

For our opening, we won't need as many credits as this. Therefore, we decided to look at another opening will less credits. For this second timeline, we chose the film 'Cyber Bully'. For this, there were a lot less credits, however it followed the same sort of pattern. The most important people were first, followed by a list of minor actors, followed by the producers and designers and the director's name only came up once but it was also at the end.
Here is the second timeline:

We think we will follow this pattern for our opening, however we will take some credits from the first timeline to add in. Such as the Production Company and Studio Name.

See you soon!

Genre Documentary!

Hello!

A few weeks ago we were set the task by our teacher to research our genre and present the information in a documentary. We were half way through creating our first documentary when we realised that the genre we had chosen probably wasn't the genre for us. Therefore, we had a meeting to discuss this problem and decided to change our genre to tragedy drama. This meant we had to start research and a new documentary again. We found it hard to fit this in because we had so much other work to do in media and were being given new information each lesson. However, we finally found the time and have now completed out documentary, here it is!

I hope you like it as much as I do!

See you soon! 

Tragedy Drama - Genre Features

Hello!

I am now able to present to you our research on our genre; tragedy drama!

The first thing we looked at was the overview of features. Obviously, there are a lot of features in a tragedy drama, so we chose six subheading that we thought were most important and useful to research. These were: Camera Angles, Lighting, Props, Main Characters, Costume and Narrative.


The next thing we looked at was popular actors/actresses and directors. We thought this was important as we need to know what's popular in this genre, as the most successful and popular actors and directors will be what our audience want. We found six popular actors/actresses and identified a list of films that they had featured in. We then chose three random ones and watched the opening of one of the films we had identified. We did this to get a feel for our genre and the rough outline of things the audience want. We then repeater this for directors.

Thirdly, we looked at the very first film which was "Romance of a Jewess". The reason we did this is that we belive it is important to look at where this genre has come from and the changes and improvements that the genre has gone through. 

I will now attatch pictures of this work so you can see our research:

The next blog post will be our documentary on this research and information that we are very excited to publish!

See you soon!

Tragedy Drama - Film Features

Hello!

We decided to research a bit about films like ours and look at the different features to see what we liked or disliked. To do this we chose to watch two tragedy film openings and make notes on the camera angles, mise-en-scene and editing techniques and identified what we wanted to borrow, change or throw away.

The first film we chose was Titanic. For camera angles, we found a lot that we could use. We identified three main camera angles used and decided that they would all be great for our opening in order to create the mood for our film. For mise-en-scene we found also found a couple of things we can use to help build sympathy for the viewers on the characters and situation. Lastly, for Editing Techniques, we only found one thing that we can use, which will also help us to create the mood of the situation. I will now attach a picture of our 'Film Grid' for this film that explains this work in more detail:

The second film we chose was Cyber Bully. For camera angles, we found two ideas that we want to use, one that was not included in the last film. We want to use this in order to held our audience connect with the characters and become aware of the character's emotions. For mise-en-scene we found also two ideas that we want to use, again one that was not included in the last film. We want to use this in order to create an opportunity for the viewers to connect and relate to the characters. Finally, we found another two things that we would like to use however we have decided to change them a little to fit our film. I will now attach a picture of our 'Film Grid' for this film:

We have also started looking more at our genre as a whole and have done research on the overview of features in a tragedy film, popular actors and directors within the genre, the first ever tragedy film made and a timeline of the genre. I hope to get this up in the next few days!

See you soon.

Target Audience Profile

Hello!

As you probably know by now, we hit a big brick wall in our recent planning stage when we started to interview our target audience. We found that our original target of males was not correct, therefore we needed to switch to females, which has a massive effect on our ideas. We originally created a 'Target Audience Profile' about a male called James. With our target changing we needed to create a new profile which we have now completed. 
Firstly we looked back at our notes from our Target Audience Profile lesson that I will upload a picture of here:

We then looked back at our old target audience profile and looked at the things that could be kept and the things that needed changing. We found that most of Emily's lifestyle is very similar to James', however has a big difference in meaning and affect as things affect females differently to males. Also, looking back on James' profile, we realise that many of his traits, with a little tweak here and there, are actually likely to be traits of a female. We think this is because we are a group of four girls, and although we had the basis of a female audience, we chose a male basis, then built female aspects.
Here is the new audience profile of Emily:

Emily is a 19-year-old female. She lives on campus in a room with her friend Lily at Warwick University studying Business. She came here from Milton Keynes college where she studied 4 A-Levels: Business, Media, English and Psychology. She has a part time job in Michael Kors, working three evenings a week. She is currently single and enjoying University life although is interested in males.

Emily spends most of her days revising, however she does allow herself time to hang out with her friends and have some time to herself. She goes home every other weekend to visit her family in Milton Keynes. Her family is large and are very family orientated, caring a lot for each other. This is very important to Emily and she makes sure she always has time for them. When she is in Warwick and has spare days, she enjoys spending time with her friends. They often go out in Warwick in the day to do activities such as shopping and going to the cinema. She hates antisocial people and loves a bit of drama and gossip. She likes to think of herself as a fashionable modern girl. She is a mainstreamer, meaning she shops in all the big brands. At night time, she often goes out for a meal with her friends, usually picking salads, pastas and fish dishes. She would never go for a big meaty meal and hates most vegetables.

In 10 years time, Emily hopes to be high up in a retail business, preferably in the fashion sector. Her goals are to climb up in a retail business to eventually become the boss and then start her own business. Her dreams outside work are to make a good amount of money, settle down with someone and start a family. She also would like to do a bit of travelling when she meets her husband. After University, she would like to stay at home for a few more years until she finds a boy and settles down with him. She then wants to move out of her family home and in with her boyfriend/fiancé somewhere near Milton Keynes so she isn’t too far from her family.

Emily has a TV in her University flat and loves to watch all the big programmes. Her favourites are Holby City, Hollyoaks, Broadchurch and The Vampire Diaries. She also loves films and takes recent trips to the cinema, trying to see all of the currents films with her friends. However, her favourite genre is drama and romance. She loves films about families as they suit her for all genres. In happy films, it makes her like it as she is a family orientated person and so she enjoys watching happy families, and in sad or scary films she enjoys it because it gives her the sympathy and fright even more as she thinks about her own family. She loves the actor Julianna Margulies and always sees the films she is in. In terms of music, she is very up to date. She follows the charts and her favourite artist is Ellie Gouding, her favourite band is The 1975. 

Our next step is to learn more about out genre. We hope to research our genre and create a documentary on this in the near future. We also want to look at openings of films in our genre and evaluate the different aspects, finding things that can be borrowed and improved.

See you soon!