Blog #4

I chose to analyze the scene from the movie Phone Booth in which actor Colin Farrell is confessing his love affairs and his deepest insecurities towards his loved ones in front of a humongous crowd in New York City.

Stuart Shepard (Farrell) is a public relations man who is being threatened by an unknown caller in a phone booth. The caller knows Stuart very well and begins to give him orders which if does not accomplish, the caller will trigger the sniper from an unrevealed location and kill Stuart.

In this scene the caller had just told Stuart to publicly admit what he really feels of himself. Stuart goes on to reveal how materialistic and selfish he is, and goes on to admitting his love affair with a woman named Pamela (Katie Holmes), to his wife Kelly (Radha Mitchell), whom are present in the crowd surrounding the phone booth Stuart is in.

I chose this scene to work with, most importantly because the whole movie is shot in one space only. To entertain viewers for an hour and a half  with a film that unfolds in one single space is challenging, but the movie manages to develop in a positive way thanks to the actors performance.

In this particular scene we have a slow piano playing with a sorrowful tone that goes well with the feeling of the scene. The camera goes from Farrell to Mitchell and back in a one person conversation. It focuses on Farrell when he speaks, and then on Mitchell for the reaction of his words. In that same way, the camera goes from Farrell speaking to Holmes reacting and back. The camera makes it look like its a third person who is witnessing a conversation as we all do on a regular bases.

The camera also takes several shots of the police officers, news reporters and a crowd of people who are silently witnessing the confessions. Theses shots are not wide but not too close, they are at a moderate distance to show abundance of people.

Because the scene is mostly just Will Farrell talking, the shots are close on his face to concentrate on sadness and desperation and on the faces of whoever he is talking to, to highlight dismay. There are occasional zoom-ins when he has a long line to say. And sporadically, we have shots from a wide distance that includes him and the crowd from above them.

As I mentioned earlier, the majority of the movie is shot in one location, and for that, the camera angles the crew chooses must add on to whatever the scene is about. It has to compliment the acting more than it would in other sets.

assignment3

Assignment #3 from Luis Cuevas on Vimeo.

Audio Project

media first assignment from Luis Cuevas on Vimeo.

Field trip to the MoMI

STOP MOTION ANIMATION

The stop motion animation activity was the most interesting part of my visit to the MoMI to me, which is why I have decided to speak more about it in this blog.

Naturally, stop motion animation is the art of photographing a non-moving object in a series of still frames. When all the images are taken and played, the object seems to have taken life and appears to be moving by itself. Stop motion animation can take weeks to film, which in conclusion can give us as far as five to ten minutes of footage from that period of time (the first episode of South Park was made via stop motion; it nearly took four months to do so, leaving the creators to continue producing the series digitally).

One of the first stop motion animation pictures dates back to 1909, with a film called “Princess Nicotine,” directed by J. Stuart Blackton, where he animated matches and cigarettes as they move around the screen by themselves in the film. Another pioneer of this field was Willis O’Brien, who had successfully filmed dinosaur themed animation early in his career, and later on would be hired as a special effects supervisor for the famous movie, King Kong.

To incorporate humans into the film along with the non-moving objects, filmmakers would shoot the already saved footage onto on side of a screen, and then with a second camera on the other side of the screen, decorations would be added to the frame, and the actors too would act along to whatever was happening in the rolling footage (Creation by O’Brien is a good example).

Ray Harryhausen was another big name introduced to the stop motion filming. He began with designing animation directed towards a young audience. As the years went by, Harryhausen paired up with O’Brien to produce more noteworthy films, such as Mighty Joe Young, which won O’brien an academy award. Afterwards, Harryhausen then introduced mythology into filming, along with producer Charles Schneer, with their most successful film, Jason and the Argonauts, a film that enthralled crowds all over the country.

https://vimeo.com/76698133

Colors light up the world. They're the tools a stylist uses after he/she is done with the blue prints of what to wear. A painter puts them together and blends new ones to make a better impression of the landscape he focuses on. We all have a favorite color, and there's certainly way more of them than what a 64 Crayola set carries. But I'm a simple guy. Overwhelmed by the endless buffet of colors I have, I like to stick with the colors we see on a daily bases: black, grey and white.

When I think of a great portrait picture, my preferences fall under elegant and natural. A smile caught in the middle of your laugh can go farther than a smile practiced every morning in your bathroom mirror. That said, combining the formality of black, white and grey colors, I can catch a hint of elegance in my portraits a emulate the fashion ads I walk by on my way to anywhere.

I wish to convey just that in my portraits; regardless of your sense of style, we can capture who you are without the need of hue in the frame. Whether its are a rocker into mohawks or a business man showing if his suitcase, under the influence of black,white and gray,  it shows us enough without showing us that much to begin with.