RSS Feed

As Simple as it Gets.

February 24, 2014 by bjh@uoregon.edu   

MediaStorm’s fantastic embed code that was much hyped doesn’t seem to be working. Please go here to see the film that I am talking about.

After seeing Brian Storm speak last week, I wanted to check out MediaStorm for my weekly inspiration this week.  I want to start off by talking about the MediaStorm website, it is clean and easy to navigate.  I personally had never been to the MediaStorm site before, but for someone who had never been there it was easy to figure out.  Exactly what we should want in the websites that we visit.  I was able to easily find their videos, to things that were done by commission.  I also took some time to browse the training videos that Storm had talked about at the end of his talk.  I plan to watch as many of these as I can, they can be very useful for any filmmaker no matter how experienced they might be.

Now lets talk about this video.  When I say in the title that it is as simple as can be I am not lying.  These are simple one camera set-ups filming New Yorkers talking around town in the wake of the September 11th attacks.  These are genuine feeling that are being expressed by the people that are being filmed, even though they know they are being filmed as some of them, like the younger man at the beginning, will look to the camera.  But what is interesting about how the filmmakers made this film is that it’s not clean shots that they went for, instead they set up their cameras as if they are watching the people from across the room, allowing the people in the shot to just have their conversations without the feeling of being filmed.

I think the best shot of the film was not the argument at 6:20 between the two women, although that did have the most emotion clearly.  In fact it is the moment with the mother and her little girl around five minutes in.  You only see the girl’s face in an over the shoulder shot of the mother, as if the filmmakers are putting us into the shoes of the mother for a moment.  It is the only shot like it in the film and that is why it is really significant and lends the most emotional moment in the film.


»

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Skip to toolbar