13 Hours (5 Master Editing Technique Mini-Analysis)

 

           In the movie 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, an attack happens on a U.S. compound in Libya, a security team struggles to make sense out of the chaos. The Ambassador's compound is attacked by hordes of heavily armed locals. The only forces willing and able to defend it are six CIA contractors. The movie is filled with action thriller that makes the audience want to stand on their feet. The movie is flourished with editing techniques, camera movements/angles, and much more.

            In the movie contrast can be found, the majority of the time it's found when action is happening. Especially in shootings, the director wants to often show the back and forth of two different scenes. To be more specific, in the movie Jack Silva (main character) and Rone are found together confronting a group of armed men. While confronting each other and increasingly raising tension, contrast (editing technique) is sought to happen, while the two soldiers are talking to the armed men, a group of other armed soldiers can be found driving recklessly fast in a pick up truck, some can conclude that they were rushing to the scene of where the tension was happening. A contrast cut is a strategic type of cut that put together two different scenes. The camera was showing back and forth cuts between the pick up truck and the armed confrontation. The director does this because he wants to build suspense amongst the audience. Video editors create the contrast cut so that they can create a sense of dissimilarity that heightens the emotion of a scene or emphasizes the intention of particular moments. By the spectators watching this contrast, they can already foresee a possible shootout happen between parties.

            Blood is obviously inevitable in these type of movies. It can been seen that blood can act as symbolism. Just by seeing blood dripping down a soldiers body it shows that a catastrophic event has happened or is happening. An establishing shot of the consultant not just represents the location of the area but also gives an insight of where a shootout might occur in the future or any second depending on the tone of the scene. The consultant gets attacked and the Ambassador eventually dies from all the suffocation inside the building because of the fire that was set off by the rebels. While the ambassador was looking towards the door knob, anxiously waiting for any possible intruders a POV shot happens. The director used the POV shot in this particular scene because he wanted the audience to somewhat go through or feel the characters tension. In this specific scenario the POV shot was shaky showing that the ambassador was hurt and was having difficulties breathing. As the contractors returned all bloody up from the deadly attack to the base, Boon was left badly scraped and with major cuts. Boon entered the shower and the bath was just getting flushed down with blood. A close up shot of the flesh coming down was taken and then a cut happened to a close up of one of his wounds where blood was gushing out. The blood and wound acted as symbolism. The director wanted to convey a message of the reality of war. Generally sometimes blood can just be symbolized as death.  

                   The movie 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, is an astonishing action movie that makes the audience feel like they are rideing along the events. The director uses some of the master editing techniques to specifically convey a message to the audience.

Convention (blog post sound project)

     The narrative sound project was a fun and easy going assignment. In this particular project I was influenced by one of the examples that my teacher gave from another student. What they did was Bernie Sanders getting stabbed at a bar. Crazy right. I thought it was very radical and just crazy. I think that's why I liked it. As soon as I saw that I thought of Donald Trump and doing the project based on him. My group partners and I gathered and I introduced my idea first, they were okay with it but we still continued to brainstorm other ideas. My idea was to have Donald Trump arrive at a convention center with the secret service and everything and then have gun shots happen, using our voices. 

      Eventually, my idea was the most stable and reasonable, so we did that. The majority of all the sounds were captured on my phone. Cris did the "potus in route", I did "Make America Great Again", and we all pitched in including Valeria for all the footsteps, screaming, and applauses. I thought it would be best if we find more people to do the screams all together so it can really sound like we are in a convention. I saw a other group doing their sound project and I asked if they could help us out with making more noise and they did. Chris is the one who edited the project and it came out good. It did stand out that this project was pretty fast comparing to others. Usually, projects take a whole class period or sometimes even more, but in this one we were able to have everything set to be edited in like one hour. I do think the most challenging part was not being able to have unlimited word usage. My group and I had to choose what words we were going to use wisely, so that it would be able to convey the message.

Cars 3

     The movie cars 3 is an astonishing film. It's fully animated to catch the audience attention. The targeted audience is young children. In the film, Lightning McQueen sets out to prove to a new generation of high tech race cars that he is still the best racing car in the world.

    The movie has a soundtrack which features "Run That Race", an original song written and performed by Dan Auerbach. The director used this song because the theme of it is about never giving up and always trying your best. The film's score was composed by Pixar's frequent collaborator, Randy Newman. A film score is original music composed and recorded for a film. It's designed to fit the film and its story. In the beginning of the movies, Ligthning Mcqueen has a lot of flashbacks. These flashbacks are created to show the memories that have been made and to represent the past, it helps the viewers better understand present-day elements in the story or learn more about a character. Flashback's also interrupt the chronological order of the main narrative to take a reader back in time to the past events in a character's life. Flashbacks sometimes also contain L-cuts, where the audio from the preceding scene continues to play over the footage from the following scene. A J-cut which does happen also, is the reverse of an L-cut.

      Establishing shots of the race tracks, sets up the scene by showing the settings and location of where the event is going to take place. Establishing shots take up major parts of the movie, almost every major scene an establishing shot happens. Lightening has a trainer called Cruz Ramirez, in some of the scenes where there is serious discussions between the two of them and sometimes with a third party, a master shot  occurs which is vital so that all the characters can be in the shot while they are talking among themselves. Both LM and CR are the main characters in Cars 3. In the scene of LM training on the beach, a long shot was taken near the pier to where LM was getting ready to race. This long shot gives the context of the distance between the cinema screen and the image. In this specific shot in the movie it could be analyzed by others to be an establishing shot but the shot mostly focuses on what LM is about to do not where he currently is. In almost all the times where there is a race where LM is involved there is POV, it gives the view of what LM is looking directly at. The director gives this shot so that audience mostly kids, can feel like if it was them who is racing. They'll feel attached and feel like their in it for the ride. 

     The majority of the movie a significant amount of time takes place in race tracks, in the beginning of the movie and the ending of the movie, there is a big blimp which works as a camera person giving an aerial shot of the event. The shot is taken from a high viewpoint, giving a bird's eye view. Cars 3 is a great movie to watch as a young family consisted of children. It's full of different shots and editing techniques that each convey a specific purpose that is put on by the director.

The Movement

     I was so excited to create a video regarding the 5 master editing techniques. Cris and I decided to be partners, with his editing skills and my great directing we make an ideal partnership. Even though he tends to take a long time editing the videos :(. We had awesome ideas on how to portray the skits but we did have problems on the simultaneity and leit motiff editing technique. We didn't know what and how to film it, so we just left those two things for last. We did come up with the ideas pretty fast except for the last two  techniques.

    What I especially like about this video is that it's the first time I applied the different complex camera angles/edit into a video. In the contrast video, I told Chris to zoom in into my eyes (extreme close up of the right eye) and then it will transition to a grey video, creating the allusion of what I'm thinking in my head. Out of the 5 different editing techniques the contrast was my favorite. But the most fun and hardest editing technique was the left motiff. It took us the whole class period to film all the different scenes.

    

    

     We used the whole entire school to create our films, the gym, weight room, lobby, and hallways. All the videos consisted of close up, zoom, medium shots and etc. The symbolism editing technique took the longest to create. Since there was a shot of both Chris and I, we had to ask a teacher who was sitting in the middle school lobby to hold the camera for us. The film was an absolute success, all the characteristics of the edited video created meaning to the editing techniques.

 So far the 5 master editing techniques has been the hardest film project of the year so far. New camera angles were introduced in this film.

https://youtu.be/OiPKLniudVE

THE MOMENT

   My group and I were excited for this “One Word Film Activity”, we got together and thought of possible words that we could use. A word that first came into my mind was love because the word love is so powerful and it could have multiple ideas which makes it perfect for filming. Well my group decided that we should use a different word, since we are so close to Halloween and it gives out spooky vibes, why not use the word “fear”. As soon as I heard this word it was like a light bulb lit above my head. A tsunami of ideas rushed into my brain.    

                                             

 We finalized with the word “fear” and brainstormed on how the narrative of the video is going to be. With the word fear we know that the showing of emotions is important. When you watch a scary movie what comes to mind. A scary setting with intimidating background noises. Now we were like, we have the word and a general idea, now we have to look for where to film. We got up from the class and searched for possible areas where we could film the video.

We looked around and the cafeteria was busy, next we looked in the gym and it was busy too, then we thought of the auditorium but there’s a class there so we can’t film. We looked at all places on where to possibly film a video about fear. On our way from the gym we remembered that the middle school side of the school was a good place and there was no traffic. But guess what, one of my partners didn’t want to walk back lol. So we just filmed practically outside of the class in a nearby hallway.

    

Before recording, I was thinking of some angles that we can use; POV, mastershot, extreme close up, etc. We started filming and the narrative of the video was that a boy was walking and he felt fear and kept looking around while moving. Multiple types of different shots were taken of him.While he’s moving, creepy sound effects are enacted, to improvise fear into the audience. I did all the camera angles except for the last one of me scaring Chris. One of my favorite shots in the video is the Extreme Close Up because in the shot it showed how scared he was and he turned his body into the ECU. The close up on his foot only while walking, builds some suspense. I did realize that we incorporated a lot of over the shoulder shots. The establishing shot was the wide shot of the whole classroom while him in it. Throughout the whole video we made it clear to show his emotions and location through different types of camera angle shots. The idea of a book being dropped and startling him came into reality. As soon as the book dropped out of nowhere, he ran. Once he came around the corner I was there and scared him! The video clearly represented the word “fear”. The video came out good voila!