In class the two we watched were A Fistful of Dollars and The Abandoned. A Fistful of Dollars starred Clint Eastwood there were a number of extreme close ups and one extreme long shot. The variety of shots used was important to show the setting but to also show that he was the protagonist. The way that we know that he is the protagonist is because right from the start he is seen as the hero. The Abandoned is a horror film and in this the protagonist is a women, this is unusual because usually a protagonist is a man. We know that the women is the protagonist because in nearly every shot they focus on her and in the ones where they don't focus on her, it comes from her point of view.
The scene we watched from A Fist Full of Dollars.
In this project I worked with my colleagues Olivia Searle, Scott Friday, Jodi Smith and Lauren Walke.
In our production I played the protagonist. Our production had to be 20 shots, so we thought up our production and wrote down what would happen in each of the shots then added the camera angle next to them. Finally in our planning process all of us drew five shots in the storyboard, this was to show that we knew everything that we were doing in the scene.
Our scene is a horror film, it's where I the protagonist gets chased by a white mask. The mask appears at the start and it's chasing me. I then manage to get away from the mask by running up the stairs and into a corridor, I then try and open three different doors until I finally open the correct one. I am then inside a black room where the mask is bashing on the door to which I run over slam the open shut and slide down against it only for the mask to appear in the final scene above me.
Our list of shots and storyboard.
I think that the location for this shot was very important, the extreme long shot which we shot outside needed to have a long path which it did as I was running the width of it. It was also important that we shot somewhere which had a door handle therefore I could struggle to open the door. Finally we needed a corridor where there was a lot of rooms in a really compact space. Therefore we used one of the corridors which had a number of locked rooms in.
I think that the character adds an important element to the scene, I think that without the protagonist then this film would be pointless because there is nobody that you are routing for. In our production as the protagonist, the audience would be routing for me because I am the one that they want to succeed and in this case survive. In any horror or dramatic scene it is especially important for a main character but definitely in ours as we are following what the main character is doing.
I got rid of all the dialogue, this wasn't originally the plan but I felt as though the voices weren't as good as I wanted them to be therefore I found a voice over of a distressed girl crying and decided to use that. I also put in two horror tracks in the fact, these tracks create tension and build the scene up especially with the way that they are in time with the movements.
For a lot of the shots the camera was at an angle to me, we did this because we felt as though it looked more professional than having the camera straight on, this way you could get the side profile along with the front. I think that it was important to have the camera at different angle's to show the expression on the faces. In this production the most important aspect was having the protagonist connect with the environment that they're in and for this reason the camera wasn't always needed face on.
We begun the first scene with an extreme close up on my eyes, this is so that we knew who the protagonist was. It is always important to have the protagonist in the first shot so that you are able to identify them right from the start. Our last scene ended with the mask looking as though he was standing over me, this was because it looked as though he had killed me, which was the point in this video as it was a horror.
As the protagonist; she is feeling scared, worried and wanting to get away from the mask. I think that it was important in the scenes that this was shown. Some of the shots are in very enclosed spaces this way it shows the vulnerability of the protagonist. These shots were filmed to show that the mask was getting closer to her, as the camera was. It was filmed like this as it felt like she was being chased by the mask when it was actually the camera.
This is our video
The impact of the extreme close ups was to show the emotion and the panic on the protagonist face, this was to show the amount of pain she was in and the pain and torture that the mask was giving her. The impact of the extreme long shot was that she was running away from him, the camera stayed where it was as it was to make it look as though it was actually the mask. A couple of things changed as we went around this was because of the lack of space which we had, we also adapted some of our ideas to fit what we were doing a lot more than before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ_7br_3y54 - A Fist Full of Dollars - 21st October 2013
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