British Film Institute

The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK. They use lottery funds to support film production, distribution, education and audience development, They celebrate the best of British film-making by; holding festivals displaying their work, putting peoples work onto DVD’s and releasing them,  and lastly cinema programming.

They display all kinds of help on their website and show people how simple it can be to get into the film/TV industry. Every year they release 12-15 new titles – a mix of restored classics and new releases that would otherwise struggle to get theatrical distribution. We also hire out films from the BFI National Archive for festivals, events and education screenings. Here are some of them this year:

• The Shining (by Stanley Kubrick)
• It Always Rains On Sunday (by Robert Hamer)
• F for Fake (by Orson Welles)
• The Lodger (by Alfred Hitchcock)

(info found out at BFI website)

Semiology

Semiology is using signs/symbols to express emotions/actual things so that everyone understands. For example, a picture of a pipe isn’t actually a pipe; it’s just a picture, whereas if you had the pipe in your hand, it would be the literal thing. Roland Barthes was a philosopher who used semiology on his films.

The physical element object (what it’s made of) is the signifier.

Meaning is the signified, and is just the object/whatever is in the frame.

Objectivity – this is where the director is more detached from the emotion in the scene. For example, Kubrick did this so he would not focus on the emotion on someone’s face, therefore he would zoom out and focus it on the room overall and have the character in the corner etc.

Subjectivity – this is where the director attached to the emotion and would use close ups in the shot to connect with the character. Spielberg uses this technique a lot in his films.

Lighting

In Will’s lesson, he taught us everything we needed to know about how to light a scene. Below is everything I learnt from that lesson:

3 point lighting:

1. Key Light
2. Fill light
3. Backlight

There are two types of light:

1. Natural (sun)
2. Artificial (torch, lamps)

You use a backlight for separation so it makes the main object you want to stand out more 3-D. The key and fill light are usually on opposite sides of the set, but both on a 45 degrees angle on the subject your pointing at. The key light should always be 100% light on the subject whereas the fill light would be 50% or less on the subject.

Hard light & soft light are natural lights. Hard light would be on a sunny day without any clouds in the sky and the light would be bright. Soft light is more when there are clouds in the sky, or its dawn/dusk when the sun isn’t that bright.

4 different types of lighting;

• Tungsten (normally the light bulbs that you have at home & makes a blue colour)
• Fluorescent (greenish tinge when shining in a frame)
• LED
• Daylight

Knowing all of this, I could successfully go away and correctly light up my own scene.

Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick is an American film director and has directed over 15 films and has written and produced over 10 films as well. He mainly directs horror movies and documentaries, and has worked with famous actors such as Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. As a child he was considered intelligent even though he had poor grades, and in his last year of school his attitude changed and so did his grades. After that his father introduced him to chess and he quickly became very skilled at it. Chess would become an important device for Kubrick in later years, often as a tool for dealing with recalcitrant actors, but also as an artistic motif in his films. Kubrick started off as a photographer at 13, and by 17 he got offered a job at Look Magazine as a apprentice photographer and then later joined with a friend, Alexander Singer, to go into the film industry and that resulted into his first documentary in 1950, ‘Day of the Fight’. He was offered various big directing roles but decided to turn some of them down, for example, the sequel to ‘The Exorcist’ and insisted on making his own horror, ‘The Shining’ which is still very popular to this day. Throughout his career, he always worked on ‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence’, and kept improving it as the advanced filming technology was brought in. Unfortunately he died from a fatal heart attack in 1999, so his good friend Steven  Spielberg finished the film off as Kubrick had asked Spielberg’s expertise on the film many-a-times. 

Below is a list of all of the films he has had a role in:

Eyes Wide Shut, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Lolita, Spartacus, Paths of Glory, The Killing, Killer’s Kiss, The Seafarers (short), Fear and Desire, Day of the Fight (documentary short), Flying Padre: An RKO-Pathe Screenliner (documentary short). 

 

Joan Baez

Whilst watching the sic-fi films, Joan Baez was the main soundtrack that the films used. Even though Baez is a folk country singer on a sic-fi film, it sets the mood for the viewers watching it. She is an American folk singer, songwriter, musician, and a prominent activist in the fields of human rights, peace, and environmental justice. She has had her music played on over 30 films, and are mainly there to set the mood of the viewers; these genres are sic-fi, documentaries and TV series. 

This is good to know because when I come to making my own films in the future, I can research the genre my film is and then what type of songs other directors put in their films. 

Defence of the Realm

10 key narrative points:

• Car chase at the start.
• Wen Nick gets captured and taken into questioning.
• When someone had broken into Vernon’s house.
• When someone’s watching Nick from the opposite building .
• When Nick gets captured and taken into questioning
• When Nick’s house then gets trashed/broken into. 
• When Nick confronts the other journalist about the secret.
• When Nick chases the other two men. 
• Vernon’s death.
• MP’s sketchy business with an unknown woman, and then he resigns.

All of these main points are the building blocks to start making a narrative to a film. 

John Grierson

John Grierson was a very successful film-maker and mainly produced mainly documentary/factual films like Night Mail. We watched Night Mail in class, and Grierson seemed to introduce a new style of documentary film. For those of you don’t know, Night Mail was a short film about the Post Office delivering mail from London to Scotland. Because the people in the film weren’t going about their business like most documentary’s, Grierson had them acting in the documentary. I think because he added this into his film, it gave the workers more depth and showed the audience that this was a real job with real people, and that it wasn’t all done by machines.

Grierson was a very successful and had worked on the production of over 1000 films like Drifters (1929), Miss Robin Hood (1952) and Man Of Africa (1953). He has influenced people like Edgar Anstey and Harry Watt who also famous documentary film makes, and he has also inspired me in thinking of new and different ways of what films I want to make in the future and how I make them.

Similarities between; 2001 (A Space Odyssey), Silent Running, Dark Star & Moon

The obvious similarity between these 4 films is that they are all sci-fi genre’s. They all had their advanced technology; with talking robots and the ability to fly through space for a number of years. 2001, Dark Star and Moon all had computers that they could interact with, whereas Silent Running could only tell the computer commands, but the machine only responded with that command they were told. Only Dark Star involved comedy and they other three films were more darker, making Dark Star more enjoyable to watch.

Similarities and differences between; 2001 (A Space Odyssey), Silent Running and Dark Star

With all of these films (2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running and Dark Star), they all were the same genre; Sci-fi.

As they were all set in space, there was the inevitability of malfunctions to do with the computers/machines that essentially had their own ‘minds’. They were all gloomy and dim which is portrayed through the dark space that they’re surrounded by, and also through the attitudes of the actors on the ship as they all didn’t seemed too pleased that they were in space. The costumes that the actors were wearing were all just white which also is mirrored in the decoration of the ships. Throughout the films, there was little music, but when the music was introduced it was ‘futuristic’ and caused tension throughout the film.

Differences throughout the films where that all of the visual qualities where different; in Dark Star and 2001, you could tell that they were low budget films and the ‘special effects’ weren’t like modern day sci-fi films, e.g. Battleship and Men In Black films. In all of the films they didn’t really go into the background of each of the characters, but there was a little story about them in Silent Running. Also, 2001 and Silent were more serious, whereas Dark Star ended in some comedic way (as the characters ‘surfed’ into the unstable planet).

Overall, these films had their setting similarities and budget differences. I would say my favourite out of these films was Dark Star, but I won’t be watching any of them again!