Practice Extract Essay

In the extract of the television show 24 the director is trying to convey a feeling of suspense within the viewer. The director is also trying to convey a crime thriller genre for the television show. The director wants to create the feelings of suspense for the crime that was committed inside the audience.

            In the first scene it opens to a woman sitting in an interrogation room chair waiting to be questioned. The setting of the interrogation room leaves viewers wondering why she is there and what she did. Not only does it leave readers wondering what she did, but it also leaves readers wondering what she is about to be questioned on and what is about to happen during the interrogation. This feeling of suspense is exactly what the author wants the viewers to feel. The crime aspect of the extract is also presented in the interrogation room. The eye-line match when the officer first walks in the room is another way the author conveys his message of suspense to the viewers. The officer looks at the camera and then the scene shows the camera after he looks at it. This conveys the author’s message of suspense by leaving viewers guessing who is watching the camera and why he looked at the camera. The suspense is in wondering whether he is going to disable the camera or is he going to try to help the prisoner escape somehow without the camera seeing it happen. These questions leave the audience on edge to see what is going to happen next. The score played throughout this scene intensifies the suspenseful feeling the audience has. It makes the extract seem more suspenseful by the music going lower and slower making it seem like something is about to happen. It symbolizes that something interesting in the extract is about to happen and it makes the viewer’s suspenseful feeling soar.

            The next scene is signaled with a shot/reverse shot of the scene moving from the interrogation room, to the officers watching the interrogation, and then back to the interrogation room. This shot shows suspense by the officer’s watching the interrogation faces. Their faces show that they are waiting on something to happen in the interrogation. These expressions incite a rise in suspense in the extract because it makes readers think about what they are waiting on and when is it going to happen. The close up of the officer after yelling at the prisoner shows his emotion of anger and frustration is at an all time high. This raises suspense because it makes the officer seem desperate, causing his next move to be unpredictable. This forces the audience to wonder what he is going to do to get the information that he needs and when will he do it, causing suspense to raise tremendously.

            The next scene is also signaled with a shot/reverse shot of the scene moving from the interrogation room, to the officers, watching the interrogation, and then back to the interrogation room. The dialogue between the officer and the prisoner is heated at this point in the extract making the suspense level rise on what is going to happen next between them. The prisoner begins to speak and tease the officer as he backs up into his chair. While the prisoner is still speaking the officer sits quietly staring at the prisoner. This leaves the audience suspenseful as to what is about to happen in the scene. The audience is suspenseful because they do not know what is about to happen between the two and how severe it is going to be. The score of this scene is another tool used to enhance the suspense in the extract. The music starts to grow louder and louder signaling something is about to happen. This also makes the suspense that the audience is feeling grow larger as well.

            The next scene is started with an action match of the officer tackling the prisoner and choking her. The dialogue of the officer also combines with the choking, asking the prisoner questions. The audience is in suspense to see if the prisoner is going to answer the questions or not. The split screen of the officer choking the prisoner and the other officers running to the interrogation room arises suspense. It does this by having the audience on edge to see if the prisoner is going to answer the questions before the other officers reach them and what is going to happen when the other officers do reach them. These different techniques used in the scene by the director rises the suspense level of the extract, therefore causing the suspense level in the audience to rise as well.

            The director’s theme of the extract is to portray the feeling of suspense from the extract to the audience. This causes for the use of different editing techniques and different camera angles, camera movements, sound, and mis-en-scene in order to convey it. These tools are used in every scene of the extract in order to create the feeling of suspense in the audience, maintain the suspense, and rise the suspense with every moment of the extract.

Final Task CCR Blog

This CCR will explain the journey that my group mates and I went through for this film. Not only will it detail the journey, but it will explain how we expected the movie to be distributed among the masses. It will also show how much I believe I have improved through out the entire year and it will also demonstrate how my editing skills have blossomed by the different edits that I have put in the CCR itself.

Final Task: Movie Opening

This is the final project that we did. For this project we picked our own genre and then came up with a pitch. After coming up with a pitch we came up with different places and ideas on how we are going to create the movie. We then created a script that we were going to follow, but during the movie we went off of the script a little bit. After deciding on everything that we were going to do we chose a couple days to film and got all of our shots filmed. We were right on schedule for us to be almost done with editing. We were going to finish editing the week before spring break ended, but the Corona Virus pandemic caused for us to have to schools cancelled. This caused for a major set back in our project because we had no way of accessing the footage that we already edited. This caused for us to have to use another editing software called Imovie. This was an easy task because we still had the footage that we filmed saved already on the USB and on our phones. Editing on Imovie was actually easier than using the first software, pinnacle studios. It was easier because they had a tutorial that all of us could watch on how to use everything. Also the previous experience of the tools that we used on the last project helped with finding the tools on the new software as well. We also learned how to get different type of fonts and titles from free websites to use for our project. All in all this project helped me grow even more in my experience of editing and filming movies, while also expanding my knowledge of different editing softwares and different titles as well.

Second Project: Music Video

For this project we had to make a music video from a song that we chose. The song that we chose had to be school appropriate and be something that we could make a video to. The music that we decided to use was called Skywalker. We chose this song because it was a song that everyone of us can actually have fun with and a flow of ideas started popping up in our heads. We decided the music video should be a group of friends hanging out and just having fun throughout the day. We did a mall scene, a car scene, and a beach scene. These scenes showed us going out together to the mall, buying clothes and changing for the beach. After leaving the mall it showed us turning up the song in the car having fun and jamming to it. It also showed us at the beach having phone, playing in the water, and talking to each other while listening to music on a towel. The editing process for this video improved from the last time. We had a clue to what we were doing this time because we had done this before. It went a lot smoother because we knew what needed to be done and we also knew how to do it. We did not have a tripod for this film, so we filmed everything by hand. We knew how to add the music since we did it for the last project, and we also knew how to cut scenes to how we wanted them to look. The editing and shooting process for this video was way easier because of the things that we learned from the last project.

First Project: Commercial

This video is the very first project that my group and I completed. It was a commercial project where we had to pick a product that we wanted to advertise. We picked Nestle Pure Life Water for this project. The process was kind of difficult because it was our very first project and we still had to get the hang of things. It was different from learning the tools needed and then actually putting them in play. It took us a while to actually get this video edited because of it being our first time editing. It was a new software that we never used before and it was something that we did not usually do. We had never edited anything before with an editing software and we had never tried to edit anything to the extent where we had to edit this one. We had to find music and we also had to input some good transitions. Not only did we do those things, but we also had to cut some of the videos on the editing software and also close gaps. We had to make sure some of the videos were faced the right way and we even learned how to speed things up and slow them down. Editing was not the only thing we learned. We learned how to shoot certain camera angles that we decided to use. We did this with our different heights and with the equipment we had. We learned how to use a cam recorder and a tripod because these were things they we never used before. In this project it was only three of us in a group: Shania, Kaliyah, and I. Kerin was in another group for this project.