Week Seven - Montage and Blog Reviews (14/03/13)

Today we started off by looking the opening of the film, 127 Hours. The storyline of the film is about a man who is always on the go and never likes to do nothing, and he goes canyoneering without telling anybody where he is going and he gets his arm stuck under a boulder and has to cut his arm off in order to survive. 

The opening sequence for this film is a montage showing lots of different images, such as people running, people cheering at a sports stadium, people praying and people taking part in La Tomatina (the Spanish tradition). All of these shots help to subtly establish the film. I noticed that in a lot of the shots, there were a lot of arms shown, this could be because later in the film it is the man's arm that becomes the reason he is stuck. Also, the shots in the montage are very busy and the people in the shots never stop moving. This could be a contrast to later in the film when the man gets stuck and is the complete opposite of what happens in the montage. 

The music in the opening sequence also fits in very well with the film, especially the lyrics. The lyrics say at one point:

"Take it if it makes you numb
Take it if it makes you come
Take it if it makes you make it perfect"

I think these lyrics fit in well with the film because he is required to cut his own arm off and once he has done this, he may become numb and will save his life because he is freed and is able to get himself some help. 

We were then asked the question, "What is a montage?. The simple answer to this question that a montage is a series of shots that are cut to music and get you into the story. A montage can also change the meaning of an image. For example, we were told about a theory where if you put an image of a woman next to an image of an empty soup bowl, the meaning of the images would change to show that the woman was hungry. However, if you use the same image of the woman and another image of a full soup bowl, it would have a different meaning showing that the woman had food and wasn't going hungry. 

We were also given some research topics that we should look into, these topics were:

• The difference between Chroma Key and Luma Key?
• The relationship between Michael Kahn and Steven Spielberg?
• What was EditDroid?

For the remainder of the session, I started to research into the research topics that we were given, starting with the EditDroid and then moving onto the relationship between Michael Kahn and Steven Spielberg.

Finally, before the end of the session, I was shown a Super 8 project and how it worked and the process of setting up it correctly, I found this very interesting and would like to learn more about these projects and start to use them.