Kurt's Blog

     The Twilight movie series has been the subject of a ton of hate over the years. It gets a lot of criticism for it's poor writing and bad acting, and admittedly, I can agree those things may be a bit of a struggle for the movies. But what I think they succeed in, and what I truly believe made the movies so popular, is their use of cinematography.      For this post, I'll specifically focus on a scene from The Twilight Saga: New Moon. I'm not lying when I say this is one of my favorite movie scenes of all time. The scene takes place directly after the main character, Bella, gets dumped by her boyfriend. Bella takes this very hard, and soon becomes depressed and stuck in her room. The scene shows the passing of time for her through this depression.     I cannot overstate how good the cinematography in this scene is. First, let's focus on the use of the seasons changing outside Bella's window. Sure, a movie could just say "3 months later" or hav...

     In reading about editing in cinema, I began to think of movies that I liked that had a good use of editing. After thinking about it, I concluded that Ferris Bueller's Day Off has some of my favorite editing tricks that were used to create really great scenes. It's hard to describe exactly what makes the editing so great in this movie, other than that it really helps make the end product more entertaining, and that's a solid goal for anyone making a movie.     The first scene of the movie I want to highlight is a scene in which a character finds an intruder in her house, an intruder that the audience is meant to dislike and lightheartedly make fun of. When the woman in the house finally sees this intruder, she kicks him in a sensitive area, and the film uses creative editing cuts to make this scene even more enjoyable:     Another scene I love the editing of is a scene towards the end of the movie. The main character is sprinting home before his p...

     A funny thing happened when I looked into the Moving Pictures chapter on sound. Before I even read it, I knew I was going to use the elements the book talked about and connect these elements to composer Hans Zimmer to show my appreciation for him. However, in reading the chapter, I saw that the book already mentioned Zimmer on their own! That is how you know a sound composer is truly great and has made a large impact on cinema.     Some of his most notable movie scores in my opinion are The Lion King, Finding Nemo, and the Pirates of the Caribbean series, however my favorite movie score of his is his score from Interstellar. There is just something about the music in that movie that represents the ideas of the film so much. Interstellar is a movie about space exploration and curiosity, and somehow the score displays those stories and emotions better than even the movie did. It's so powerful how music can tell a story like that, and no song achieves it bette...

     In the movie that my group made for the fascination project, I was one of the actors in the mini film. It was an interesting and fun experience, and it actually took more thought and planning than I was expecting it to. Furthermore, after reading the chapter on acting in Moving Pictures , it's fascinating to see how many solidified acting strategies that me and my group actually used.      First of all, one thing that my group definitely had was limited time for rehearsals. We really had to just plan our scenes on the fly and do the best we could in the moment to act out the scene a way that best fit the ideas in our heads. In reading the textbook, it's really fascinating to see that's common practice in cinema as a whole, and that figuring out how to act out a scene very quickly is something that's necessary to succeed as an actor. It's also fascinating how my group used the method of blocking without even knowing it was a thing. We just naturally pla...