Journal Reflection

This week in filmmaking class we learned many important details about the art of filmmaking. The first important detail we learned about is the art of cutting and pasting together film. My classmates and I watched a video that reviewed movies in which cuts were not pasted together properly. We watched a clip from the movie Goodfellas in which multiple characters sat together at a table and listened to a story. During the story the camera switches angles multiple times in order to give a look at both sides of the table. At one point, the conversation intensifies and the camera switches many times between Tommy Devito and Henry Liotta. During these switches, many mistakes can be seen. It is clear that after cuts, they did not pay attention to where they were and what they were doing during the piece of film before the cut. This resulted in clips not piecing together as well as they could have. For example, the first mistake that is seen is hand position, after cuts, it is seem that Henry’s hands spontaneously changed positions and were in different places. Another problem was the way some characters were sitting, after cuts, characters changed their sitting position and messed with the fluency of the film. It is so important to make sure that clips that had to pasted together flow. Being able to make cuts look like one shot is an art of filmmaking that makes film exceptionally better. Another aspect we learned about filmmaking is the film itself. We learned about types of film strip and how filmmaking worked before the use of digital cameras, and why some filmmakers still use old school to give their films a purposeful look. We learned that large production films like Star Wars used 35mm film. We also learned how film cameras worked in order to give the special aspect that filmmakers love. Old school film strip cameras have many attributes that make recording on film very special. The film camera would consist of two rolls of tape, one roll of tape on the top that was ready to be used, and one roll on the bottom that was already shot. The film also consisted of two pieces of slack that would insure that the tape had no discrepancies in timing. The camera would pull down the tape at an even speed, almost pausing at each film strip, in which the camera would take a still picture on each slide. When these slides would be played back at the same speed they were taken, it would look like a video. I was sick the last day of class last week and I believe I missed out on learning about adobe spark editing. In the future, I would like to learn how to use adobe to edit videos and create special effects. While I have used other editing apps in the past to edit together film projects in middle school, I want to learn how to use other apps and compare them to what I have used in the past.