Term 2: Week 2: of soaps, white balances and vampires

Monday

I loved the lesson with Kim - it was great to talk to someone who is right now writing for television which we see. There was a particularly nice moment when Meg revealed her favourite storylines from Hollyoaks and it turned out to be one Kim had written!

Rather bizarrely I found myself attracted to one of the least glamorous roles she described - that of script editor. They can be terrible apparently, but I rather like reading others' writing and tweaking and helping to develop it.

In the afternoon we learnt about one of the many mustacioed men who pioneered America's film industry. My new favourite film is "The Eagle's Nest": a true comedy classic! The comparison between 1902 and 2010 was very nice, especially since Gavin and Charlotte had paid such attention to the detail.

Tuesday

More lighting, more feelings of desperate inadequecy, although less and less as we learn more. The concept of colour temperature and it's counterintuitive way of being described (orange is a cold colour?) still makes me make this expression 0_o but I felt ok putting up the lamps and doing the white balance. I'm still impressed by how pretty even the simple images we are experimenting with are.

In the afternoon I had a lovely little tutorial with Gav, which reassured me that I hadn't been going wrong. Still, looking back at my edit it needs more work - more variety in the shot lengths and shapes.

Wednesday

Bucking the habit of months, we were in in the morning and the subject at hand was Reality. Yep, all of it. Pretty heavy stuff.

It's odd to think of such a staple of tv being invented, but of course someone had to be first, and it turns out it began with the investigation of mysteries in America. And, loathe it or hate it, reality tv has undoubtedly had a huge influence on what we watch; it's become so much of the landscape that there are dramas based off it and parodies everywhere.

Friday

In which Nosferatu scares the pants off me.

I don't know whether if it was the eerie cinematography, Max Schreck's utterly unnerving performance or the music*, but this still works as a horror film. Not quite fainting-in-the-stalls bad, but enough that I was left well unsettled.

I think that among all the rest of the brilliance of the cinematography (even if the colour washes were a bit weird) and the set design and the editing, what it really proves is the power of not showing. Count Orlak is creepy and scary, but you never see him doing anything particularly violent and the most blood is a slight cut on someone's finger.

*And this seems to be a running problem - except for Charlie Chaplin, most of the silent movie music I've heard gives me a headache. Please DVD companies, think of the viewer!


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