#1:

First class of Scene in Cinema for Semester One, 2015. What was said in the first tutorial was that there will be no comments about what the course will involve, no questions and little to no talking. We were divided into groups, and then handed a piece of paper each. Little did we know that each groups was different. On this piece of paper was a task. On the back was a script. We all had half an hour to practice and act out one scene. We had to share the roles of actor/director/camera operator. We had to go by the script and develop a scene within the space we had and with one camera, giving us constraints. During this exercise no one had any idea what was to come of this, it was all a bit vague. However, after sitting down and watching everyone else  do theirs, we were all so different with our approaches. It was interesting how text/script is perceived and interpreted. After watching the actual scenes from the original films, some were similar, however my groups was completely different. After this I realised that it is how people interpret things, which determine the outcome. Now that I think about it in depth I can see why this was the structure of our first class.

 

#2:

To begin this course I had an idea of what I wanted to get out of it. After doing Cinema Studies in my first year, I figured out that I enjoyed deconstructing films or scenes to see how they work, and to know why they are made the way they are. I thought that choosing this course would be a continuation on from the cinema studies pathway, which is an area that interests me. In our first lecture we were shown specific scenes and then had to talk amongst ourselves about the coverage of the scene. Someone in the class could determine what the storyline of the entire film was about, just from the coverage of this one specific scene. After looking through the scenes, you start to notice all of the elements that put the scene together. As a scene opens out, you start to see the wider implications. The main points that i took away from Lecture One are:

-How directors work, their individual style impacts the film significantly.

-This course is all about individual research and practice.

-CONSTRAINTS: All people have to work from constraints, and this is normally where creativity can come from.

-A coverage of a scene is cinematic. The way it is made has its own meaning. Transcends its content.

The second scene we watched is from the film ‘Margret’. This is what was taken out of the scene’s coverage:

-Two shot perspective of camera (from characters).

-Shots are designed so the viewer sees the action at the same time the character does.

-Reoccurring elements such as,  reflections, Bus and Cowboy hat.

-Things graphically change so much over time.

-It is like every shot is a different shot. Like a short film within the film.