About Music:
We choose <看>as our background music, mainly because its lyrics are very suitable for our main theme. At the ending of this song, there is a drama monologue.
看镜中人 朱颜瘦
看爱与恨 新与旧
看灯如昼 泪湿透
看谁来约 黄昏后
It is an ancient poem. Its main meaning is that I have been waiting for many years, from young to old. I used to love you and hate you. I used to sit in front of the dressing table from day to day, and the tears soaked the clothes, but now I no longer have any expectations for you.
About some details in our video:
Wang kar-wai has created two characters in his film <In the mood for love>, one is the Su Lizhen’s husband, the other is Zhou Muyun’s wife. The two characters never appear in this movie, but director uses conversation between Su lichen and Zhou Muyun to make audience believe the existence of the two virtual roles. We learned this and we also set up a virtual role outside the screen. By showing the character’s changes of emotion, we characterise this image who is the character’s lover.
Besides, the character Su Lizhen in the movie <In the mood for love> have wear 26 exquisite cheongsam. Each cheongsam has different meanings, they represent the emotion changing of Su Lizhen. In our video, we also learn this and our costumes represents the character’s different emotions.
The green costume : girl, youth, love begins, expectation, joy
The red costume : getting old, love ends, disappointment, sadness
This video inspires us to design some dancing movements in our video, it is also a traditional Chinese dancing. Because our model is not professional dancer, this video helps us a lot.
I watched some film stills, some were taken by Cindy Sherman and some were taken by Gregory Crewdson.
<Untitled film stills> By Cindy Sherman
The colour black and white and the structure of this photo all have an obvious contrast, even the cups on the table are placed in order. The light behind the figure is in stark contrast to her black dress, highlighting the character in the picture. Every place in the room is evenly distributed in black and white.
Light comes from upper left corner, lower left corner and above, that highlights the model in the picture.
<Twilight series> By Gregory Crewdson
This series is quite excellent, they all have suitable depth of field and that makes them look more meaningful. And there’s also a spotlight strengthen the presence of the model in the picture.
About essay film:
An essay film is actually a view, an experiment, a mediation or something personal. When I have not knew more about the essay film, I guessed that it was a kind of vlog. But it is totally different from a vlog. Vlog records the life or something others and it does not need people’s point of view, but the essay film must represent a single strong personal point of view. And the essay film must have words in the form of dialogue or text, the text must represent the author’s attempt to work out some reasoned line of discourse on a problem. Besides, the overall language of the text needs to be as eloquent and as interesting as possible. When we shoot an essay film, we also need to pay attention to the construct-ed-ness of our work.
Group development 2:
Our group shoots all the footage for three times and all the shooting processes were in the same studio. In addition to the footage, we also recorded some interesting behind-the-screen videos. I did a little bit editing on it and that was quite a good memory for us.
Introduction about Beijing Opera :
Peking Opera is the most dominant form of Chinese Opera which combines music, vocal performance, mime, dance and acrobatics. It arose in Beijing in the mid-Qing dynasty. (1636–1912) and became fully developed and recognized by the mid-19th century. (Major performance troupes are based in Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai.)
Peking opera features four main role types, Sheng 生(gentlemen), dan旦 (women), Jing净 (rough men), and chou丑 (clowns). Each of the four main role types are divided into more different roles depending on the age, personality, and the status of the person playing the role. Our video mainly focused on Dan. There are a few different kinds of Dan in Chinese Opera. The commonly seen ones are Qingyi (verdant-clad)/Zheng Dan(straight role), Hua Dan (flowery role), Daoma Dan (sword-and-horse role), Wu Dan (material role), Lao Dan (old role), Cai Dan (colourful role) and Huashan. We mainly imitated the makeup and costumes of Huashan, It is a new type of Dan developed from the artistic characteristics of Qingyi, Huadan and Dao Madan since the 1920s.
