I wrote up my proposal for this project in a previous post, and so for my presentation, I’m going to bring that along and refer to it as I speak to the class. I won’t necessarily be reading from the paper, but using it to keep me on track, and remind me of what I need to be talking about (important when you’ve only got four minutes!). Paul suggested that I focus a bit more on how my interest is in character and then mention my interest in Edgar Wright and John Hughes as ways of exploring character, rather than having a larger focus on Edgar Wright and his style, so I’ll try to spend a bit more time explaining where my interest in character has come from and how its developed over the semester so far. Of course, I am going to spend a bit of time talking about the two directors, and so I’ve made a small slide show to help me show what I like about them and how I might be able to learn from them. Two of the slides contain gifs of Edgar Wright movies. The first shows his general style through the following gifs:
I think these will help me to explain how these projects will help me to become a better filmmaker, since you can see that there’s real structure to these shots and a lot to take from them in regards to composition, lighting, action, etc.
And the second slide shows a collection of examples of the close up montage, the technique Wright uses that I’m most interested in emulating for my own project, since I think it will provide a really interesting way of showing things about character:
These too will help me as a filmmaker, since there’s lessons to be learnt about creating rhythm, timing shots and framing a close up effectively. I’m just worried about them being too distracting as I’m talking! However I’ve already sacrificed having sound in order to keep the attention on my proposal and not on Wright’s content, so I think it will be okay, and they’ll aid me in explaining my interest.
The final slide is simply a collection of three photos showing John Hughes characters, to better show the kind of character I’d like to look at through my work and the possibilities in regards to costume:
I haven’t planned a whole lot to say about Hughes. I think for the proposal I really just need to mention him in order to express an interest in character aesthetically, not just in regards to narrative. I think this is important as well since I don’t have a focus on dialogue, and it would probably better suit my project to leave dialogue alone, since my real interest is in expressing character through film elements outside of dialogue and voice over. I think I might even have a hard time explaining why I want to incorporate John Hughes’ style when I’m so heavily into Wright’s style of filmmaking, but there’s just something about his characters that really excites me and I hope the slide above can help me when trying to explain this to the class (how can you look at their outfits and not be a little excited??).
