How To Do A Film Analysis.

March 19, 2009 · Filed Under Entertainment, Movies · Comment 

It seems like the two film analysis that I have done became very popular among readers so I will teach how to quickly do a film analysis of any movie you watch. There are different categories or things that you can focus on to analyze a movie but I will only mention the easiest ones.

Colors

The easiest thing to find in a movie is color patterns. The use of the color red usually means love, sex, passion, anger, blood, death. Depending on the movie you will notice. But this isn’t always the case, the director might use the color in a different way or have little or no meaning. In the movie Do The Right Thing by Spike Lee, he uses the color red to show heat. You could take as an example the movie The Sixth Sense which uses the color red a lot in the scene where the kid and the mom are in the kitchen (near the start of the movie). Some movies might use a combination of colors and are used to set different moods of characters throughout the movie. Next time you watch a movie focus on the colors used and if they have a specific meaning to the movie.

Camera Angles

Camera Angles are a bit more complicated to understand and see. A low camera angle makes someone look taller but more than that it makes someone look important, superior. It is usually used with main characters of action movies. Sometimes a big villain might have a low camera angle to show how big he is. On the other hand, a high camera angle gives the meaning of not too important, if it is zooming out then they are usually loosing importance. Always pay attention to something that is in the frame for more than two seconds, it usually means something important that will have a meaning latter on in the movie.

Motion

Motion is a very tricky case because the camera usually moves a lot but in same cases it does have a special meaning. When the camera is moving away from a person (usually from a top view) and makes the object/person smaller and smaller it means that the person is getting less important or is getting lost, usually something negative. Zooming into somebody gives importance to the that picture, the director wants you to see details so pay attention to them. If a camera moves 360 degrees around a person/object, it usually means change, something is changing or is about to change. Mostly used when someone realizes something the camera does a 360 around the person. Typically in society everything goes left to right, it also applies to pictures. Most scenes you will see will have people walking left to right for the most part, if things are moving from right to left then it is something odd happening. Same way you would consider something is happening if people are moving away from the camera and not towards it.

These are some simple tips of things to look at when analyzing a film. There is a lot more thinks to take into consideration and some are far more complex than others. I might publish a second part to this.

Yasser

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Watchmen.

March 7, 2009 · Filed Under Entertainment, Movies · Comment 

★★★★☆

Yesterday I went to see one of the most hyped movies for 2009, Watchmen. I went to see this movie without having a clear idea of what the movie was about, all I knew is that it was based on a DC Comic book and it is about Super Heroes getting killed and who protects them. I must warn you that this movie is 2 hours and 30 minutes long and it moves at a slow paste. That doesn’t mean that the movie is bad, it actually gives the movie enough time to describe and explain each character in the movie and continue on with the story. The movie has an excellent plot, a bit complicated if you don’t pay attention and some say it gets a bit boring at certain times but I disagree. The movie is good, the action scenes were also pretty good. Overall the movie is a B, it doesn’t live up to the big hype it had but it is still not a bad movie.

Yasser

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