Task 13 - Manipulation of Diegetic Time and Space

Diegetic means that it has something to do with the world of text, such as storylines and speech and non-diegetic is the opposite.

Time manipulation is very important in move editing as it can show a lot of meaning for simple things, such as when a character experiences a flashback or flashforward. Time is paused in the real world whilst the character experiences another time tense. Time can also be manipulated to show that locations have changed as time has passed by or it is used to actually slow time down or speed it up in films.

Time is usually altered in movies to try and make the audience understand how a character is feeling at that given point in time. Usually when time is slowed down it means that the character is experiencing a lot of adrenaline or is having a lot of fast thoughts at once whilst trying to decide something and when it is sped up, they are most likely just letting life flow around them as they could be recovering from a serious wound (like in the game Wolfenstein: The New Order when Captain Blazkowicz is in a hospital recovering from a head injury) or as they travel back in time such as in the Harry Potter films.

Colour can also be manipulated as well. Filters can be applied to films to give them a different look or to make them visually appropriate to the sequence that is being displayed. The Matrix films did that throughout the films. When Neo was in the Matrix itself, there would be a slight green filter applied to make it seem like a simulation of life, and when he was in the "real world" then there would be a slight yellow filter applied to make it look slightly more realistic.

Colour saturation can also be changed to give a scene more or less colour to enhance what is going on in the sequence. A scene in which people are in a graveyard or something similar are more likely to look gloomy and grey. This is because of the mixture of colour saturation, filters and pathetic fallacy which is used to compliment the feelings of the film that are currently being displayed. An example would be that happy scenes are most likely to be in a happy and sunny world where a grim and dark scene would be set on a rainy and dull day.

For our own experimentation with the manipulation of time and space, me and my group recorded our own video in which we tried to speed up the world around Jessica to make it seem as if she was experience time sped up more than everyone else.

The video was quite good. We didn't expect Jess to have robotic movements, however, so it made her look like a robot moving around, but it worked really well. One scene didn't work for me very well though, which was the reading scene. I wanted to put an emphasis on the clock more by enhancing it's detail but I couldn't manage to do that and I'm pretty sure most people watching the video would not notice the clock hand moving really quickly.

We added a small twist at the end to make it seem as if Jess was just going through a derp phase and people didn't notice it until the end where everything goes back to a normal speed for Jessica and she freaks out slightly.

Task 12 - Transitions And Effects

Transitions and special effects can be used to manipulate a sequence in a film. They can be used to distort or change how time or space looks and works and can make the viewer think that the film is going or looks a certain way, when really the way the film is really going is being manipulated by how these transitions and effects are being used.

Transitions are visual effects that are used to switch between scenes. All film makers use a lot of transitions in their films and they all alternate between wipes (where the new scene slowly takes over the screen by covering the previous scene), jump cuts (where one scene suddenly jumps to another one without much warning, this is the most common type of transition), dissolves (where two scenes overlap momentarily and then the old one becomes invisible as the new scene replaces the old one), irises (where a dot becomes a larger and larger circle which shows the scene inside the circle) and fade ins and fade outs (where there is a single colour which fades to a scene and reversed respectively, this transition is mostly used at the start and end of a movie, respectively).

A graphic match/match/raccord (the French term) is when one scene has a shot of an object or space or composition of sorts and cuts to another scene which has a very similar object, space or composition. This helps establish the continuity of action and may sometimes be used to link the two scenes together metaphorically.

The follow shot or following the action technique is where a dolly (a cart on a track which has a mounted camera, sometimes may have a crane to allow for vertical and horizontal camera movement) is used to film moving action, such as a car chase or where characters are moving over long distances such as in medieval war films where two sides are filmed running towards each other. This technique is used to make it easy for the viewer to easily observe the character being followed.

Multiple points of view are used when there are several characters. We tend to see what is going on from their perspective when there is either some intense action going on such as a fist fight or when two characters are conversing during some drama. There is a deleted scene from the first Iron Man film where Robert Downey jr. has just defeated Jeff Bridges and they are on the roof of one of Tony Stark's buildings and they are talking as the camera switches from Tony's side to Jeff's as they talk and struggle to save Jeff from his Iron Monger suit.

Task 11 - Creating Pace With Cross Cutting

For this task we had to film our own video that we had to make into a cross-cutting sequence.
For this video I had the camera do several close-ups on the character's faces that got closer and closer before going back to a wide-angle shot.

I think that everything quite well apart from two things. We used a hair band to make sure we placed the packet of crisps in the same location that they fell so there wouldn't be a jump in its location and that hair band could be seen in a different shot. Another problem we had was thinking of a way to make the crisp packet drop from Jordan's pocket. Of course the version that I used in the video is a little bit over the top but I think it fits the overall theme of how silly the situation is over a small crisp packet.