Unit 1

For my arts challenge I have look into the requirements of directing. I believe that I have some strengths that would make me a good director such as an interest in photography and a drive to try and create interesting stories that people can connect with and with evoke a powerful effect on my audience.
I have been part of several short film projects with friends and school and I'm in the Pre production stages of creating a film as part of a course for the British film institute. This has helped me look at film production on a more professional and looked at ways to plan it a lot more effectively.
From this course I have also learnt about the other roles of film making that are important for directors to understand if they want to be able to oversee the crew and make sure that every part of the film works well.
To try and further  my ability as a director I have been looking at lot of interviews and behind the scenes features for films by some of my favorite directors (Wes Anderson, Edgar Wright, ect.) And I have found out how the importance of cinematography and editing, can be used to create an effect that actors cannot by themselves.
In Edgar wright's films for example, whilst he is always sure to have a funny script, alot of the quirkiness and humor come from the visuals and how they are used in combination with sound and editing. For example, there is a scene from Sean of the Dead, where the protagonists try and protect themselves from a zombie by beating it with pool cues, whilst this doesn't sound particularly funny, by having all the movements in the scene in time to "Don't stop me now" by queen, a sense of ridiculousness and joy is created offering viewers a chuckle at what other films would take so seriously.


He also uses matching scene transitions to create fluidity and sometimes humor. It also shows skill as a director for knowing when to use these kinds of cuts and when not to. For our film as part of the BFI course we tried to do two different matching scene transitions and whilst one of them looked quite good and flowed relatively well. the other felt clunky, with the two shots not being similar enough for it to give the right effect

Christopher Nolan Analysis

Christopher Nolan is one of the most successful and acclaimed directors of the 21st century. He has gone from making films on the tiny budget of $6,000 which make only $48,000 to handling one of the biggest franchises of all time (Batman) and making films that would draw in over $1,000,000,000 worldwide.
His second film Memento was a much bigger success than his first film (following) it tells the story of an amnesiac trying to find the killer of his wife and avenge her murder. The film's main selling point and most interesting feature was the way in which the narrative was presented/ film was presented: viewers are shown the story backwards. Nolan creates a narrative that is presented in one a reverse chronological order, with each scene leading more and more into the past as opposed to the future. Critics loved the film with it achieving 4 and 5 stars from most reviewers and audiences were also enthralled with the films box office being $25,000,000, which was 520.8 times more than his previous film.
The success of Memento was down to it's interesting an unique technique to presenting a narrative, the story of the film wouldn't have been nearly as interesting if we were told it chronologically. I have decided to also try and see if I can present films in a non-chronological format and see which way would be most effective when presenting the narrative. Due to the fact that I have a low budget and less manpower my film would follow a lot more simplistic story-line and be limited to a few locations. My plan would be to think of a story in chronological order and then from that point try and write a screenplay which is the point in which I would play about with chronology.