UW Film Creators Club

Brought to you by the fine members of the UW Film Creators Club (UWFCC)!

Happy holidays, everybody, and to all a happy light show!

-Remy

Check out this hilarious prank pulled by a student and member of UW Entertainers.

Respect to these guys for getting a laugh out of stressed out students during exam time.

BWUAAAAK!

-Remy

A group of University of Waterloo students were faced with an assignment in their Digital Arts Communication course (DAC202): to tell a story through film.

After a month of work, the result of the project is KUAIZI (translation from Mandarin means “chopsticks”).

KUAIZI is a story about a man who followed the path of gang crime and lost his one true love in doing so. What binds people together? What tears them apart? These are some of the questions raised in the film as we follow the main character, ordered to do a hit on an undercover cop.

A story about love, choice, and fate. We hope you enjoy it.

BRUISE STUDIOS TEAM
Kennedy Cheung
Jeremy Choo
Rana Moghees
Melody Mui

CAST
(In order of appearance)
Jeremy Choo
Rana Moghees
Kennedy Cheung
Stephanie Lao

-Remy

Hey guys, check out this great short comedy film which has won a ton of film festival awards. It tickled my funny bone, and I think you’ll love it too. It is a fable about the magic of free parking.

- Tiffany

Robert Krasker recieved an oscar for his exceptional cinematography in the 1949 film, “The Third Man”. Directed by Carol Reed, this film starred Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton (both of “Citizen Kane” fame) in a disjointed post-war Vienna, topped with an unforgettable soundtrack by Anton Karas on the zither.

Richard Misek has written an insightful treatment focusing on Krasker and Reed’s cinematography. With examples of visual geometic linearities in setting and character structures, Misek offers a deeper perspective into one of the greatest films of the classic film noir period. Here are two excerpts from his writings:

“The film’s constantly shifting horizon is of course a product of its Dutch angles. In a close-up, the effect need not be especially disorientating, as close-ups tend to be spatially decontextualised, allowing a single object – for example, a face – to fill the frame. However, in exterior wide shots depicting complex spatial relations, the effect of Dutch angles can be intensely disorientating.“

“The Third Man’s wrong geometries also take place over time. Inevitably, in the fourth dimension, they take a metaphoric turn, manifesting themselves in the discrepancy between the straight lines of Holly’s excursions through Vienna’s innenstadt and Harry’s more fragmentary movements. Holly embodies linearity, he is the main thread running through the film, an almost continuous presence from scene to scene… Harry, by contrast, embodies non-linearity. He is an insider, a central figure in Vienna’s underground network of black marketeers… Narratively too, Harry follows a broken line of appearances and disappearances, playing a cameo role in his own story.“

Misek’s article is called “Wrong Geometries in The Third Man” and can be found here (with helpful frame captures and visual examples)

“The Third Man” in its entirety (shhh…) can be found here on youtube:

- Brian Yuan Zhang

Have you heard about Theatre in Video?

With over 500 hours of online streaming video, Theatre in Video brings the stage to your very home via the interwebs. I was told that they just updated the site with the entire Shakespeare collection, and what’s cool is that you are able to view the entire play, watch only certain acts of it, and even bookmark your favourite scenes.

shakespeare approves.

If you’re into live theatre and drama, it’s definitely a site you should check out.

-Remy

What exactly is a shot?

The shot is a fundamental basic film-making technique. Shots are essential building blocks in story-telling and extremely valuable in making a professional-looking film. They are the fundamental units of fim-making and, when used correctly, shots help the director deliberately portray a comprehensible message to the viewer.

Here are some videos giving examples of basic types of shots such as the wide shot, the medium shot, the close-up shot, and the extreme close-up shot.

Getting a shot to look just right takes practice, skill, and sometimes, just plain luck. To all aspiring film-makers, I’ll let you in on a tip that helped me grow the most as a director and a cinematographer:

Experiment with a DSLR camera.

When you mess around with a DSLR, you start to get a feel for elements like lighting, shutter speed, aperture, focal length, depth of field, composition, grain, motion blur, etc. Mastering the manual features of a single-reflex camera will improve your skills greatly as a film-maker.

But what does making films and videos have to do with a photographic camera? Shouldn’t we be talking about video-cameras and camcorders instead?

Well, the foundations of video are build on directly on the grounds of photography. Video, after all, is created by showing a sequence of individual static images in quick succession to create the illusion of motion. Without going into too much history, you might be familiar with the “zeotrope” and its ability to allow a viewer to see a “moving horse”.

this thing's a zeotrope.

At around 15 “frames per second” or “fps”, our brain is tricked into seeing motion. So an image like the following will display a moving horse.

"The Horse In Motion" - In theatres now.

Of course, we’ve come a long way from the ol’ zeotrope. Today we film at many frame rates. Some popular frame rates include: 24 fps (for that “film look”, also known as 24p), 30 fps, and 60 fps (or 60i).

However, the principle of isolating individual static images with subtle gradual and progressive changes and showing them in rapid sequence has not changed at all, and Pixar accomplishes with the use of a strobe light and their bad-ass Toy Story zeotrope.

Video expands on its forefather, giving the photographer a new dimension that photography lacked: Duration.

With the dimension of time, the photographer is now able to capture motion, allowing for extended narrative capabilities that static photographs were restricted in.

Despite video’s advantage in being able to capture “long photographs”, film is still built heavily upon the field of photography and, before one becomes the next Tarantino, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg or Kurosawa, one can benefit significantly from learning how to operate a manual camera.

Practice your shots well with a camera and learn the ropes. After you’ve mastered the controls, you’ll find that moving from a professional photographic camera to a professional video camera will be a very smooth transition.

Best of luck, and happy filming/photographing.

-Remy

A few weeks ago, the Criterion Collection blog published an article written by director Wim Wenders titled “An Attempted Description Of An Indescribable Film”. It is an interesting example of a director writing about his own creation.

While it is difficult for any artist or creator to describe their own works, Wenders’ realization of concept and form is as abstract as it is poetic. Here is an excerpt:

“THE SKY”?
The sky above it is the only
clear thing you can understand.
The clouds
drift across it, it rains and snows
and thunder-
and-lightnings, the moon sails through it
and sinks, the sun shines on the divided city,
today, as it did on the ruins in 1945
and the “Front City” of the fifties,
as it did before there was any city here,
and as it will when there is no longer
any city.

The rest of this treatment can be found here.

The trailer for Der Himmel uber Berlin – Wings of Desire (1987) dir. Wim Wenders:

- Brian Yuan Zhang

An amazing documentary with local perspectives on the realities of accessing health care services in french for francophones living and studying in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario (Canada).

Sorry, Anglophones… no subtitles here, but at least you enjoy the sexy sounds of the language of love, non?

-Remy