Skip to main content

Contextual research: Directors

TAIKA WAITITI

Taika Waititi is probably my all time favorite director. I fell inlove with his work after watching his mockumentary about vampires in New Zeland called "What We Do In the Shadows" and I'm very excited about the sequel " We're Wolves" (we're wolves - werewolves - that's genius). He's also well known for mastering happy sad cinema. He believes that when the atmosphere is tense and uncomfortable that is when we feel the need to laugh most, his goal is to find the lighter form of tragic. Great examples of this kind of tragic comedy are his films "Boy" and "Hunt for the Wilderpeople".  Recently he's known for directing Marvel's "Thor: Ragnarok" which was received pretty well by most (some are unsatisfied because it's more of a comedy than an action film, but that's one of the main reasons why I, personally, liked the film so much). His directig style includes, as he himself has said, very mundane comedy and usually he tweaks the given original script a little bit (shortens the scene: ends it when he starts getting bored by the scene, adds some jokes or comedic situations). He's also known to act in his own films, it may not be the main character, but he writes himself a part. He said, he does it because he's an egomaniac (From experience in this project - acting in something you're directing is way harder than he makes it look).  


KEVIN BRAY

I chose Kevin Bray because he has directed the pilot episode of "Suits" and that is the episode I chose to redirect for this project. Up to this day he has directed 12 episodes of the show, although he stoped directing it in 2016. From looking at the list of other shows he has directed I noticed that there were a lot of detective type of shows ("Suits", "White Collar", "How to get Away with Murder", "Chuck", "Criminal Minds", "CSI:NY" ) a lot of which I've seen and although I have seen numerus episodes that he has directed I can't really tell what is his unique way of directing. Could be the fact that he worked on shows that had pretty much set style of directing (establishing shots, wide shots, shot reverse shot and CU shots). Personally I think that directors can put more of themselves into film and make it their own for example in the films that he has directed ( "All About the Benjamins", " Walking Tall", " Linewatch") has a lot of POC actors and deal with simmilar issues - a cop/detective/sheriff fights against a mob that deals drugs. These films has some comedic aspects but are mostly action films.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Influences DOPs and the genre

BEN DAVIS DOP in numerous superhero films, such as Kick-ass, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Doctor Strange, and Captain Marvel. The films I want to focus more on is Kick-ass and Captain Marvel because the audience gets to see how the main characters become superheroes and that is more relevant to our project "The 7 Billionth Hero". In "Kick-ass" all of the superheroes are just people who don't have any special powers. The Protagonist decides to become a superhero and fight crime and starts a new superhero trend.  There's a lot of interesting POV shots  Mirror POV, when he's practicing what he's gonna say to the bad guys. Phone camera    I particularly like this film for lighting. Most of the fight scenes are filmed in low light and there's a contrast between his everyday life and his superhero life. It's bright, warm and slightly yellowish, but at the same time is very monotone to show the boredom a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Studio Idea

Personally, I found it really difficult to come up with an interesting studio production idea. But because "one idea is not enough" (Brown and Duthie, 2010)  I came up with 3 initial ideas: 1) Guess the song type of game show, but instead of guessing pop songs, the contestants would have to guess classical music. I got this idea from a game my friends and I loved to play and the way my music teacher used to test my class.  2) Travel guide about how to make the most of your trip, places worth visiting and places that are overrated and not worth your time. I got this idea from my sister who travels a lot and from the way she does loads of research about each and every place she visits. 3) Debate/Game show where 2 groups of people debate about nerdy topics ( whats better Marvel or DC, which Doctor was the best etc.). The idea comes from noticing how much rivalry there is between comic book lovers and overall 'nerds'. I feel like this idea is the stronge...
Post a Comment
Read more

JVC camera

During our studio production rehearsals, I was behind the JVC camera. Everyone in our camera crew agreed that it was the best to stick by one camera and master working with it instead of bouncing from one to another. I've never worked with a JVC camera so it was tricky to figure out. The first day I picked it up felt like my first day in uni when I knew very little about cameras, it took me ages to find the on/off switch. To help me better to understand where I can find all of the settings and buttons I took the camera out. I wanted to go through the settings so I would be confident in knowing where I can find certain settings if needed. Before that, I couldn't find peaking on it which helps with keeping everything in focus especially when people move more. Found out that if you turn the peaking on you can only see things in black and white and the peaking colour, of which I wasn't a fan, but at the same time I found out that you can increase peaking on the...
Post a Comment
Read more