Grace's Blog

This week in class, we were to watch a documentary called The Social Dilemma. I liked this documentary because it took a topic that many teens are familiar with and added new information that was surprising to me. I know that many teens struggle with social media addiction but I never really knew the scientific aspect behind it and how it is like you are being controlled through your different social media platforms. As I was watching this documentary, it made me nervous about how my social media is being monitored by others and how that is affecting me. When you really think about this, it is scary knowing that your social media is controlling you as a person, which can lead to those mental illnesses.  Something that I learned while watching this documentary was that your social media really does track everything, including how long you look at a post. That is crazy to me that the people behind social media have the power to do this because it is kind of scary that they can have a...

 This week in class we watched Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg. It has been a long time since I saw Jaws for the first time, so it was nice to watch it again. I really enjoyed the film because of the excitement of the action on the screen as we watched the film. Jaws had many different things in it that made it fun to watch. Something interesting about this film that I thought Spielberg did great was incorporating different sound effects into the film. I like how thrilling Jaws was at times because I enjoy a film that has me on the edge of my seat.  While watching Jaws, I made a connection to another film that we had watched earlier in the class. The film that in my mind was similar to Jaws was The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Both films had started with someone being devoured by a shark. In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, it was his best friend, and in Jaws, it was a random girl. Something that both films share in common is that throughout the course of the movie th...

The first aspect that we incorporated into our film was the Cinematography. The reading on cinematography describes it as the arrangement of objects and setting within the frame of the camera to achieve balance and visual interest. Something that we had to do a couple times was different takes because someone would either mess up or laugh during a scene that we were trying to film. One of the aspects of cinematography is deciding if your film is going to be in black and white or in color. For our film, we choose black and white because we believed it would fit better into our genre of mystery/thriller. The last aspect of cinematography that we focused on was the different shots that we took. The first scene of our film we had zoom is shots of those pictures of those people in Merner. Another type of shot we had was overhead. I think these different types of shot added to our film and made it more interesting to watch. The second aspect of film that was incorporated was Editing. Editing...

 The week started off with us not having class on Monday. This was probably good for the people that needed to continue to finish up on their projects. It was nice to be able to not have to worry about it because my group was the first to present last week. Since we did not have class, I was able to spend Halloween with my family. It was nice and I cannot wait to see everyone's projects as they present them.  In Wednesday's class, we were able to view 2 groups' fascination projects. I loved being able to see how much time and hardwork that my classmates really put into making their projects perfect. Another aspect I loved was how involved all the people were in their projects, by them all acting in their films. It was interesting to go from just my group's genre of our film, to seeing the different genres of the other groups' films that my classmates created. Both groups that went today did a great job and each of them had different aspects about their films that I ...

 This week in class we continued working in our groups on our films. On Monday, we did not have class because we were to work on our project. My group met this day to find a new location because our original location was not going to work out because there was always a class in the spot where we wanted to film. We decided to try Merner and it actually worked for us. I feel like it made our film even better because of some of the different spots in Merner helped added that mysterious vibe we wanted for our film. We ended up getting our entire movie filmed, so that was great.  Then, we went into Wednesday's class with our clips taped, but we still had to edit our film together. In class, we learned how to use Adobe Express, which is a pretty easy editing tool to use. Something that we went over was how audio and video are on different tracks when we are editing them. We worked on putting our clips that we shot into Adobe Express. My group struggled a little bit with how to inser...

This week in class, we were assigned a new version of The Fascination Project, that I believe will allow us to be more creative. For this Fascination project, we are tasked with making a simple 2-7 minute film that shows different things we have learned in class, but also just how creative we can be as a group. So, in Wednesday's class we brainstormed different genres of movies that we each want to film, and that is how we chose our groups. I chose to be in the Crime/Mystery/Thriller group with Brooke, Anna, and Ola. I was excited because I knew we were going to have fun coming up with a concept for our film, which we did. It was interesting to see all the different genres that others came up with for their project.  During class on Wednesday, after everyone selected their groups, my group met and we were able to start brainstorming some different ideas that would work well for our film. We talked about different locations where we could shoot our film, to give it that feeling of m...

 This week in class, we watched Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. I liked the film, and thought it had an interesting twist to a classic fairytale. When I was watching the film, certain aspects of it reminded me of the film Peter Pan. One big thing that I noticed between the two films was that in Peter Pan, they went to Neverland, which is a different world. In Pan's Labyrinth, Ofelia goes into the labyrinth, which reveals to me that she has a whole different life in a whole different world. I thought it was interesting how these two different films could share a similar aspect.  I think it was interesting how Guillermo started the film with the end scene. It really added something to the film because it gave me a chance to imagine what happened, and it added some suspense to the plot. Something that was interesting to me was that Ofelia's mother thought that she was too old to believe in fairytales, even though Ofelia was in a fairytale. There was magic throughout ...

 This week we were assigned to watch Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. I thought it was an interesting movie that had a slow build to it. It was hard for me to get into at first, but as things started to build up with the main characters, I found myself getting more interested in the film. Coppola did an excellent job directing and I think she picked a great cast for this film. One of my favorite parts of the film was that it was shot in Japan, so that was something unique that I have never seen before. I have never seen a film written by Sofia Coppola, so it was interesting to see how her style of film compares to other film directors' styles of film. I think that it was cool to see Bill Murray play such a different role than we saw him play in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The film portrays Murray as this movie star that travels to Japan to do a whiskey commerical. He seems like this lonely guy, just lost because he not only is he all alone but he does not understand...

 This week for class we were to watch the horror film, Get Out. I was nervous about watching it because I do not like scary movies at all. I thought that Get Out was a good movie. When watching Get Out, there was so much suspense throughout the film, that I was on the edge of my seat. It starts out slowly, but as things unfold it builds up, which I liked and thought was interesting. One thing that I liked about this film was the shocking things that you did not expect to happen.  One element of the film that I thought that Peele really did well was the music. He chose songs that really set the mysterious element throughout the course of the film. Something that Peele did with the music that I thought was cool was he used the same song in the beginning of the film and at the end of the film. I think he did this because he wanted to tie the whole movie together, which I thought was great. The music helps shifts in the storyline, which helps add to the overall plot of the movie....