Citizen Kane Analysis

              Summary

In this project we analyzed a short clip of the movie Citizen Kane for Mise-en-scéne

Mise-en-scéne (meez-on-sen)

Sound

Cinematography

  1. Seeing the Light (9:34)
    • Lighting Ratio
    • Key Light
    • High Ratio
    • Low Key Lighting darker and more dramatic
    • Fill Light =fill in shadow ,High Fill equals high key lighting
    • Low Ratio
    • High Key Lighting
    • Hard Light=light coming from directly from source, is high contrast for tense situations
    • Soft Light=light is coming from a few different places like reflecting from some where. can come through a bed sheet.
  2. Camera Angles (6:09)
  3. Point of View (5:07)
  4. Zoom and Moving Camera Effects (6:01)
  5. The Moving Camera (4:32)
  6. Focal Length (5:16)
    • The distance between the optical center of the lens and the film plane
    • Depth of field
      • Refers to the depth or space and what portion of it is in focus
    • Movement
      • Movement through depth
      • Normal lens – matches our expectations
      • Short lens – exaggerated depth effect makes it seem like people walking are covering more space than they actually are
      • Long lens – movement through depth seems slower, size changes very gradually
    • Perspective
      • The way objects appear in relation to one another in depth 
  • Proxemics
    • length of the shot
    • when someone is in a closeup, they dominate the screen and seem for important
    • Extreme long shot= shows background info. character is hard to see
      • like an army marching or a group working as one
    • Full show= when a full body action is happening like an embrace or a fight
  • Extreme close up= an object in f=great detail or a fraction of a face,
    • anticipated the use of an object
  • Camera angle
    • height/angle of camera filming someone
    • low angle=looking up at someone. a powerful person or a noble/heroic person
    • sometimes things in the foreground are more powerful than things from a low angle
  • high angle
    • makes someone look vulnerable
  • extreme high angle
    • aftermath of a ransack or someone is about to be attacked
  •  Dutch angle, someone with a disoriented mind
    • angle is diagonal

Narrative and Genre

Genre

 

Narrative

Interview Video

What I learned

In this project I learned how to analyze a scene from a film in depth. About how to look for Mise en Scene in the film. I learned lot about the first scene in the film Citizen Kane and I basically learned what Mise en Scene,Cinematography, Sound and editing are because I forgot what I had learned the first time we reviewed the topics. I learned that Citizen Kane is a deep film and has multiple layers.

Citizen Kane Research

The Battle Over Citizen Kane

  • William Randolph Hearst is the person Citizen Kane is based off of
  • Transformed newspaper publishing
  • used intrigue and manipulation and a little bit of lying
  • Orson Welles was a famous movie maker.
  • Welles played the lead role in citizen Kane
  • got a contract with RKO before he even made a movie
  • he was about 20
  • William lived on a property half the size of rhode island called the ranch
  • Welles was 24 when he started making the film Hearst was 76
  • Hearst got everything he wanted when he was a kid.
  • William dropped out of Harvard and bought the old newspaper business his father owned
  • Will first paper called his paper “Monarch of the Daily’s
  • Will was personally shy but his requests were orders
  • Will made a woman collapse in the streets just to see how poorly she was treated by the government
  • Welles was raised as a genius in his home
  • Welles knew the value of a fight
  • Welles parents split up when he was 6 ,his mother died when he was nine and his father died when he was 15
  • Welles arrived in New York when he was in his late teens
  • Staged plays for the common man in New York
  • He was strict to the cast
  • four men attacked him one night outside the theater
  • the plays were a success.
  • Voodoo MacBeth was very choreographed
  • Welles made money through radio as well as plays
  • Welles was the voice of many characters
  • Welles hired an ambulance to transport him around
  • He ate a lot and drank a lot
  • He didn’t get any applause at the end the audience just walked out
  • He fixed the play by adding a scene when an innocent person is attacked by a mob
  • He used a organ in the background and hit all of the base notes when the person died
  • the applause sometimes when on for three minutes
  • Hearst decided to run for politics and said we was for representing the little guy
  • Hearst eventually got on the congress
  • Hearst attacked people in the papers
  • Heart called twice in the papers for someone to put a bullet into the president’s head and then someone did
  • Hearst ran for mayor, governor and other positions and lost after the assassination
  • Orson’s film was designed to attack Hearst like Hearst attacked people in the newspapers
  • Orson liked danger
  • Orson used a real knife in his play and accidentally stabbed someone
  • Orson sometimes skipped rehearsals and showed up days later
  • the broadcast tricked many people
  • they thought that aliens were attacking earth
  • it was a radio broadcast story telling of war of the worlds
  • Welles was offered a contract with lots of freedom and he could make any film he wanted
  • Citizen Kane portrait Will as someone who was separate from society and kept his wife inside all the type
  • Will tried to defend his Wife
  • Marion Davies was a “gold digger”
  • Marion was taught as a young age to pay a lot of attention to rich gentlemen
  • Will made a film starring his wife which was a romantic epic
  • Will favored his wife in the papers “he was shoving her down the publics throat “
  • she became kind of a joke in the papers
  • Hearst had the largest private zoo in the world
  • he brought an ancient monastery to his property
  • his property was half the size of Rhode island
  • His newspapers and magazines were hurt by the great depression
  • during the depression Hearst became a symbol of hate for the rich
  • FDR made a new law of taxes for people with an income of over a million dollars, This drove him closer to bankruptcy
  • Marion started out as a gold digger but she eventually fell in love with Hearst
  • Welles arrived in Hollywood at the hight of his status
  • A Hearst columnist called Welles the would be genius
  •  His contract said that he had to make two films.
  • RKO canceled his first film and almost canceled his second
  • Welles lashed out at people in times of stress
  • Marion Davis was a screenwriter who drank a lot
  • Welles added the loss of Kane’s mother because he lost his mother not Hearst
  • Many of Hearst’s papers were not true of low
  • Hedda Hopper was Luella’s rival
  • Luella Parson took three weeks off to take down Citizen Kane
  • Hearst threatened the film by gossip about racism, suing and scandals
  • RKO pulled the movie and Hearst wanted to buy it
  • Hearst threatened to reveal that most of the owners of the movie studio were Jewish
  • During this time Welles got more popular
  • he got more ideas for more films
  • Welles wanted to play the film in tents and call it the movie the theaters don’t want you to see
  • Hearst started to insult Welles in the paper
  • He claimed that Welles supported communism
  • Hearst’s reporters asked is Hearst was a communist and a homosexual
  • the FBI opened a file against him and said that he was a threat to the nations security
  • Citizen Kane was nominated for nine different rewards
  • Orson Welles was once a magician
  •  Hearts died in 1951 in Marion Davis’s home
  • Welles never got full control of a major film again
  • Citizen Kane became popular in the late 1950’s
  • Hearst became a vagabond
  • begging from everyone for supplies for filmmaking

Docudrama RKO 281

  • Orson was nine when his mom died
  • Orson created the war of the worlds broadcast
  • Welles went to Spain and met a bullfighter
  • the bullfighter said that a bullfighters worst enemy was fear
  • Welles thought Will was a hypocrite
  • Will’s wife didn’t go out of the house much and Will had parties to “Bring the world to her”
  • Will’s wife was an alcoholic
  • Will practically owned hollywood so it was a big risk to make fun of him in a movie
  • Hearst called his mistress rosebud
  • Hearst’s wife did puzzles in her free time
  • Welles dramatized that he was a bad person by saying in the movie that there was a time when he was innocent
  • It was Welles idea to call the main character Kane
  • Welles boss, George wanted him to make a film version of war of the worlds
  • Welles was filming the film without permission and was two days ahead of schedule
  •  Gregg Toland was an amazing film cinematographer worked on citizen Kane
  • a camera was destroyed on set so he borrowed another one
  • Welles is insecure. He is worried that he won’t be as genius as everyone thinks he is because the people spent so much time and money on him.
  • Welles turned his back on his father because he was embarrassed by his father’s drinking problem
  • He regretted it after his father died when he was 15
  • On a shot he couldn’t get a low enough angle so he dug out the floor
  • Luella was a gossip columnist who was funded by Hearst who found out who Citizen Kane was about
  • Welles lied to Luella about who the film was about
  • Hearst tried to sue Welles
  • Once Hearst went crazy and shot someone and killed them but the media made it go away
  • Hearst’s suing form was rejected and he found himself in debt
  • Hearst used racism in his journal posts
  • Many people helped make the film it wasn’t just Welles that came up with everything
  • Luella had photo’s of movie stars doing inappropriate things and tried to blackmail RKO into not airing Citizen Kane
  • Hearst started to go bankrupt because he failed to sue Citizen Kane
  • As Welles started to loose popularity the movie became all that he had left
  • Hearst spent tons of money on statues and stuff and went bankrupt
  • Hearst spent money on anything he wanted instead of needed
  • Hearst’s wife wanted to be in comedies
  • she sold a bunch of her jewelry for money
  • The bosses at the other studies made an offer of 8000 dollars to buy Citizen Kane to burn it
  • Orson gave a great speech and they didn’t take the offer
  • Welles wanted to make another film called the life of Christ

Orson Welles Interview

  • After he got the contract many people resented him
  • The producers didn’t like how he acted, directer and produced
  • Toland came to Orson to work on the film
  • Orson watched a film forty five times and said that a scene didn’t work but Toland taught him about how film worked in three hours
  • Welles tried to destroy Hearst with movies as Hearst tried to destroy people through newspapers
  • Sometimes Welles randomly said yes to interview questions when he got bored
  • He actually got in an elevator with Hearst the night that his film opened and Welles offered him tickets but Hearst didn’t say anything
  • Someone wrote a book attacking citizen Kane and it said that Welles didn’t even write any of citizen Kane, none of this is true of coarse
  • They shot ten days of Citizen Kane early by saying that they were doing camera tests
  • He made a few films after Citizen Kane

Premiere Pro Editing Basics

      Summary

I was given the following two videos so I could learn about the editing process. I watched both the videos and took notes on what keyboard shortcuts to use and when he explained different things in the videos.

       Original Video

       The Process:

1:01 Cutting Out The Questions:

2:48 Cutting Out Redundancies and Unnecessary Information

7:55 Cutting Out Ums and Pauses

15:47 Shifting Video so it Starts with B-Roll

16:38 Adding B-Roll

18:36 Three Point Editing

21:12 Adding Stills

26:06 Zooming in on Stills

29:28 The Morph Cut

32:06 The Audio Mix

36:10 Adding Music and Color Correction

Video 2:

1:24 Organizing Your Interviews

13:00 Cutting Out Ums and Pauses

 Shortcuts:

  • V – Selection tool
  • Q – Cuts everything to the left
  • W – Cuts everything to the right
  • Cmd, K – Makes a cut
  • \ – Shows the entire timeline
  • Home – Moves cursor to the beginning of the timeline
  • I – In-point
  • O – Out-point
  • A – Selects all tracks forward
  • ; – Lift (leaves a gap)
  • ‘ – Extract (fills the gap)
  • Cmd, D – Fade in
  • B – Ripple edit tool
  • Up Arrow – Moves cursor to the left edit
  • Down Arrow – Moves cursor to the right edit
  • Left Arrow – Moves cursor to the previous frame
  • Right Arrow – Moves cursor to the next frame
  • Cmd, Shift, D – Cross fade
  • Number Pad – Moves cursor to a specific location on the timeline
  • A – Selects all tracks forward
  • Opt, X – Clears all in-points and out-points
  • Shift, 3 – Select the timeline

Camera Operation and Control Project

Image found on Flickr CC Canon EOS 600D/Rebel T3i and EF-S 18-55MMIS II by 600d

Summary:

For this project we used the film making process to create a short video. I served as the editor for the short video we made about how to use a Canon T3i camera. I had to learn about the editing process and was assisted by Danny Sampson  for editing using premiere pro (an editing software).

 Notes:

I thought that the project went well. Our group was focused and we did all of our jobs. I was helped when I was confused about some parts of editing and helped out the group when I could. The only thing that could have made the better is if I was more efficient in editing, this will be better next time though because I am now experienced in the editing software. We also forgot to create one of the shots and we had to do it the next day. We learned from this and will not do it again.

Timeline:

Day 1: I was absent and did nothing. Danny was the director and worked on the story board, Dzung worked on the shot list and Jonah worked on the screen play.

Day 2: I started to learn about premiere pro and practiced with it. Dzung finished the shot list, Danny finished the story board. and Jonah finished the screen play.

Day 3: I continued to learn about premiere pro and practiced with it. They rest of the team started filming. Danny was the actor for the shots, Dzung and Jonah operated the camera and the tripod.

Day 4: I started editing the footage and Danny helped me edit. We added all the scenes to the project and put fade transitions in between them. I spliced the audio and video in two of the scenes so there were jump cuts without interrupting the audio. I realized at the end of the day that we forgot to film one of the scenes. I added all off Dzung revised the shot list and Jonah revised the shot list.

Day 5: I added music to the video and an end title card that said “Thanks for watching!”. Danny, Dzung and Jonah filmed the missing scene and Danny and I added the scene to the video and uploaded it to YouTube.

 

Project Skills Evidence

In this video we explained how to use a T3I camera, demonstrating our editing skills and our filming skills.

What I Learned:

In this project I learned the basics of premiere pro. I learned how to cut footage, splice video and audio, add transitions, title cards and music.I also learned how to manage my time while editing. I solved the problem of not having any good music to put in the video. I found music on the creative commons, made sure it was the right style and added it to the video. I didn’t use any tutorials for this project. I had some experience with editing on other softwares, practiced with things I didn’t know how to do. Danny taught me the rest of the things that I needed to do.

Close Reading and Mise-en-Scène

www.ign.com/articles/2016/07/01/lights-out-review

Image from IGN review of lights out.

Summary of the Project

In this project we analyzed aspects of mise-en-scène in an image from the film Lights Out. We explained each aspect in the presentation we make. The link is below. I did the last five slides, calvin did the first six slides and Dzung did slides six through ten.

Mise-en-Scène

Image found on CC “Shadow” by svofski

Setting and Expressionism

  • Sometimes things in the frame are replaced with spikes to make he audience feel uneasy.

Lighting and Familiar Image

  • When a characters face is in the shadows it means that they are showing no emotion and are probably the bad guy.
  • Sometimes when a characters face is in the shadows it means that they are powerful like when the old lady was in the shadows, she was at equal power with the murderer.

Composing The Frame

  • The frame can change in size and shape.
  • Rule of Thirds
  • Composition is built in section of three.
  • When there is something in one section, there must be something in the opposite section.
  • A super balanced frame can imply control, elegance or make the audience feel uneasy.
  • When a character is looking across the frame he or she is put on one end of the frame looking across.
  • Characters in the foreground are usually the most powerful
  • character in the background
  • sometimes when characters in the foreground are sometimes just important to the narative

 

David Fincher -What-Why-How

Image Found on CC, “Morph” by Ben Watkin

History

David Fincher lived near George Lucas as a kid. Many big films were being shot near him. When he was eight he started filming. He got a job as an assistant photographer at Lucas Films and helped create the footage of the AT-STs for Return of the Jedi. Later he directed commercials. He directed Alien three in 1992 but the company that hired him gave him so many restrictions that the film wasn’t what he had envisioned.

Technique

He tries to get the audience to know things before the characters in subtle ways. He lets the audience work to figure out where the movie is going. He does this to make the audience feel smart when their predictions are right. When two characters are on the phone, Fincher makes them face towards each other when the are agreeing and facing away from each other when they are fighting. He does this to make it seem like the characters are in the same room.

Camera Technique

He has the camera movement match the velocity, direction and angle of the character in the frame. This is done to lock you in to the behavior of the characters. David Fincher makes his camera seem omniscient by not using handheld cameras very often. The camera’s movement helps establish distance by moving from on this to another by moving at a steady pace from one place to another. When the camera is on the weak characters it is shaky making them seem weak on uneasy and when the camera is on the strong characters it is steady making the strong character seem confident. Fincher doesn’t cut to a closeup unless he needs to show something important. He does this because he believes that when the audience sees a closeup it means that they have to pay attention to it because it is important. Sometimes he shows unnecessary closeups to throw the audience of when there is a mystery. He sometimes shows empty chairs or empty frames. He does this to show the lack of something or someone.

Visual Effects

Fincher uses lots of visual effects even when they are not very obvious. He does this to surround you with the film. Almost every shot in his films has at least one visual effect. His film Social Network has more visual effect than Godzilla. He uses CGI to establish distance making the camera go through walls like in the opening of fight club. He uses visual effects to make his films time period accurate. Like in his film Zodiac, he shows the San Francisco waterfront as it appeared during the time when the movie was set using visual effects. He alters the appearance of characters to maintain continuity like he makes a characters hair look different in of of the shots that are supposed to take place in one day and the characters hear look different in all of the shots that take place the next day. He uses CGI to support the story only.

Stretch Goal for the Year

Image from CC, Behind the Scenes by alexcoitus

 

Role: Sound designer 

  • Goal: To have a advanced understanding of the sound design process.
    • Why: I want to understand film design because I thought it would be fun to understand how they made all of those sounds in filmmaking.
    • How: I will achieve this by taking the film cinematography class this year and try to help with sound design.
    • When: I will work on this by at least watching one film essay a week preferably about sound design.
    • Resources: I will need the help of the film cinematography class so I can learn about sound design.
    • Milestones: Every week, I will try to learn about a new aspect of sound design, whether it be a youtube video or a lesson in film cinematography.
    • Heroines / Heroes
  • Ben Burtt

He created the lightsaber sound, the Wilhelm scream and R2D2’s sounds. He has also worked on Indiana Jones and Wall-E. He has won multiple academy awards for sound editing. He is a editor, a writer and a director but he was best at sound design. He also did Chewbacca’s voice and the lightsaber sound. He was born on July 12 1948 and he is currently 79 years old. He graduated from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts with a Master of Fine Arts degree in film production. (Information from IMDb) He has worked at Lucas Films and Pixar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Burtt

  • Gary Rydstrom

He did work on Jurassic park, finding Nemo and Toy story three. He has won multiple award for sound editing. He has won 7 academy awards for sound editing and design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Rydstrom

Video Essay: Jacques Tati- Where to Find Visual Comedy

Image from CC, the magic beans are more sinister than we thought by Ruth Hartnup

Visual comedy is very common in older films and is still in many films today, but what is visual comedy exactly and where can you find it in films. Find out here.

Visual comedy is comedy with a visual gags. They were most common it silent films. The visual gag is best when it is a problem for the character or stops them form getting from point A to point B. This draws attention to the gag and gets the audience invested. Exaggerated sound also helps because it draws the viewers attention to the event even more. Exaggerated movements are key. Unexpectedness also helps on the comedy because it makes the audience jump up and say “what just happened?” Another way to get a laugh is to make the audience see something from one angle but from another angle it looks like something completely different.

Reveals are also a great visual gag. A reveal is when something looks normal but the camera reveals something about the character or object. This is unexpected by the audience and makes them laugh.