Futuristic fat me by user6407022

Million Dollar Baby - Empire Film Review

Review
Without so much as a decent shower break following Mystic River's victory lap, Clint Eastwood rejoins the awards fray touting another heavyweight contender. Were it simply a thumping two in a swift one-two, Million Dollar Baby would be impressive enough, but as a rueful rumination on sin and absolution, Eastwood's new Baby boldly measures up against the director's undisputed champion: Unforgiven.

Put together on the fly, with little pedigree to speak of, Million Dollar Baby is the movie equivalent of a no-hoper handed a title bout. The source material is a short story from a debut collection by 69 year-old fight insider F. X. Toole. The adaptation is the first produced screenplay by Paul Haggis, a decorated TV writer best known for creating offbeat Mountie comedy Due South. And Eastwood himself stepped in at short notice, moving his Mystic River crew onto the project with virtually no prep time.

In what is essentially an odd-couple drama charting the well-worn contours of seasoned trainer and spunky protege, Morgan Freeman's salty sidekick is elevated to a third leading part principally to provide a semblance of narrative control. His intermittent voiceover, meanwhile, dispenses homilies that might make Shawshank's Red blush. However, Eastwood employs the space cleared by Dupris to explore character in ways that standard Hollywood-movie time simply would not countenance. And Million Dollar Baby's dancing is not entirely in vain. All the bobbing and weaving is clearly intended to put the audience off-balance, blinding seasoned pros to the sucker punch that Eastwood has been cocking all along. Even if you do see it coming - and it's best not to look - Baby's final blow should still floor you, a shot to the gut that will wring tears from the toughest guy in the gym.

With the easy confidence only a true vet can possess, Eastwood tells his story at his own unhurried pace, in his own unadorned style. Ably supported by his usual backroom staff, notably DoP Tom Stern, Eastwood's striking framing has the muscular simplicity and directness of Ernest Hemingway's prose; the twist in this tale is that the embodiment of American manliness is a girl from hillbilly country.

Hybrids on Prezi

Film Genre on Prezi

Film Festivals

Short Films on Prezi

Examples of Short Films

Movie Evaluation

When I created the movie i found that using edting instead of camera movements benefitted more. It worked more because I was able to select whether I wanted to cut excess video from a scene. This ended up being alot easier than moving the camera about so it didn't flick from a scene then to the next where it may have been a close up shot , this would have looked un-professional and the video wouldn't have worked aswell as it did.

Using editing enabled me to add effects such as fade in fade out to help certain scenes flow into one another alot better than camera work. This made the entire film run smoothly and it was less time consuming using the editing techniques. This worked really well as it was meant to be a short film of no more than thirty seconds , using this brought the time total of the film to around twenty-six seconds shorter than what was needed making it alot better.

Whilst filming i used a tripod to keep the camera steady

Final finished movie

Set up photo's

The table where the 'drinking' game takes place betweeen the two friends , this photo is the chair from the angle of one of the people. The picture shows clearly the set up for scene to take place , from the angle over the sholder of one of the people in the actual scenes showing the opposites face.



The table where the 'drinking' game takes place betweeen the two friends , this photo is the chair and table from the angle at the front it's a medium shot showing clearly the set of the table and in the atual scene the bodies of the people playing the game. This shot shows us exactly what's happening as we can see both sides.



The table where the 'drinking' game takes place betweeen the two friends , this photo is the chair from the opposite angle to the one before. The picture shows clearly the set up for scene to take place , from the angle over the sholder of one of the people in the actual scenes showing the opposites face.

The picture shows clearly the set up for scene to take place , from a high angle in which the actual scene is filmed. This image even though it is only a bin plays the final setting for the film in which one of the two people drinks to 'much' and ends up falling ill due to the game.

 

Mini Film

For our task we had to create a 'mini film'. In our groups we had to plan out a scenario that lasted approximately thirty seconds. We were only aloud to use the following words for a clip.

Character 1 - "Just do it"
Character 2 - "I can't"
Character 1 - "I can't until you do it"

Using these words we had to put them into our own scenario. For ours we chose to do a drinking scene where a couple of friends took part in a drinking game.

In our group we took around and hour to create our 'mini film' this time included planning and filming the actual scene. When filming we had to move the camera to where we wanted it to be , whether this was on an angle or close to the thing we were filming.

For the task we weren't aloud to zoom in as this didn't create a very good affect and looked un-professional. We filmed the scenes different times so we could pick the best ones from a selection of scenes.

Once we had finished filming the scenes we put it all together using the college's editing suite. We cut scenes which had excess on which we did not need. In doing this it helped the scenes blend into each other better. Between certain scenes we added fade in/fade out where appropriate. We then watched the end product to see if everything flowed into each other , once we were happy with what we had done we saved the final piece.

A2 Media

This year I'm starting A2 media as our first task we are looking at creating our own 'mini films' within a group , to gain idea's we watched various clips from other films. We looked at what editing techniques they used and why they used that certain technique to make the clip succesful.