Oh, hello!
Hi, livejournal. Long time no see, but I come bearing GIFTS.
If you follow me on twitter, you'll know I've been trying to get this to work for a really long time. If not, this is new to you, but I hope you're still interested.
Cast Away: the Montage
Above is a download link to my most recent assignment for my Motion Picture Editing class. Our task was to take the island sequence from Cast Away-- which is about an hour and ten minutes' worth of footage-- and distill it into a five minute montage.
My write-up:
The music I used is called "This is Gallifrey: Our Childhood, Our Home," composed by Murray Gold. I chose it for its variety--it has elements of extreme beauty, as well as extreme tension. Its consistent, driving drum beat, punctuated by moving woodwinds and inspirational strings, is the soul of my sequence: the theme of this montage is escape, centered around raft construction. Perhaps it's just because I reacted so strongly against the Russian philosophy of expanding the moment, but I used that rhythm of the drums in a very rigid way to maintain a sense of comprehensible linear movement. Time is Chuck's worst enemy and his greatest asset-- he spends four years on the island, and only a few days give him favorable conditions for escape. I wanted the montage to capture that dependence on perfect timing. The picture of Kelly is featured in both halves of the sequence in order to give the montage thematic unity, and Chuck motivation to get off the island. As the tone shifts from hope to despair, and despair to hope once more, Chuck's mood remains relatively constant: he is doggedly determined, and optimistic in spite of his melancholia. Though I experimented with many different types of transitions, ultimately I only used different kinds of dissolves and maps. Nothing else seemed to work with my tone; wipes will always remind me of Star Wars, and the more geometric transitions felt amateurish.
If you follow me on twitter, you'll know I've been trying to get this to work for a really long time. If not, this is new to you, but I hope you're still interested.
Cast Away: the Montage
Above is a download link to my most recent assignment for my Motion Picture Editing class. Our task was to take the island sequence from Cast Away-- which is about an hour and ten minutes' worth of footage-- and distill it into a five minute montage.
My write-up:
The music I used is called "This is Gallifrey: Our Childhood, Our Home," composed by Murray Gold. I chose it for its variety--it has elements of extreme beauty, as well as extreme tension. Its consistent, driving drum beat, punctuated by moving woodwinds and inspirational strings, is the soul of my sequence: the theme of this montage is escape, centered around raft construction. Perhaps it's just because I reacted so strongly against the Russian philosophy of expanding the moment, but I used that rhythm of the drums in a very rigid way to maintain a sense of comprehensible linear movement. Time is Chuck's worst enemy and his greatest asset-- he spends four years on the island, and only a few days give him favorable conditions for escape. I wanted the montage to capture that dependence on perfect timing. The picture of Kelly is featured in both halves of the sequence in order to give the montage thematic unity, and Chuck motivation to get off the island. As the tone shifts from hope to despair, and despair to hope once more, Chuck's mood remains relatively constant: he is doggedly determined, and optimistic in spite of his melancholia. Though I experimented with many different types of transitions, ultimately I only used different kinds of dissolves and maps. Nothing else seemed to work with my tone; wipes will always remind me of Star Wars, and the more geometric transitions felt amateurish.