Please make sure that you have completed a draft catalogue for Monday 27th June. You should upload the draft to moodle or email a copy to your class teacher. You will get feedback on how to improve your work from your teacher and be given the opportunity to improve it. Please make sure you meet the deadline!

An example of the catalogue is on the website in the small scale research page. Link is here http://longroadfilm.co.uk/units/fm3a/

Long Road Film is on Twitter and we will be tweeting from New York next week. There will be an attempt to get students tweeting about the films we watch as well. Please follow us.

If you have not seen this yet, this is a fantastic way to test your film knowledge. Hours of fun for the whole class! http://famousobjectsfromclassicmovies.com/

The WJEC (exam board) now have a channel on youtube that has examples of student work on it. Please have a look and see what you think about the work on there. http://www.youtube.com/user/wjecstudentspace#p/u

You will find examples of the type of work you should be producing on the A2 Moodle page.
Remember the deadline is Tuesday 1st March. This is for all A2 classes.

Click the link to access the BBC Radio 4 Film Archives which feature interviews with a host of stars as well as a documentary discussing how cinema going has altered in Britain in the past 100 years. Fantastic!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/film-season/

What should go on my blog?

• Your blog is an online notebook where you should collect links and other useful online material and store it.
• You should also use your blog to make notes on how useful the sources are and what they have told you about your chosen topic
• Not everything you find will be useful or relevant to your investigation but this is part of the process

What else should I be doing?

You must watch the films! This is very important as these form a key part of your project and you will need to know them very well and be able to refer to specific scenes from them in your presentation script. When you watch the films the following questions may help:

• Do the films have any common themes? If so what are they? How are they represented?
• Does the director work with the same actors? Who are they?
• What genre are the films you have chosen? Has the director worked in other genres? Is this relevant to your investigation?
• Do the films have stylistic similarities? What are they? Does the director work with the same cinematographer, editor, producer or other key personnel?
• What do you think are the key scenes in each film? Why do you think this? How does this relate to what you are investigating?

Where else should I be looking for information and sources?

• We will organise a college trip to the BFI Film Library in February, this library is a fantastic resource and has loads of articles and books about popular choices of directors.
• Cambridge Central Library has a good film section on the top floor near the cafe
• You should also use the college library which has a good range of resources

What happens with all this information?

This information will form the basis of your presentations script which we will work on after the January exam.

If you are having problems please email boram@longroad.ac.uk and put ‘research project’ in the topic box!

The college has open evenings on Wednesday 17th and Thursday 18th. We need students to help out and say why other students should choose to do Film Studies at Long Road. If you are free to help on either evening please let your teacher know. You will get enrichment credits for doing this. Thanks

Editing is a key part of the film making process and is often misunderstood. Editing is responsible for the structure of the film, the dynamics that we see on screen, the manipulation of time and the colour of the film. Alternatively it is “cutting out the bad bits”. It is likely that in some projects the bad bits will far outweigh the good bits and if this is the case then it is important to remember the maxim “you can’t polish a turd”. In some cases it may be beneficial to re shoot footage particularly on student projects.

The Oscar winning editor Walter Murch works to a ‘Rule of Six’. These are six criteria that should be staisfied by every ‘cut’

1. Emotion – is it true to the emotion of the moment?
2. Story – it advances the story
3. Rhythm – it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and “right”
4. Eye-trace – it acknowledges what you might call “eye-trace” – the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame
5. Two-dimensional plane of space – it respects “planarity” – the grammer of three dimensions transposed by photography to two. (The question of stage-line)
6. Three-dimensional space of action – it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space

(from ‘In The Blink Of An Eye’ – Walter Murch)

Here are two videos of Walter Murch discussing his career and editing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This short extract illustrates the work of a foley artist. A foley artist is responsible for making the everyday sounds used in a film. A good foley artist’s work will be invisible to the audience but without their work the film would appear quiet and strange. The Mean Streets task you worked on was your attempt at recreating the work of a foley artist.