Daily Blog 1/19

Today, Mr. Rivers kicked the class off by telling us how impressed he was with the work and questions that we put into our literature review (that was due last night at 11:59). He went on to explain how we are going to be taking a break from working on the senior paper for the next two weeks so he can thoroughly look through our reviews, and in that time we will be going over editing during class. The lesson today was about, Alfred Hitchcock, the master of horror films. We watched a video of him explaining editing film and assembling different pieces. At the end of the video, Mr. Rivers asked us the question "what does Hitchcock mean my assembly?" The class concluded that he means physically combining multiple shots to create a sense of story, characterization, and tone. We learned that everything in the film is implied, and by putting pieces together it develops character, creates a  linear sense of time (cause and effect), and continuity of location. These are choices that different artists make the editor holds the power of potentially changing the character. A technique of editing is the "eyeliner match": 1. character looking at something, 2. The thing that they are looking at, 3. Character reacting to the thing. Continuity can be broken by adding something that doesn't fit into the sequence. Sometimes breaking the idea of continuity is done on purpose, to show absurdity. We looked a sequence of pictures from the Alfred Hitchcock video, to show how putting different images in the middle can change what we infer about the character. The last thing we did in class was looked through a slideshow posted on the classroom, and each table group found an empty slide and filled the middle with anything that didn't break continuity.    

Learning how to edit your writing is an important skill that helps our writing grow and mature, this will especially help those who are going to college next year, for they will need to have writing skills that meet college-level standards.