Luke Schmitzer daily blog 1/23/18

Today in class we started off by writing down the objective. Today’s objective was: I will be able to analyze how choices in cuts and assembly contribute to the narrative, thematic, and political development of film. We once again first broke into group to define the three (narrative, thematic, and practical. My group defined narrative as the story, thematic as the overall message, and practical as continuity. When we broke out of the groups and began our class discuss we came up with whole class definitions. The class defined narrative as the story, setting, and characters. We defined thematic as the theme, tone and overall message. We defined practical as preserving continuity, and solving problems. We then watched “Of Oz the Wizard” which is a remake of the movie “The Wizard of Oz”. What makes this so special is someone took Wizard of Oz and put all the words in the actual movie in alphabetical order. This however was not a good film. We then started applying the rules to actual films and how each develops throughout a certain piece of the film. We did this with Good Fellas where we saw the development of practical as incredibly busy, transitions, and the fact we feel included. We saw narrative to develop in the way that everyone knows the character, and the fact that he is an important person. The thematic development showed power, and had a playful tone. The next movie was Ironman 3 where we did the same thing. The thematic development gave scenes urgency, the narrative development showed it to be danger, and the practical the cuts made allow to preserve continuity and it keeps the actor safe. As shown in what were doing at the end of class, it shows how you can look for the development of the film in those three categories. Also how we would break up intro groups allows us to be able to work as a team, and learn some sort of leadership. As shown in the exercise at the end of class we cam apply these to basic films, meaning wide range.