In telling her Japanese lover “You destroy me. You do me good.”, I believe the French woman means that her new lover’s presence and sudden involvement in her life is breaking down old emotional barriers, and forcing her to revisit old traumas concerning past love and loss. In a way, he is “destroying” her by causing her emotional turmoil, but he is also forcing her to move forward. His presence and prying questions cause her to remember her past trauma and make her face how utterly incomprehensible and heart-wrenching it was, repeatedly. This repetition pulls her back and forth through time, slowly breaking her away from the past as she comes to accept the present. So, in this way, his presence is both something bad because it is painful for her and something good for her as well – she is facing past trauma, and is having to deal with it and overcome. This also seems to fall in line with the idea of destruction becoming a type of creation – he breaks her away from mourning her first lover as he becomes her next.

The most stressed point of the blog post was that, organizing one’s clips and images before one begins the initial editing of a project, is the most important step in saving time when editing the remainder of the project. Naming clips meticulously beforehand and sorting them into bins and folders that can be easily navigated also helps a great deal in preventing the interruption of the creative process during the editing stages. A very useful entry and a great reminder of how important it is to be organized.

The first scene was a wide shot of a carnival from under a nearby bridge, tracking slowly to the left as the opening credits faded in and out along the lower third of the screen and ”When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge  played in the background. This struck me as slightly strange because the shot seemed to drag a bit at the end, almost as if it was edited not to finish showing more of the scene (which it generally wasn’t; it had been showing the same side and area of the carnival as the camera moved) but to let the song play in its entirety. The only reason I could think of for this slight, extra time allowance was to finish the credits along the bottom of the screen, but it still seemed distracting enough that I think there might have been more to it than that.

 Another notable edit within the movie was the only Dutch angle (or at least, the only one I saw) used, which was somewhat sudden and unexpected in a scene where the main character, Fergus, is, for the first time, looking in the wallet of his at-that-time hostage, Jody. The camera was tracking forward towards the two, at first, when it suddenly adds a counter-clockwise rotation to its zoom, making the scene (and the audience) feel slightly off-kilter. The use of this angle seemed to coincide with Fergus’ dawning realization that his hostage is just another human being like him, which would in-turn, lead Fergus to feel compassionate towards Jody and make him feel guilty for his hand in Jody’s current predicament. This helps kick-start their friendship and later leads Fergus into a far more complicated situation.

Lastly, the lighting in this movie was often used to illuminate just what was important to a scene, or perhaps what was off to the side of the action to create tension, confusion, or frustration in the audience. It can also be said that the use of such lighting, and some literal, physical barriers, helped manifest the film’s theme – very veiled, concealed nature, that was present both in the characters’ actions and behaviors, and in the surrounding plot’s twists and turns.

Overall, a great film. One of those, I think, that is meant not only to tell a story, but to really make the audience reflect on themselves and their perceptions.

It opens with a scene in sepia tone (a flashback to 1989 as the caption in the bottom right corner notes) of a father and son as the father washes his son down for lice, apparently. The camera angles are all either over the shoulder or from the side of the two in MCU. As the scene cuts (no transition used, just a cut) to the present day (again, as the captions note) the filter is no longer sepia but back to regular colors with what seems to be a slightly increased contrast. The camera angle is pointed out a shop window, level with a passing woman. The frame tracks slight to follow her in through the store’s doors and zooms out, tracking backwards as she walks in and in front of the camera, by the front counter. She stumbles and catches herself against it then proceeds off screen as an employee gives her a slightly suspicious look from the left third of the shot. The shot changes to the employee’s view and the camera pans to watch as she continues to stumble about the store. The scene cuts to the two main characters (panning up from the bottom right two fix them in an upper body shot as they wlak towards the camera while it tracks backwards) strolling down a walkway near the ocean (there are seagull sound effects aside from the view of the ocean off to the right). They meet up with a woman and the camera angles continue to be over-the-shoulder as they converse (the majority of the talking scenes in the episode were like this). She leaves them and the two continue on to find a man that called them about a case. In short, their client has accidentally lost track of a cooler containing a deadly virus and needs their help in retriving it. There’s a cut back to the scene with the first woman in the store still stumbling around and it’s revealed that she is displaying symptoms of the virus and that she has the client’s watch.

The rest of the episode is much of the same with some tongue-and-cheek humor and some flashy zoom-in, zoom-out camera angles as the evidence is found and revelations are had, and some shifty, blurry, after-imagey effects used in flashback scenes. Overall, it was pretty entertaining, and there seemed to be a great amount of attention (and some pretty well-executed detail) put into the editing.

I liked the blogger’s initial talk of experimentation with lighting; just trying to figure out techniques and such on him own first before looking into anything serious and by-the-book. The information about night lighting with Christmas lights seemed like a pretty good idea; something seemingly obvious but not always thought of. It wasn’t just a blog entree explaining some of the finer points of lighting, but it also listed quite a lot of resources for tutorials and how-to’s that they had learned from. Overall, very VERY useful. :]

As with every opening sequence in the series, the first scene dissolves in from black, to show the Enterprise flying through space. Most of the cuts within each scene appear to be just simple frame jumps, and the music ranges from slow, light, and calm to harsh, tense, and dynamic respectively to each fitting scene. The only availible effects at the time appear to be green/blue screen effects for beaming and the views outside the Enterprise and masking for the internal screens. Camera zooms are often used to zoom in on someone’s face or an object of dramatic importance before a scene cuts away to dissolve into black.

The basic story of the episode is that the crew is attacked by a barrier of sorts as they are trying to uncover the whereabouts of the Valiant. After effects of the barrier’s attack later slowly begins to infultrate the minds of some of the crew (Gary Mitchell and DoctorElizabeth Dehner ) giving them super-human abilites through heightened ESP. As Gary becomes more powerful, Kirk and the others are threatened with having to destroy Gary before he ultimately destroys the Enterprise. They end up attempting to maroon Gary (and Elizabeth) by force, but Kirk is forced to kill him to keep him from causing any more death or destruction.

The first scene immediately starts with a shot of a man in a flipped car. As he finds his way out the back window, obviously confused by his predicament, he finds that the immediate world outside is also enveloped in chaos and confusion – with people screaming, helping the wounded, etc. There are shots that quickly zoom in and out on those crushed under rubble and who are seriously injured as the man looks around (camera panning with him) realizing his surroundings. This serves to increase the tension and the fast-paced sense of the scene.

The opening scenes after are shot with a warm overglow of colors expressing a more comfortable mood. Not until about six scenes in (one concerning the main character’s work in espionage) does any type of background music come into being. It is rhythmic and fast, giving the scene a bit of a actiony, edgey feel. A car chase, shortly thereafter, ensues in which the stationary camera angles are all in either dash-cam shots from the front or shots from the back seat of the pursuing car (the one our main character is driving). Other shots are outside the vehicles, either shots from the side or shots swerving with the car from behind or in front. There is another variety of shots from the ground below the vehicles and all the angles now seem to be swerving and shaking to better establish the action of the scene.

The intended “flashforward” then takes place as the car chase (and many other sub-plots) come to a head. The effects on the scenes of “the future” have flares of light, higher contrast, sudden shakey cuts, and somewhat blurred edges, giving the scene a mysterious, uneasy quality - all the while a sharp, unnerving screeching sound is heard amongst the “future” scenes that are shown. When the scene returns to the “present” the brighter, warmer hues and shades have been replaced by cooler colors to show a defining change in mood – it is now more dismal. The nest few scenes are shot with increasing fast camera pans and a ‘whoosh’ sound as it moves (as our main character is now back where the episode started assessing his surroundings as the world seems to panic around him).

The rest of the episode continues with just regular straight cuts between scenes, and increasing amounts of plot clearity (though what exactly happened is still not clear by the end of the episode as this is the point of the series). Overall, it was relatively engaging in terms of plot and the editing appeared to be very good. I’ll be looking a bit further into this series before making any final judgements though.

Overall, going by the blogger’s report (and the intriging screenshots hosted), the movie sounds engaging. It is described as being kinda slow but deep. It takes place in a real, believable setting, but with a small super-natural twist that gets all philosophical and such. In a nutshell, the film is about what is possible, and ultimately what is morally and personally “okay”, in a world where one’s soul really exists in a tangible form – and can be removed like any other organ in the body. From what I could gather, the movie is very engaging if one is interested in story depth more than physical action, and that has to take some work with keeping the audience interested with different camera angles, panning and tracking speeds, and scene transitions. Even if the acting with marvelous, one wonders what the cinematography was like in an apparently slow-moving film.