Chris Link

Today the ninth of January in the year two-thousand-seventeen we walked into class to find that for today we could sit anywhere because Mr. Rivers was still working out the new seating chart. He began by reminding everyone that the revised feast review is due at the end of the night, along with the posting of the final podcast that we did last week.

He then transitioned the focus of the class onto the subject of film editing. We were then tasked with evaluating an example video essay that talked about the evolution of depicting the internet and instant messaging in a motion picture setting. After the completion of the video we had to talk about whether it provided evidence to support a claim in our table groups and then as a class. We found that it showed a variety of styles, had an abundance of visual evidence, used music to keep people focused, The narrator spoke very deliberately (scripted), and he credited the artists that appeared in the video. Mr. Rivers was very enthusiastic about this topic, and hinted that there is a very high probability that we will be receiving an assignment that is similar to the aforementioned video essay.

We then moved on to dissecting the different mise en scene elements of a single frame from the movie Psycho. We found that the woman's outstretched hand cast a dark shadow over the bright tiles in the background, which in turn made the scene more ominous. We took a detour from here watching a short video starring Alfred Hitchcock who described the power of video editing. We then came back the movie Psycho watching the scene where the women is murdered in the shower making sure to count all the different shots that made up the scene. By the end of the clip nearly everyone had lost count. We talked about the necessity for this scene to have so many shots. For the final activity of the day we watched another short video scene from the movie Goodfellas with the same task of counting the shots. This time there was only one, and as a class we decided this was because it promotes the felling that the audience is experiencing the same special moment as the main characters.