The Lord of the Rings

We watched a documentary over The Lord of the Rings in class last week. Honestly, I am absolutely not a huge fan of the movies, but I think it was pretty interesting to find out how producers have to think about every detail. Some things kept my attention.

For example at the beginning, they take a shot of the location. It is wonderful, too beautiful to be true, makes us think it is going to be a fantasy movie. Then they talk about how much it was difficult to settle a prologue, and especially to pick a point of view. They chose the ring's point of view, and gave her a powerful female voice as storyteller. I thought it was very interesting, and a great idea.

Then I think a very interesting thing is when they talk about the first time we actually realize the size difference between hobbits and humans : when Gandalphe and Freudo meet. They say they used "forced perspective" (?): put a lot of distance between the two actors and use perspective to make them appear as sized differently. They use the same principle when Gandalphe and Bilbao are in the same room, even if it was a very difficult scene to shot, like they said.

Rocky, Paper, Scissor

First, I really have to share with you how much this video made me laugh! I think it is crazy to think about what a good video teenagers can create, even better than some actual movies... It is almost perfect. I say almost, because couple of things could be better.

For example around 55 seconds, one of the two main characters appears from behind a wall, then two shots later, he walks from the same place, which seemed weird since the two guys were having a conversation, he should have stayed at the same place...

I am not going to list all of them because it didn't shock me, I just forced myself to think about that and see negative things because I had to, but it is a great short movie. They totally understood how to play with music, sound effects, and shots..

One of my favorite shot is the over the shoulder shot at 3:36, when the main character is arms up and is like showing the world he is the king of the universe and he is going to beat the other guy!

The other interesting shot is the extreme close-up at 5:23, which is used I think to show how Rocky feels. It is a great way to shoot people's emotions I think, and it works perfectly in this case since we can really feel How much Rocky is decided to win this fight.

About the music, I think the choices are perfect. I am not even going to talk about the Eye of the Tiger song, since it is in the movie Rocky, so.. good choice. But the song right before the fight is a great one. It sounds like an epic movie's song, which is funny and stressing at the same time, because let's not forget it is only rocky paper scissor! So I thought it matched up pretty well with the movie.

Then, watching the video, I can feel that the writers thought and actually took the time to elaborate interesting plot and dialogues. They thought about how they could make it funny, and I think the choice to make the dialogues pretty serious was a very good idea, because it made a contrast even stronger with the silly plot.

Great video!