'Stand by me' - Discuss the character of your choice

'STAND BY ME'- DISCUSS THE CHARACTER OF YOUR CHOICE IN REALTION TO THE FILM.

The character I am analysing from the film 'Stand by me'  is 'Gordie Lachance' who is a 12 year old boy, coming on 13. He occurs to be the main character in the film as it shows a lot more of his life at home than what it does to the other 3 children who are his best friends. Him and his 3 friends embark on a journey to find a dead body of a boy who was allegedly hit by train.

His older brother 'Dennis' was killed in a car accident which marks a reason to why his parents ignore him and supposedly hate him. This would pay off a large impact on how 'Gordie' feels. His father says "It should have been you" to 'Gordie' on the day of 'Dennis' funeral which would impact on his confidence majorly encouraging him to feel unwanted and unloved by his own parents. He expresses his emotions in the film by sharing his feelings with his best friend 'Chris Chambers'. The fact that his parents hated 'Gordie' influenced him to carry on his journey to find the dead body as he felt that they might be proud of him for doing something good.

He explains throughout the film that he really misses his older brother 'Dennis' as they had a close relationship. Dennis always stood up for 'Gordie' when there were arguments between him and his parents which influences on how he had someone always there to look out for him and give him the comfort that he needed. And now that 'Dennis' was gone, he had no one to fall back on anymore, and he gave off the impression that he struggled with standing on his own two feet and looking out for himself more.

He was overly grateful however for having his best friend 'Chris Chambers' because them two always had each others backs, and it was as if he was a 'get away card' from his parents.

Practise pleminary task

In a group of four, our task was to come up with a 2 minute opening to a film. This had to include certain filming techniques such as shot/ reverse shot and match-on-action. We got given specific locations where we had to film our opening scene.
Plot
What is going to happen in your opening 2 minutes?
We will have the younger character drinking a hot chocolate in a café. We will have her mum walking past the window of the café and then into the café through the door using the match-on-action technique, meeting the other character (the daughter). She sits down with the younger character and they begin small talking and during this the daughter experiences flashbacks of how the stepdad used to treat her mum. Her mum then explains some good news that she is divorcing the girls stepdad, the mood then lightens.

'My week with Marylin Monroe'

How do I as a viewer, engage with Marilyn Monroe in the film?


During the film 'My week with Marilyn' I felt like I did engage with Marilyn. I felt like I could understand her in the manner of how she felt about love and how she understood it. She understood it as being that sex and affection was love, not everything that comes with it such as the personality side and going out with each other etc.
I also got the impression that she was not easily pleased and that she could never be completely happy at any time apart from when she felt loved. It was as if she was desperate for it but maybe couldn't deal with it when she got it because she ended up pushing away the men that got closest to her. This could be a trust issue which she had faced from previous relationships and had carried on effecting her throughout later partnerships.
I also felt like she was harsh to Eddie Redmayne who played Colin Clarke in the film as she didn't really engage with him in the right manner. It was as if she wanted him to fall in love with her, but for her not to fall in love with him and was potentially playing games with him, like she new what she was doing. This links in with how she was so desperate for men to love her and for her to understand what love felt like. She was good at giving off the wrong impressions.

Preliminary task

On Thursday last week we completed our Preliminary exercise:
A continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue.

Technically, what is the 180 degree rule in the context of this task?
The 180 degree rule is when you only film one side of the characters face, imagining that there is a line down the middle, implying that you can not film past that line as it would look incorrect on playback.

What is match-on-action?
Match on action for example is when you film characters walking through a door including two different angle shots but making sure they flow nicely together and still make sense within the clip.

What is shot/ reverse shot?
This is when you flip different shots between two or more different characters.

How did it go?
The filming of our preliminary task went really well, we all worked well as a team to complete it and the characters we asked to act for us were really helpful and tried their best to complete the task in the right manner. There were a few mess ups, such as us being asked to leave a science lab which we were originally going to film in, therefore we had to quickly decide which room to use to film the preliminary. We would then film it quickly as we didn't want to run out of time. This could have caused us to rush our work but it went well and nothing went dramatically wrong. There were 3 characters, all male who were our actors and other than a few laughs in between filming, they did complete it well.

What would you change/ do better if you had the chance to do the task again?
If I were to do it again, I maybe would have changed the location to a more suitable environment to link it with the plot better. Another thing I would have changed would be maybe when we were doing the more serious scenes, the characters could have acted more serious as well. Other than that, it all went really well for our first filming task.

Welcome!