Final Project Review:

For our final project, my group (Carter Hall, Ethan Lareau, and Amber Rachele) decided it'd be fun to wrap things up with a funny news story about finding the real Santa Claus. Our first day of searching was quite unsuccessful. However, on the second day, while coming out of a bank, we discovered Santa and chased after him. We eventually cornered him and interrogated him about whether or not he was in fact the real Santa. He denied it, but we were not convinced.  After all, who else dresses in all red and has a beard as white as snow? Due to the limited availability of Santa, we only had one day to film with him and we had to make it count. The day before we were scheduled to film with Santa, we decided to scout out some locations. Ethan grabbed a camera just in case. He ended up filming the whole time. The whole film was shot freehand with just a T5i and a shotgun mic. We ended with a ton of footage that we had to cut down a lot, but it was worth it. We were lucky enough to have Bruce Murtaugh assist us in our filming. While I have to admit that it was a little strange to work with and give acting directions to an adult we didn't really know, it was helpful to have someone who at least looked the part. To be completely honest, Bruce wasn't exactly the best actor, but we appreciated his willingness to help us out. 

My group honestly didn't have any sort of script or a specific shot list, which was kind of fun and was something a little different. We decided to do our news story in the form of a vlog almost, where we did entries marking our progress that served to keep our viewers in the loop, while we jumped around from scene to scene a little bit more than usual. Despite the fact that we didn't really have a script or shot list, I feel like we got some pretty visually appealing shots and decent sound. One thing our group could've easily added to make our video a little bit better, was lighting. We only had one person behind the camera (Ethan), so we didn't really bother with lighting. Whenever we decided to shoot, we simply shot wherever the lighting was naturally the best. I honestly don't think that adding lights would've made a huge difference, but I'm sure it would've cleaned up some of our shots and given off a more professional feel to the video. 

We had Carter edit our video since Ethan did all the shooting and Amber and I did all the (sub-par) acting.  I wish that the upbeat Christmas music Carter added had continued throughout the interview with Santa, rather than suddenly cut off. This also would've been especially helpful since there's a lot of background noise in that scene. I also wish that we had done two takes of the interview: one just filming Santa and one just filming us. I feel like this would've made it much easier to edit out the bad parts and keep the good parts. It also wouldn't have the same motion sickness feeling that it does now. Overall, this was a fun project to film and create, but it is certainly not something I'd submit to the Gawliks or even show off to my friends. 

Movie Review:

The Good German is a 2006 black and white movie. It is honestly not a movie I would recommend to someone to watch. I do have to say, that I like the way the movie lit it’s shots. In almost every scene, there is something in a shadow, which gives off a sort of dark and mysterious feeling that leads you to believe something is not quite right. One thing this movie did really poorly, however, was composing its action scenes and its more violent scenes. Watching these types of scenes, I felt absolutely no emotion. In one scene, a man was being beaten up, and had his arm broken, but it didn’t feel as though it was actually happening.

The Good German honestly does not engage its viewers, and does not evoke any sort of emotion. There was also a slight issue with continuity. Every once in a while, there would be a scene that looked like it was filmed about 60 years ago, but few other scenes were filmed to match. It was really distracting to go from 2006 camera quality to 1940's camera quality, and back again in a matter of minutes. Something that Amber kept commenting on while watching the movie, was when people were drinking. You couldn't tell what they were drinking because it all looked like water, but you, of course, assumed it wasn't.

On the bright side, the movie had good sound and the actors acted well enough. While the actors were not very good at the action scenes, everything else was good, and we can assume that much of the lack of success of the action scenes was in large part due to the directors. One additional thing that was lacking in my opinion, was emotion between the actors. None of the characters in the movie seemed to have honest or complex relationships with one another. It seemed a little bit like it was an every man for himself type of situation. If I had not been assigned to watch a black and white movie I’ve never seen before, I never would’ve started this movie, and if it hadn’t been for a grade, I wouldn’t have finished it. While there were some things the movie did right, there were a lot more things that the movie did wrong.