End of Semester: Final Projects Gallery

And so the semester comes to an end. Thanks for a great course everyone! I have to thank Ahmed for insisting on a class picture; it was a wonderful way of closing out the term.

Back row: Jay, Victoria, Peter, Ahmed, Kat, Nida, Natalie & Dhruv.
Front row: Jocelyn (with her newborn!), Manuel, Julia & Elan.

Below you’ll find links to all the final projects you produced:

– A Look at Martin Scorcese
Dhruv recorded four podcasts focused on the late work of Martin Scorcese, looking at Gangs of New York, The Departed, Shutter Island and Hugo, focusing on the themes than run through them and paying close attention to their opening and closing scenes. Listen to the first one below:

– Characters in Movies Reacting to Plot Twists
Jay produced a supercut of, as the title of his video states, characters reacting to plot twists. Beware! There are plenty of spoilers for films as diverse as Star Wars, The Sixth Sense and Black Swan.

Original Art by Kat herself!

– An Inside Look at Miyazaki
Kat created a Tumblr dedicated to director Hayao Miyazaki and three of his most lauded films (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke). Check it out to see her artwork, as well as to learn more about these films.

– Clocks vs Gatsby and Titanic
Victoria channels the spirit of Coldplay’s “Clocks” to create a mashup of two of Leonardo DiCaprio’s biggest films, Titanic and The Great Gatsby. See the result below:

Delicious looking cupcake from Foodista on the Rise

– Foodista on the Rise Blog
Nida created a Julie & Julia inspired recipe blog using Tumblr where she posted several recipes from Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking pairing them with pictures and anecdotes from her own attempts at reproducing them.

– Clint Eastwood: The Original Badass
Looking at someone he dubs “the original badass” and “an icon of masculinity,” Peter created a supercut of (in)famous Eastwood moments and performances, from Dirty Harry to Gran Torino.

– Tarantino | A Cappella
Ahmed recruited some friends and produced an a cappella medley of songs famously featured in Quentin Tarantino films, including “Staying Alive” (Full Tilt Boogie), “Woo Hoo” (Kill Bill), “100 Black Coffins” (Django Unchained) “Bang Bang” (Kill Bill). Listen below:

– Being a Gangster
Alex created an extended video look into the template that goes into making a gangster film, from The Public Enemy to Scarface. Take a look:

Guy Pearce in Memento

– Memento Memory
Jocelyn’s blog explores Christopher Nolan’s Memento in full detail, offering a wide variety of posts and discussions on the themes and images of this mind-bending film.

– Jared Leto- What Does He Really Look Like?
Natalie took her love of Jared Leto and channeled it into a video exploration of Leto’s penchant for extreme changes in his appearance for his roles, from losing weight for Dallas Buyers Club to donning cornrows for Panic Room:

– Disney’s Frozen: One-Man Dub – Frozen Heart
Elan flexed his singing and editing muscles and dubbed the opening number of Disney’s Frozen. Needless to say, we can’t wait to see the rest of the film dubbed like this.

– How Frozen and Tangled Overlap
Elan wasn’t the only one who worked on Disney’s latest behemoth. Julia explores the film’s similarities with another recent Disney film, Tangled. Watch below:

Thursday! Tyler Clementi Center Showcase

Social Media, Engagement & Going “Viral”

Facts to Know About Social Media

1 in every 4 people use social media & it has been growing steadily:
2012: 1.47 billion social media users worldwide
2013: 1.73 billion social media users worldwide
by 2017: 2.55 billion social media users worldwide

5.2 hours worldwide average time spent on social media

Best Time to Tweet and Post on Facebook

The Science of Social Timing Part 1: Social Networks & Part 2: Blogging

Blogging and Creating Digital Content (from here)

Users often leave Web pages in 10-20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people’s attention for much longer because visit-durations follow a negative Weibull distribution:

If the Web page survives this first — extremely harsh — 10-second judgment, users will look around a bit. However, they’re still highly likely to leave during the subsequent 20 seconds of their visit. Only after people have stayed on a page for about 30 seconds does the curve become relatively flat. People continue to leave every second, but at a much slower rate than during the first 30 seconds.

3 Simple Ways To Engage Your Readers And Keep Them Reading (er…scanning)

Videos and Going Viral (from here)

Create short, high-quality videos.
Your video does not need to longer than two to three minutes at the max. Shorter videos shot with a high-quality camera result in the most views, links, and comments. And, remember to choose a high-resolution thumbnail image to characterize your video in the search results.

Place keywords in your video’s title and description.
Search engines don’t have the ability to read video content, so it is up to you to tell the engines (and the viewers) what is contained in your video. Write a short, precise description of your video using the keyword terms most likely used by your viewers.

Become you own salesperson.
Promote your video through your Facebook, Twitter, and other social network channels. Have your friends and followers comment on your videos. Linking your video to your Facebook and Twitter accounts will result in others linking to your video. All of these promotion efforts will increase your video’s search engine rankings.

Make it easy for others to do the work.
Your settings on YouTube should allow your viewers to vote, comment, rate, and embed your video on their sites. I am always amazed at the number of people who go to the trouble of creating a video and then work against themselves by limiting viewer access.

Ten Ways to Make Your Video Go Viral

Resources to Keep Track of your Work

Statigram

Twitter Analytics

WordPress Analytics

YouTube Analytics

NEW LENS STUDENT FILM FESTIVAL

The Rutgers Center for Digital Filmmaking, Writers House and our film production students cordially invite you to the 3rd annual NEW LENS STUDENT FILM FESTIVAL in the beautiful Mason Gross Nicholas Music Center on Tuesday, May 6, 2014 at 7:00pm. 

This is a juried film festival judged by a team of professional filmmakers. Our innovate film students will present impressive documentary, fiction and animation films and compete for a variety of filmmaking awards including Best Drama, Best Comedy, Best Documentary, Best Cinematography, Best Animation and Audience Award.

To learn more about our festival, please go here.

Final Project – Grading Rubric

Natalie’s Final Project Proposal

From our discussion last week and from much further thought, I have decided to change my project from Jared Leto’s career to Jared Leto’s transformations for his career. When I was looking at clips from his movies, I realized there’s close to no movies in which he actually looks like himself in real life. The majority of the movies he is in there is a huge transformation. For example, the biggest ones being Chapter 27 and Dallas Buyers Club. In most of his roles, he had to change his hairstyle to eccentric ways. Some examples include Alexander, Panic Room, and Lonely Hearts. I am still going to be making a video. I will be mashing up clips together that show how different he looks in all of his roles. Because this will be very short, I will also include a short interview or two about his transformations for roles. Read this article about Leto’s Dallas Buyers Club transformation:

http://style.mtv.com/2014/03/01/jared-leto-rayon-dallas-buyers-club-transformation/

 

Kat’s Final Project Proposal

An Inside look at Hayao Miyazaki movies- Tumblr.

For my final project (as I had stated before) I am interested in making a tumblr account that goes a little in depth about the hidden meanings behind 3 of Miyazaki’s most popular films: Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and My Neighbor Totoro.

The tumblr account will have posts that are tagged according to the movie they refer to and what kind of post they are so that users can easily find them through the navigation section on the left.

The types of posts that I will make include:

-a short biography about Hayao Miyazaki

-summaries of the 3 films

-an inside look behind the meaning of the 3 films

-imaginary blogs made by various characters in the films

-the occasional miscellaneous picture that is related to the films (some of which will be made by me, and others will be from other tumblrs that I find in order to make the site more like a typical tumblr account).

In order to make the tumblr account cohesive and posted in a logical format I will be holding all of my posts to post at the very end. So in other words I will be saving the separate posts as drafts as I create them and when I finish with all the posts I want to make I will release them in a certain order so that if a user does not want to use the navigation links on the side they can just continuously scroll down to see all the information I have.

To find all the information I need I will be searching around a lot of websites (probably through google) and I have already found some sites that talk about the symbolism in Miyazaki’s films. And then to find out more about Miyazaki and his history I will be finding various pages including his official website and maybe even publish books about him. In the history of Miyazaki I also plan on going a little bit into the history of the company he founded, Studio Ghibli and I will briefly go over the other works that Miyazaki has made. But I do not want to lose focus and get side tracked so I will just be listing all the movies the company has made.

Some things that I will require for this project is giving myself ample time to do research on all the things I want to cover. I also will need time to create the images I would like to post. And lastly I will be asking my cousin to send me pictures of her dressed up as certain characters. It is a lot of work and in order for me to get all the components together I will be giving myself personal deadlines to meet so that I can keep up with the project in a timely manner.

The intended audience I have in mind will be Miyazaki fans like myself who are interested in learning more about Miyazaki’s film and just overall enjoying themselves on my tumblr page. I want the page to be interesting and not read like a textbook. I will do my best to make it interesting by writing in my own style and having pictures to aid heavier paragraphs.

Besides tumblr, I will probably be using photoshop and painter in order to create the images I want. I do not think I have time to incorporate any videos or make any gifs without overwhelming myself so I will probably stay away from those forms of media unless I have extra time to teach myself. But if I find interesting videos I will be sure to reblog them. Also I will be adding a music player on the tumblr account to make visiting my page a more immersive experience.

The overall purpose of this tumblr account is for me to learn more about my favorite animator and the intricate worlds he created throughout the years as well as to share my love for his films with other people. I have never met someone who does not like a Miyazaki movie–only people who had never seen his films. So I hope to not disappoint my fellow fans and create a tumblr account with truly interesting things to say about the 3 films I want to focus on. I hope that people will learn something new as I’m sure I will be learning a lot from this project. I also hope to learn more about using new medias and technologies and incorporating them into one cohesive work.

For anyone interested, I already created the tumblr account but there is nothing on it yet. The url is http://beyondmiyazaki.tumblr.com/

Nida’s Project Final Proposal

My life can be accurately summed up as a collection of food experiences and I have been considering many possibilities for a project that could combine this film class with my love of food for several weeks now. I have finally decided that for my final project, I want to embody a film that is entirely based around French cuisine: Julie and Julia. I will literally steal the plot and apply it to my life by embodying the role that Julie plays and replicating her goal in the film: to recreate Julia Child’s recipes as a personal challenge and keep an updated blog to chronicle her experiences. I certainly don’t plan on cooking every single recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) within the next month as Julie had planned to do in an year. My personal preferences in food are all baked delights and I will definitely be making the following three recipes from that category that are highlighted in the film: Upside Down Apple Tart, Chocolate Soufflé, and Raspberry Bavarian Cream Cake, and I will also be making whichever recipes throughout the cookbook I personally find appealing. Significant in the film are parts of the film’s cooking scenes where Julie has revelations and realizations about not only cooking but also about her own life. There are also plenty of moments of hilarious and sometimes upsetting accidents and the difficulties she faces. For the personal entertainment of all people who will be informed of my experiences as I go about this project, I will be sure to include those types of instances that I personally encounter.

A second layer of the film is Julie’s use of a blog to chronicle her experiences, both in her life and in her cooking journey. Following this layout from the film as a tool for my presentation, I will be creating a wordpress blog highlighting all the recipes that I will be making and also include personal text in those posts before and after the recipe. Before I state the recipe, I will have a blurb on my personal life that led me to choose the particular recipe and explain the significance to myself personally. After the recipe is stated in the body of the post, I will relay the issues I faced and idea on how to potentially avoid the mistakes I made. The recipe posts will include images of the final creation that I will take of my own creations and also screenshots if the recipe was shown in the film as well all situated at the beginning of each post. This layout is meant to mimic Julie’s style of blogging in the film. In order to create a stronger connection to the film, I will take screen grabs from the film and use them in all applicable posts. Sometimes they may be of the same food item I am making, and other times they may be a different food item that uses the same technique that the item I made uses. For example, if there is a screen grab of Julie making an egg dish, I can apply to to any egg dish I make, giving me a wider array of options for comparisons to the movie.

The blog itself will have a homepage that has a chronological list of all my posts scrolling down and several page links across the top of the site to organize the blog more. There will be an About page to explain the origins of the blog, my idea of implementing Julie and Julia into my life, and why I chose to do this project versus any other option. There will also be page links per type of recipe such as Sauces, Breads, Desserts, etc. and on each page I will link to any relevant blog posts where I have created an item under that category. Aesthetically, the blog must be well organized and easy to follow as a recipe blog and also provide some explanation of how the blog is relevant to this film class.

Besides my love of food and my desire to find a way to incorporate it into my final project, I want to do a project like this because I want to show that films can be relatable to our lives as viewers. Many films like Julie and Julia are often put aside in modern day cinematography because they are not the flashy, dramatic, out of this world, exciting films that tend to capture audiences, nor is it a film on a highly debatable topic that inspires deep discussion after the film. These quiet films are the ones that run most parallel to the average person’s life and I believe that we can use them to reflect on our own lives more than we can with other kinds of films.

At the end of the project, I plan to complete 2-3 recipes a week, within text posts, spanning the period of the next month. I hope to have completed a project that inspires some learning in the kitchen as well as some reflection on myself and my life that can be related through my cooking, much as Julie did throughout the film.

Peter’s Final Project Proposal

Alright, so after hemming and hawing with a plethora of ideas such as types of movies, awards won and why, who does what and where and at what time period I’ve thought of over 20 ideas, yet, none of these enticed me nor seemed very narrow. I either had an idea that sounded great on paper, but was hard to execute, or something that was easy to execute and narrow, but I didn’t have enough scenes to work with. The idea that finally led me to this idea of creating a mash-up of cliches, one, if executed correctly, would create a nicely formulated poem/creative prose that would have some type of fluency. Yet, the theme was not there, but after remembering one of the most quoted lines of all time, it finally hit me…”Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?” AND THAT’S IT!!

I will engage with Clint Eastwood films, particularly, Clint Eastwood shooting people and things, which of course he loves to do. Since he has been in over 20 films, I will have plenty of scenes to work with, great lines that lead up to shots being fired, all focusing on one of the great cultural icons of masculinity. With myself having been on a Clint Eastwood movie binge before, I know how amazing of an actor he is and how his deadpan expression and curt responses can create a beautiful “calm before the storm” effect, thus allowing my piece to have a strong sense of tension along with an exorbitant amount of action and of course, death. My audience will, in effect, be large, catering not only to the Clint Eastwood fans of the world, but any film viewer who enjoys action and watching people get shot. Which I’m sure is a large audience, who doesn’t enjoy death? Thus, armed with this idea of death, action, and all around masculinity, I have begun my slow but enduring journey into finding all Clint Eastwood movies, which will be my raw material. These will include, but not be limited to: A Fist Full of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad and The Ugly, Hang Em High, Coogans Bluff, Two Mules for Sister Sara, Magnum Force, Joe Kidd, Dirty Harry, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven, and of course, Gran Torino. Utilizing these movies, which I already have most of, will allow me to have access to over several dozen shootouts, target practices, and copious amounts of death. I can have all different types of shots like long range sniper shots, short range suspenseful shots, ones with a quick draw and ones in which Clint Eastwood is basically just a straight boss saying some sweet one-liner right before blowing some guys head off. All in all, I feel as though this is narrow, specific, entails a theme and a specific actor, and has all the necessary means in which to create a great piece. I thought this was a good idea after seeing the natalie portman cries a lot video, which got me to thinking about what other type of actor does something similiar, in the sense that they do it often. Thus the idea of Clint Eastwood shooting off a .347 magnum was born!

Finally, of course I will need some type of program to make this idea feasible, so I am choosing to use a video editing software, but since I am not well versed in this type of software, I feel like that will be the hardest part for myself. Thus, I hope by the end of this project I will be able to correctly use, even on a basic level, video software on macs. Heck, maybe I’ll actually become a mac user, you never know, I might become entrenched in the idea of being able to be creative in other ways. All in all, this is a large step outside my comfort zone because I have, up until this point, only had creative experience in writing prose, poetry, and fiction. Of course if this idea is too optimistic, I can always take the easy way out, spend a maximum of a few hours on make poems and prose based off of films, maybe remake the ended of some of my favorite films in writing form, the possibilities are endless when in comes to expressing myself in written format. But, I feel like this is creating myself in some sense, which is why I chose to pursue this scary situation instead. We experience the most growth when out of our comfort zone, and that is exactly where I intend to place myself.

Alex’s Project Proposal

When I started to think about what I wanted for my project I wasn’t sure about much but I was sure that I wanted to explore a genre. I wanted to explore the history of a genre by through video form. Originally I wanted to make a video on the genre of monster films but I decided that I would shift to the Gangster genre. Though many contemporary Gangster films are well known there is a long and rich history of gangster films to draw from for this project. To start off my project I plan on capturing clips from famous and critically acclaimed films throughout the genres history. I would then take these moments from the films throughout the history of the gangster genre and use them to create a series of montages. These montages would then be used edited together for the theme and direction of the final product of my video. The end result will be a video that covers the history of gangster films through the use of clips from different era’s and also telling the story arc of the gangster genre by creating it using the clips. I am going to be using these moments from gangster movies throughout history to create the basic story acts from the gangster genre. The video will use clips from the various films through the history of gangster films and use them to play out the basic story arc of the genre
Gangster films if examined can be largely summed up by looking at the basic premise it has held from the start. The first act consists of a down out of luck anti-hero from a bad neighborhood finds himself unable to live or succeed in American society in a way usually sympathetic to the audience. In the second Act the anti-hero embraces a life of criminal activity and exploitation of others to make it in America. In the third Act the anti-hero usually achieves success from his exploitation and the success is fetishized and glamorized for the audience. In the fourth act the anti-hero through his own actions usually immoral to the audience begins a swift downfall from prestige, success or power. In the fifth act the anti-hero pays for his actions with his life and serves as a lesson in either social conditions or morality. Not all gangster films strictly adhere to this format. Some films empathize with their characters like Menace II Society and others revile them like Goodfellas. Different movies play around with the format of the gangster genre but they all start from this premise. It is this premise that I am going to create using clips from Gangster films throughout the genre’s history.
Gangster films often strike up images of recent films or maybe even movies from the 70s like the Godfather but they have been around from nearly the beginning of cinema. The first ever gangster film The Black Hand is from 1906 while the first major gangster film The Musketeers of Pig Alley dates to 1912 and was directed by W.D. Griffith. Gangster films have been around for a while and this long history offers a rich field of films to choose from. I plan on using scenes from The Public Enemy (1931), Public Enemies (2009), White Heat (1949), Juice (1992), Scarface (1983), Scarface (1932), Menace II Society (1993), The Petrified Forrest (1936), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), Layer Cake (2004), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather II (1974) and The Godfather II (1990). I may use scenes from more films or maybe this list may be too many, I’ll find out when I start to put the video project together. As it is now I plan on using films that are primarily gangster films so noir films or thrillers won’t be used. If some films may be several stories like the Godfather which is also an immigrant story among others as well as a gangster film it might be used. I am not sure about films that are both gangster and cop films. Films like the French Connection, New Jack City, King of New York and so on. They do have great characters who are gangsters and they follow the gangster character arc that I described above but they aren’t just gangster Genre films so I am not sure if I should use them. I also have been sticking to mostly American films; do you think I should include from other cinemas like Hong Kong, China or Japan or would that not work. I may or may not include films or mixed genre or films from other cinemas yet but I plan on exploring them and seeking other points of view on films that I should use.