Final Thriller - Enigma

Enigma As A Thriller

In looking at Enigma I wanted to relate and compare it to a typical thriller. Having recently watched The Girl On The Train, I was taken by just how well we utilised the different tropes and clichés of Hollywood thrillers. I made a compilation of the film to compare to our thriller.

Evaluation

Preliminary Task

La La Land - History of the Modern Musical

On December 9th La La Land, the new film from Damien Chazelle, will be released in certain cinemas in USA. On Christmas Day it will be a wide-spread release and on January 13th the UK will get it. After the critical and Oscar darling, Whiplash, Chazelle's first movie was released buzz was outu for his next big movie. A dream project of his was an old Hollywood style big musical in present day.

This film was a smash hit, the critics loved it, the audience loved it, musical theatre fans loved it, musical haters loved it. The expert artistry of Damien Chazelle's work as a director made it an instant success. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, Hollywood's new Burton and Taylor, were on the big screen, dancing tap and bursting into song. And for a genre as maligned and shunned in modern Hollywood as the musical genre, that's no small feat.

Musicals in more recent years have run the gambit from box office poison (Into the Woods) or critical and award-winning extravaganzas (Les Miserables, Moulin Rouge) but since 2001, post 9/11 Hollywood has found itself unable to recapture musicals glory heydays, think MGM's days, the old days of Singin In The Rain, The Wizard of Oz, Top Hat, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, the list goes on. Musicals post Moulin Rouge mainly existed in Disney films and animation and rarely made it to the big screen the way they used to. But they have tried and it has rarely turned out well to make a big cheesy, dancing-the-night-away style of film reach audiences the way they used to. The same way action films have changed, so too have musicals. Audiences cannot accept the fantasy and the escapism unless they root it in something more realistic. Gone are the boom-and-bombastic disaster films and gone are top hats and tap shoes on the big screen.

 

And somehow they did it. Damien Chazelle shopped the project around Hollywood executives and, as expected, received a very hearty "no" from most. That is until Lionsgate, who was an unlikely

The film was huge, gaining fourteen Oscar nominations from the Academy Awards, tied for the most nominations since All About Eve and Titanic, and eleven from the Foreign Press Association at the Golden Globes. The film was well on the way to win the Best Picture as well, although for all who watched the Oscars this turned out to not be the case. Still, nevertheless, the film is iconic, gathering what it wants

On the Cutting Room Floor

A lot more footage was included in Enigma to play into the overall plot of the film. This is all presented in an earlier cut of the film. You can tell by the titles and the not-too polished editing that this was an incredibly rough cut.

We eventually decided it would be better to cut out most of the second half. Firstly because it was becoming well out of the time limitations for the thriller as a hole. And second, it started to feel like too much being crammed into it at once. Ultimately I think we made the right call.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Disney Lucasfilm's latest entry in the Star Wars canon is a muddled film with promise with the whole not being as good of the sum of its ingenious parts.

Kathleen Kennedy announced the Rogue One franchise at D23 as a spin-off from the core saga that would examine the parts in between the original and newer films. This prequel would take place before Episode IV - A New Hope, telling the story of the rogue task force that captured the plans for the Death Star. It follows Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), daughter of Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), the research scientist and developer of the plans and construction of the Death Star. He is the one who constructed the controversial "fatal flaw" in the system of the Death Star. The Rebel Alliance believes he is a traitor and that Jyn is their only lead and they want to find him and assassinate him before the Death Star is functioning. Jyn seeks to find her father who abandoned her as a child and left her in the care of Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), a veteran of the Clone Wars who mentored her. And that is just Jyn's plot. And this brings the biggest problem with the film; much like Suicide Squad this is an ensemble piece and the focus through the entire first act is cluttered and clumsy, it doesn't know its focus or how to maintain it. My personal theory is that Jyn, as the marketing shows, was originally the focus of the film. But due to the negative feedback on Jyn in the first trailers and the problems behind the scenes with production the film went through extensive re-shoots; Disney wanted changes made to the overall film, there is an entire subplot involving the Kyber crystal, the charge of the Death Star, that her mother gave her, probably to have her mother make some impact because, in Disney tradition, her mother dies rather swiftly in the opening.

This film also follows the Han Solo esque Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), Yoda-esque Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen), Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), C3P0 rip-off K2SO (Disney favourite Alan Tudyik), Chewie-esque Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen) and yet another Caucasian brunette in Jynn Erso (Jones). Luna and Jones are unwatchably one-note and dull in their performances, Jones' hard-faced demeanour and monotone "cool" tone gets a little grating, so much to the point that the filmmakers felt it necessary to jam in random moments of tenderness on her part. She does the "saves-child-from-peril" cliche, and a very forced call-back to the classic trilogy with her talking to her hologram dad a la Princess Leia in Episode 4. Luna's character Cassian starts out as a truly interesting character, in a call-back to the Episode 4 Greedo scene, Cassian murders an Imperial informant in cold blood, making the audience question his morality and wonder how they will address it. But, like the rest of the characters, this is dropped in lew of more action and comic-relief. Riz Ahmed, an actor I truly enjoy, plays Bodhi in such a confused and incongruous manner, jittery and highly energetic but with no real reason or rhyme to it and incredibly inconsistent. He does get rather aggravating after a while. Forest Whitaker is laughable with his wheezy, breathless, "I-need-my-asthma-pump" voice and his likewise one-note performance. Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen  shine as a duo, Chirrut's mystery and quick wit is matched wonderfully with Baze's sardonic delivery. Alan Tudyik is enjoyable as the rogue robot, but they never deal with any real implications in regard to his actions and his backstory. The biggest flaw with these characters being so dull is that this is, at heart, a heist movie. And the high stakes and dramatic ending do not ring true when the audience is given nothing to care about.

The action, while impressive, also holds no dramatic tension when legions of side characters and stunt men storm the AT-ATs on an uncomfortably Vietnam looking beach. The appropriation of the Vietnam imagery isn't even poignant enough to feel manipulative or contrived, its capitalising but it does not matter. The effects and choreography are what truly sell it, Chirrut in his martial arts, Jones and her stunt team in her escrima fighting and ILM's incredibly photo-realistic effects help to sell the scenes when the characters are really not being sold. The set-pieces are gorgeous, grand landscapes, sweeping battles and a stunning spaceship battle amidst dozens upon dozens of shuttles and X-Wings, Darth Vader hurling people into the ceiling and slicing them in two in an almost horror film corridor fight. It's intense and it's brutal but it never feels earned. That's what I feel the entire film is in a nutshell, gritty, real, brutal and thrilling but unearned. The emotional points are almost glanced at, character development is sneezed at us and the basic plot is so jumbled and jam-packed you don't even know who to pay attention to at any one time. A valiant first run of a soon to be series, but a test drive that will hopefully lead to greater trips in the future.

Bridget Jones's Diary Remake - Complete

Production Begins

Filming the Remakes- Crewing for Fahrenheit 451

In our lesson we helped another group with their re-creation of the opening of the 1966 dystopian film 'Fahrenheit 451'. They needed shots of television aerials, so we filmed from the school field, using a tripod and a video camera to get the desired effect. The zoom function on the camera was very smooth, so this helped to precisely replicate the gradual close up used in the original shots.

I think that it was useful to see how the cameras worked, as this will be key in our own re-creation of 'Bridget Jones's Diary'. We may possibly shoot from several different angles using multiple cameras as some shots in the opening are face-on wide shots and others are wide shots from the corner of the room. I think we should use a DSLR as all of the shots are stationary, so we won't need the camera to focus quickly;it will remain focused on one particular spot. I also think that setting up the tripod efficiently could be difficult for our group, as we only have three people, but because we don't need any tracking shots, we won't have much other equipment, such as a steady-cam.

Pre-production #2

Bridget Jones opening remake:

Story Board, Shot-list,Titles List

Breakdown of Opening Titles

Pre-production

Bridget Jones's Diary - Preparation

Myself and Charlie planning

 We've been working on story-boarding and planning out the shots for our production. Our re-creation has suffered from slight delays, because we lost the storyboards and have had to make them again. Eden was also off school for a week because of illness, so we are not where we are supposed to be in terms of preparation.



Storyboarding

 The hardest part of the process so far has been finding props and deciding where to film in the common room, to mirror the look of the opening as closely as possible. It's becoming increasingly harder to find objects that accurately resemble those in the opening; such as an unlit cigarette instead of a lit one, red pyjamas and wine (Ribena).

However we made up for lost time quickly and we're hoping to begin shooting on Wednesday, after our rehearsal. 

Deciding on the Remake

Bridget Jones' Diary Opening Recreation

Our group decided that we would try to re-create the opening of 'Bridget Jones's Diary' (released in 2001, directed by Sharon Maguire) based on the novel of the same name by Helen Fielding.

The film is essentially a romantic-comedy,about Bridget Jones (Reneé Zellweger), a self-conscious, accident prone woman in her early thirties, who has to choose between two contrasting male love interests, the barrister son of her parents friends, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and her boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). It had a budget of $25 million and earned $281.9 at the box office.

We chose 'Bridget Jones's Diary', because it's a British film produced by 'Working Title Films' (Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan), the production company that we will be studying later on in our course. The opening scene's mise-en-scène consists of various pieces of furniture, made to look disorganised and haphazard to emphasise Bridget's own complicated life. We are hoping to use the 6th form common room, as well as our own props to re-create this look.

Queer Baiting - Hollywood's Latest Method Hype

Recently, with Disney's Beauty and the Beast and Lionsgate's Power Rangers, there's been a marketing tactic of revealing that, prior to the films' release, that there is a gay character.

Seeing as these are family fare, it struck me as surprising that they would potentially sabotage their ad campaign by revealing something that has ruined film's success in other circumstances, films like Paranorman and shows such as The Legend of Korra had catastrophic ratings and audience appeal once this had been released.

 

 

What was even more baffling is that, as I said in my review, LeFou in Beauty and the Beast is only really played for comic relief and as a sickening stereotype, all subtext and no text if the director Bill Condon, a gay man, hadn't made a big deal about it.

First Exclusively Gay Moment In A Disney Film

 

Power Rangers however had a legitimate textual confirmation. The character Trini, the yellow ranger, is confirmedly LGBT in some way and they address it in the script itself. No other heightened stereotypical traits come into her performance, it just is what it is. In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with that.

 

What's frustrating is this idea that there has to be a huge thing about it. Bill Condon didn't need to make a statement, he could just have let the film do it on its own. And frankly, if he hadn't addressed it LeFou would exist with the other supposedly "gay" characters in Disney's history like Elsa, Merida, Jafar and so on. If you're going to go there then go there, I just don't see the point otherwise.

Moonlight Review - Fails As A Coming-Of-Age Narrative But In A Good Way

Moonlight is a coming-of-age narrative about a young African-American boy living in the drug district of Miami and the hardships he goes through not just for his upbringing but his coming to terms with his sexuality. The plot takes each act of the film through the three phases of his life, childhood, youth and adulthood, and paints a tableau of Chirod throughout the course of his life.

I love this film so much. It's everything I could have hoped for. I went into this film knowing nothing, I'd heard buzz and stirrings surrounding the film but it wasn't quite on my radar. The cast of relatively unknowns, safe for Mahershala Ali from Netflix's Luke Cage, actress-singer Janelle Monáe from Hidden Figures and Naomi Harris of the Bond Series fame. They lend some legitimacy to the cast but not distractingly so. I was surprised by Monáe's appearance at the start of the film however, as I had no idea she was in it I was pleasantly surprised as I really do love her as an actress. Mahershala Ali was fantastic, he was wasted on Luke Cage in my opinion and he's a genius find. Naomi Harris I have always been a huge fan of, she is an amazing actress and here I do truly feel it's her greatest work yet. She is also wasted in her respected franchise and she is not given enough work. And considering she filmed her scenes in no less than three days is astonishing to me.

The themes it deals with and the way it presents them is brilliant. The way it's shot is breath-taking, with such low budget and resources they make the film look incredible. While watching it it called to mind several Eastern films I had watched and upon researching I discovered that there was some influence and inspiration on the director. It really gives the film an iconic look and file, transposing the filming style of Asia to the locations and atmosphere of Miami USA.

What sticks out to me the most is the coming-of-age side to the story. The film takes you on the journey of Chirod's life but when we see him as an adult he's still just the same as he once was. I like that the film didn't have a linear story with an easy ending but rather addressed the idea of never truly growing up. It made the film that much better in my eyes and I truly loved every second of it.

Academy Awards 2017 - The Biggest Blunder in Oscars History

The Oscars this year were something, to say the least. The nominations were a given, no one could really question them (except for a head-scratching snub for Amy Adams for Arrival or Nocturnal Animals) and everyone had a dog in this fight; "La La Land is the greatest thing ever", "Moonlight is a game-changer and it had zero budget", "Ryan Gosling learned how to play piano, dammit, who cares if his performance was a little lacklustre". It's extraordinary how commonplace it is for everyday to posit this idea of the mainstream awards. After the headache inducing buy out of the Golden Globes, pretty much solidifying what we have always thought of how easy it is to gain the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's love, the Oscars was supposed to hold the yearly enjoyment of the long speeches, the perfect outfits and the fist-pumping adulation for your favourite actor getting what you feel they deserve. Boy howdy, this was unexpected.

The ultimate screw-up and the, to date, biggest mistake in the Academy's long Hollywood history means more than the slew of internet feedback could think. La La Land was prototypical Oscar Gold; a Hollywood set musical, calling back to the musical days of yore with naught but love for film and Hollywood and a bittersweet love letter to Los Angeles. It was a shoe-in for Best Picture, its box office and cultural appeal was undeniable. Moonlight, on the other hand, was not typical Oscar fuel; an LGBT themed coming-of-age story of the life of a young, disenfranchised boy living in the drug culture area of Liberty City, Miami. It details his plight to find his identity, including the physical and emotional abuse he receives as a result of his homosexuality. Including an all-black cast with mostly unknown actors, this was a risk but it gained critical adornment and audiences found it unusually acceptable. High risk and a high reward is the perfect phrase. This event was all the press could talk about, poor Emma Stone had to ward off the comments until eventually she could say nothing else except for "I f---ing love Moonlight", but still the questions came. The world was lit up by the sheer disbelief, no one could comprehend it; the Academy had honoured the exact opposite of what they're known for and it meant more than anyone could have anticipated. Moonlight was granted with the highest honour of being new; it wasn't about slavery, it wasn't exploitative, it was truly unconventional in every way. And the Academy gave it the praise it deserved.

The rest of the wins were less eventful but everyone got the ideal choices;

Casey Affleck - Best Actor

Mahersha Ali - Best Supporting Actor

Emma Stone - the Best Actress

Viola Davis - Best Supporting Actress

Manchester By The Sea - Best Screenplay

Moonlight - Best Adapted Screenplay

Zootopia - Best Animated Feature Film

Beauty and the Beast Review

Pretty much a shot-for-shot remake, Bill Condon's Beauty and the Beast is an enjoyable film but it's inevitable to compare it to its original that this one is trying so hard to capitalise on. In that way, it does not surpass it but it does not fail, something I think many people are happy for.

The cast is perfect, the bad auto-tuned singing not withstanding. Emma Watson is a perfect Belle, she elevates the passivity of the original character into a dynamic and interesting character. Her singing, while good when sung live, is unbearable once autotuned. I really don't understand why they felt the need to mess with her vocals, she has a perfectly good voice on its own as you can hear during the film where they didn't feel the need to tamper with it at all. The rest of the cast is perfect in theory, but Emma Thompson and Ian McKellen stick out to me as a little off. Thompson lacks the warmth that Angela Lansbury leant to the character and Ian McKellen just did not hit any of the character beats that David Ogden Steirs originated.

The songs are brilliant, the new numbers like Evermore, Days in the Sun and How Does A Moment Last Forever are wonderful additions, they lend themselves very well to the score.

My biggest problem stems from Josh Gad's character LeFou. While I think Gad is perfect for the role, I question the decision to turn LeFou from a coded gay lacky to a love-sick, over the top gay stereotype. There was a huge deal made about the film and its inclusion of an officially gay character and I personally just saw a stereotype with no well-written textual backing for the decisions.

All in all I highly enjoyed it. Does it have any reason to exist? No. Is it shamelessly capitalising off of the original too much? Inevitably, yes. But I haven't enjoyed a cinema experience from Disney this much since Princess and the Frog and I left with a spring in my step for sure. I'll be watching it, no doubt, many times in the future.

The Girl on the Train - Movie Review

With an award-worthy performance by Emily Blunt and a twist to rival Psycho, these elements cannot keep this mess of a film from de-railing its source material.

Based on the hit mystery novel by Paula Hawkins, this film makes the unfortunate choice of adapting it the exact same way the book was written; a first-person narrative from the perspective of three different people. The narration, the jumpy narrative and the terrible pacing are all evidence of filmmakers and screenwriters who did not know how to edit the novel for a film medium.

The cinematography and editing are very cliche and address all the tropes for a typical thriller; the phasing edits, the cutting frames, the rack of focus, the colloquially called "Hitchcock Shot"). The tropes are all addressed but they never really feel motivated and the overall framing for the blackouts is more fascinating than the actual "memory" moments where she recovers what she's forgotten. It's a well-made film based purely on its shot design, the composition is wonderful and the camera's movement is very smooth and thankfully low in seizure-inducing "shaky-cam" which most modern day thrillers use. There are some very good uses of these tropes, her first two flashbacks are evocative of the kind of feel I have in mind for my thriller treatment.

The acting is amazing; Emily Blunt is one of my all-time favourite actresses and she gives an incredible performance. She plays the alcoholic part a little too well, it's rather chilling. If this were an all-around stronger film she should have been a big awards contender. But the low critical and box-office rates hindered the film beyond all relief, both from an audience and awards point of view. Rebecca Ferguson, another one of my favourite actresses, gives a very enthralling performance. She doesn't have a ton to do, her character is more or less a plot device, but she does the best she can with what she's given. Luke Evans, another great actor, plays the abusive, possessive husband brilliantly, I'm glad to see his career is doing well as he's a very likeable actor with a lot of range. Lisa Kudrow has a fleeting cameo and she does a very good job, she is the nicest character in the entire film. She is relegated to being a bit of an expository character, basically helping to lay out the twist at the end of the film (which is genuinely brilliant), but she makes it work. The rest of the cast suffers from their bad writing and it is sometimes cringeworthy. Allison Janney as Detective Riley is playing a hard-bitten, grizzled cop and she plays every cop cliche ever done, Hayley Bennet is relegated to a sexy-lamp, she is an object that is passed around before being promptly murdered. She spends the entire film nude, having graphic and poorly filmed sex scenes and strutting around her balcony in skimpy outfits. Any character comes through in her writing, as she was written brilliantly in the original story, but she never has a narrator so most of her lines are her thought trains from the book. No actress could make those lines sound natural. And then there's Justin Theroux's Tom. Theroux, a David Lynch alumni and a fantastic actor is given nothing to work with. His character is so one note that you can place it the minute you see him. He plays the manipulative, conniving killer but his motives are unclear, his backstory is non-existant, his depth is that of a puddle. The only way Theroux manages to heighten his work is in just how cold and sinister Tom really is. And while the twist is genius, he never plays into that genius. He lets the twist speak for itself; it works with or without him and he's a weak, flat antagonist that adds nothing to the overall story except for a weak way to tie these stories together.

Setting Up The Shoot

 

Casting of Melanie

We had a bit of a problem with the casting of our protagonist, Melanie. We had at first cast Mia Rodgers, an AS Drama Student, in the role but due to scheduling she could not make it for filming day. Instead we cast my friend Lilli Schlaeffli in the role. While we had to change some visual elements, I am very happy that Lilli will be working with us. If we were to replace anyone over Mia, Lilli is ideal. She's incredibly talented and works incredibly well.

Industrial Light and Magic (ILM)

Industrial Light and Magic

Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) is a motion picture visual effects company that was founded by George Lucas in May 1975. It is a division of the film production company, Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when Lucas began production of the film Star Wars. For many years, particularly during the widespread inception of computer graphics in film during the 1980s, ILM was considered the leading industry standard production house for computer graphics in film; many studios other than Lucasfilm sent scenes to the studio for CG. It is also the original founder company of the animation studio Pixar.



ILM originated in Van Nuys, California, then later moved to San Rafael in 1978, and since 2005 it has been based at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio of San Francisco. In 2012, The Walt Disney Company acquired ILM as part of its purchase of Lucasfilm.

The Star Wars saga was an incredible achievement by the company

Revolutionising the digital animation of Hollywood is one thing, revitalising the hand-drawn animation world is another. For Robert Zemeckis' Who Framed Roger Rabbit ILM was tasked with creating realistic cartoon characters, or "toons" in 1947's Los Angeles.

The process was an intense procedure, everything from highlights, to low-lights, to translucency, to shadows. More difficult still was the tracking of toons before the age of digital computers. Zemeckis wanted to film the picture like any other movie so as to not take the audience out of the moments he presented; he wanted toons to experience high emotion, high melodrama and serious real-world issues. Unlike Ralph Bakshi's Cool World where the limitations were most prevalent when the toons enter the real world.

ILM do the visual effects for most well known films and blockbusters; all of the Marvel movies (under Disney and Marvel Studios), the upcoming Great Wall, Kong: Skull Island, TMNT, The Revenant, Warcraft, Transformers, and most if not all big blockbusters in the immediate future.

Thriller Opening - Analysis Of Tropes

In preparation for our opening, we looked at two different thrillers to address the tropes commonly featured. For 10 Cloverfield Lane by Dan Trachtenberg, the thriller that later evolves into a sci-fi film, the film opens with the common trope of the shaky cam following of our protagonist around a room. Through visuals, no dialogue, we have the scenario of our protagonist explained; she is leaving her fiancee and she is packing her belongings. We get this through her rapid grabbing of her belongings and her hurried packing, the restlessness of the camera entails. And the final panning shot reveals the left wedding ring and the note. This visual shorthand shows us very quickly the events that lead to this, telling us the backstory without forced exposition. As we follow her in her car we reach the second trope, "The Winding Road To Nowhere". This has been seen in such famous thrillers and horror films as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, The Cohen Brother's Fargo and more. We follow her in her car across a bridge, into the country, further and further away from civilisation. The isolation of her in her car, alone in the middle of nowhere is a scary.

In Room (2015) by Lenny Abrahamson, they create tension via several conventional and non-conventional ways. For example, the editing involves very quick insertion of titles so quick that they come across as disorienting, unclear, fragmented, white on black. It adds to the overall affect of the disjointed, abruptness of each shot. In terms of sound, the dull tone and the breathing over the short clips of the room add to the quick paced world building. It's only until the smooth, long take of the reveal of Room and the protagonist's voice over that the soft piano music begins. If the conventional beginning of the film had not happened, we wouldn't think this film was in any way a thriller, based on the shot of the main character and his mother and the music choice they made. The diegetic sound in the beginning, the breathing, sighing and moaning, add to the unknowing and creepy vibe of the scene, the mother's voice telling him to go back to sleep is unnerving if you haven't seen the film and you don't know what happens. Then when the voice-over begins, the sudden disconnect of diegesis , the echoey, unreal quality of his voice make it suddenly so much more calm. The shots in the beginning are obscured visuals, you can't make everything out. The extreme close-ups on mundane, small things keep it in such tight focus that you don't fully comprehend the situation. The camera action, the pull of focus, the shaky cam, the raked angles, the intensely tight shots give sense of claustrophobia. The misleading opening transitioning to the family-drama style situation of our main characters frames it as way of life, showing it as a normality and routine while also keeping an otherness to the scene that keeps you uneasy and unsure.

 

First Day Of Thriller - Log Lines

Having looked at log lines for famous movies, it's becoming apparent that there are only so many plots that can be made and the key is in the details. The way it hooks a studio executive is through key elements such as character cues, simplicity, lines, famous scenes, famous visuals or iconic ideas. For example, Rocky was easy to summarise because it's so simple and effective, utilising a well-known quote to make it identifiable.

Similarly Mad Max is such an iconic story and culturally significant film that it's immediately noticeable to someone like me, therefore it's brilliant to capture an audience and exec's attention.

We were then tasked with creating a log line for our thriller after our original treatment was complete. This was mine:

A girl is abducted and made to carry out riddles and puzzles to secure her freedom. The one who entraps her, known only as Enigma, uncovers secrets and a twisted past in our protagonist that she has been trying to escape, something she cannot remember.

Genesis Cinema - East London

Independent cinemas in London have an important role in London and the rest of the country in distributing indie films. However, when we visited the local Genesis Cinema we saw a blockbuster action sci-fi film, Star Wars Episode VII - The Force Awakens.

Genesis is one of multiple independent cinemas and cinema branches in London. Such cinemas include Everyman, Curzon, The Arthouse Cinema, BFI Southbank, Cine Lumiere, Electric Cinema, Lexi Cinema, Peckhamplex, Phoenix, Prince Charles, Regent Street, Rio and many more. 

Genesis Cinema is a unique film experience. This was originally a music hall now made into an independent cinema, it has its own cafe, pub and very Shining-esquqe bar.

There's an ongoing debate as to the relevance of modern cinemas, due to the internet we all have access to the digital copies online, there is this debate as to whether or not cinema is a dying art. While cinephiles and movie buffs will deny this, and while independent cinema will surely strive to exist long into the future, the advancements in streaming and in online distribution do make questions towards the merits and validity cinemas and film theatres have.

TV Show Openings

In search of ideas for my thriller opening I have researched and studied the following TV intros, Even though we would be making a film opening, it's worth to research it in my mind.

Moodboard

In development of our thriller we made several mood boards to find inspiration for our protagonist Melanie, to be played by Mia Rodgers. This was to find different costuming ideas for her as well as to come up with the theme and palette of the overall film. The look of it was important to me.

Editing - Working With Final Cut vs Premiere Pro

Working with Final Cut was by far the biggest hurdle for me. As someone who's used Premiere Pro, Final Cut was a headache to get the hang of. To me it felt too user friendly for my liking, very hard to work with in all honesty.

Golden Globes 2017 - Nominees and Nocturnal Animals

This year's Golden Globes made one affirmation to us; the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is as buyable as we all like to think. We joke about it constantly but last night it really rang true as it was discovered that Tom Ford, director of Nocturnal Animals, had sent two bottles of cologne to the HFPA. Although they claimed to have sent one of them back (one of them, huh?) the nominations were definitely a little askew. I mean, look at them:

Film

Best Picture, Drama
Hacksaw Ridge
Hell or High Water
Lion
Manchester by the Sea
Moonlight

Best Picture, Comedy or Musical
20th Century Women
Deadpool
Florence Foster Jenkins
La La Land
Sing Street

Best Director
Damien Chazelle, La La Land
Tom Ford, Nocturnal Animals
Mel Gibson, Hacksaw Ridge
Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea

Best Actor, Drama
Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
Joel Edgerton, Loving
Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge
Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic
Denzel Washington, Fences

Best Actress, Drama
Amy Adams, Arrival
Jessica Chastain, Miss Sloane
Isabelle Huppert, Elle
Ruth Negga, Loving
Natalie Portman, Jackie

Best Actor, Comedy
Colin Farrell, The Lobster
Ryan Gosling, La La Land
Hugh Grant, Florence Foster Jenkins
Jonah Hill, War Dogs
Ryan Reynolds, Deadpool

Best Actress, Comedy
Annette Bening, 20th Century Women
Lily Collins, Rules Don't Apply
Hailee Steinfeld, The Edge of Seventeen
Emma Stone, La La Land
Meryl Streep, Florence Foster Jenkins

Best Supporting Actor
Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water
Simon Helberg, Florence Foster Jenkins
Dev Patel, Lion
Aaron Taylor Johnson, Nocturnal Animals

Best Supporting Actress
Viola Davis, Fences
Naomie Harris, Moonlight
Nicole Kidman, Lion
Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures
Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea

Best Screenplay
Damien Chazelle, La La Land
Tom Ford, Nocturnal Animals
Barry Jenkins, Moonlight
Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea
Taylor Sheridan, Hell or High Water

Best Original Score
Moonlight
La La Land
Arrival
Lion
Hidden Figures

Best Original Song “Can't Stop the Feeling,” Trolls
“City of Stars,” La La Land
“Faith,” Sing
“Gold,” Gold
“How Far I’ll Go,” Moana

Best Animated Feature Film
Kubo and the Two Strings
Moana
My Life as a Zucchini
Sing
Zootopia

Best Foreign Language Film
Divines
Elle
Neruda
The Salesman
Toni Erdmann

 

Any field that Ford could have made revenue in was filled alright, Amy Adams chose to rally for lead in Arrival. The amount of awards was surprising since Nocturnal Animals is not very awards friendly (UPDATE: Not a single nomination from the Academy seems to attest to that). And in the grand scheme, only one win for Aaron Taylor Johnson actually made the light.

 

Jimmy Fallon was this year's host, an ABC affiliate so it was ideal, and he did a good job. I did like his intro despite how long it did start to get and how on the nose some of his parodies were. He held his own and kept the show rolling, it was just slightly odd to see the SNL alumni hosting such a prestigious event as this.