I have quite an obseesion with adverts, I'm always the one disaproving at people who fastforward during them. Thats the purpose of adverts though, to attract the viewer in such a short space of time. Above is an example of what I feel portrays a visually aesthetic and successful advert.

Film review

Ive decided that an important step towards creating an interesting blog is to put across my personal opinion about such things as films, adverts and books. Not so much that I have come across recently but in the past also.
One of my all time favourites is the outstanding film Gladiator which was directed by Ridley Scott. It stars Russell Crowe who portrays General Maximus Decimus Meridius, friend of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who is betrayed and murdered by his ambitious son, Commodus who is played by Joaquin Phoenix. Captured and enslaved along the outer fringes of the Roman empire, Maximus rises through the ranks of the gladiatorial arena to avenge the murder of his family and his Emperor. The recreation of ancient rome is amazing, especially the replica of a third of the Colosseum which is the main set for the majority of the film. The rest of the colosseum was added digitally.
I feel the soundtrack gives the most beautiful atmosphere and is so well suited to the mood of the film.



One of the most renowned quotes from the film where the once mysterious Gladiator reveals himself to Commodus as the very infamous General Maximus Decimus Meridius.


This is my favourite soundtrrack of all time.
The music evokes such passion and feeling that its hard not to be captured in it.

The brightness that I have achieved in this shot was created by repeatedly waving the glow sticks over a smaller area, It almost looks asthough I'm holding a fan of light.

I love the way the colours fan out and sweep across the photo.
On the left hand side of the photo, I like the stronger contrast between the intensity of the light and colour compaired to the dark backgroud. Whereas on the right the colours are faded as this is where they glow sticks moved more quickly.

With each of my photographs I feel they give a slightly different sense of colour and light, whether it is in the way I have moved them across the camera lens or the order in which they were arranged in my hand as some show different colours from the rest.
This particular one above was taken up close on a macro setting, unlike the others I kept the glow sticks perfectly still as I wanted it to show clear detail with no blurring of the colours which was caused by rapid movement in the rest.

Pixelation.

We worked in a group of four girls myself, Beth, Stephanie and Gemma.
When we were assigned our project, we were given 300 or so photos to take that would create 20 seconds of seemless film.
So we began, when thinking of a narrative as a group we came up with a few ideas, however they all seemed fairly small subjects so we produced a concuction of a few of them. I think its a rather random mix but in parts I feel it does relate to student living. Especially as we filmed in university halls.
In our shots we wanted to portray a sense of unusual behaviour that is often related to the student life. In the first few shots I appear to be making a cup of tea but afterwards I begin to behave in a strange manner, for example taking copius layers of clothes off and falling down the stair case. It raises the question, Was it really tea i drank? Maybe someone spiked the water in the kettle.
The idea of wearing multiple layers was to resemble the issues women have with deciding upon what to wear, especially during freshers week as we had so many fancy dress outfits to get sorted. The way I have edited it gives it a sense of confusion with the two images overlapping, this was achieved by copying and pasting some of the photos above the origionals and then bringing the opacity of them both down to 50%. Also when reversing the sequence it looked quite unique as the clothes seem to be put back on effortlessly almost as if their was a magnetism between myself and the items.
I think it looks really effective when I'm falling down the stairs, as what would of normally been quite a painful accident we made into a controlled but still natural looking fall. Although at one point I did actually fall but the end result was worth the bruise. The inspiration for this came from the video below which we were shown earlier on before this project.