Week 12
1. Unions protect and represent employees through collective bargaining and guilds represent individual contractors without protections.
2. IATSE is unique because it offers member-specific benefits like healthcare and retirement and specialized safety training.
3. Directors can join the DGA by working a certain amount of hours (150 days), getting hired by a union production company, winning a top-tier award for your film, or working on a project that becomes unionized.
4. Yes, after gaining 150 days of production experience with at least 75 of those days being as the 1st AD.
5. For a non-low budget director, the entire fee of $15,320.00 is payable up front.
6. You might engage with your audience when it comes to branding yourself by researching the genre of films you enjoy making and so you understand what they expect and how you can utilize that with your own creative spin.
7. Choosing a niche is important to your brand identity because this will help you become a more memorable director by having films that are recognizable as being yours. This also helps you hone in on and master the type of filmmaking you’re really good at, cementing your brand further.
8. Don’t be a copycat; in other words, copying the tropes of your genre exactly will keep you from standing out and defining yourself as a director.
Quentin Tarantino has cemented himself as a director with a clear brand that he utilizes to tell many different types of stories, a great example of how your brand should be a defining aspect of your films without making every film the same.
Lens Choices
1. a. Wide – 24mm. Medium – 24-35mm. Close – 55mm
b. For wide shots, I want the ultra-wide 24mm lens to help reinforce a sense of dread around the package. With the tighter shots, I believe a tighter lens choice will help bring the viewer closer to the actor and their emotions.
Close-ups with a tighter lens like this bring the audience closer to the actors emotions.
c. The ultra wide lens for wide shots showcasing the entire environment is a metaphor for how alone the characters are in their struggle with this package, not being able to tell anyone, by making the space around them feel that much bigger.
In this shot, the subject seems more alone in their environment due to the wide lens filling more space around them.
d. The wider lens for my wide shots also gives me more of an opportunity to use the foreground to compose the image in a creative way that directs attention to the subjects. That is also the reason I’ll use a 35mm for medium shots, giving me more room to compose while still tightening the shot.
If a tighter lens was used for this shot, not as much of the landscape would be available to use for composition, with the subject taking up more of the frame.
2. I plan to use a handheld version of a dolly tracking shot to give the audience more of a sense of panic as Cam approaches the table. Otherwise, the camera will not move much, and I will rely on the framing and lens choices to tell the story.
