Reflection Posts

Night of Reading the Dead

Roger Ebert’s essay “How to Read a Movie” spoke on how camera angles and positioning of characters within a frame are incredibly telling to the essence of the scene. I more so enjoyed his point that more can be seen through multiple people’s eyes. Ebert said:

“For example, I had been through ‘Citizen Kane’ at least 30 times before I took it to the Savannah Film Festival, and someone noticed a detail I had never seen before.”

All the details that many people put in the production of a movie need lost of other people to pick up on all of them.

In my poetry class this past Thursday, we got into a long debate whether this series of photos in Matthea Harvey’s collection of poems and images “If the Tabloids are True What are You?” counted at poems or not. Eventually, I reached the understanding that whether or not you call them poems, you can still view the images under poetic terms. This fits perfectly with viewing movies under photographic and design lenses.

via GIPHY

The short videos I chose to watch were examples of editing techniques, camera angles and techniquestop 20 amazing cinematic techniques, and one-point perspective. My favorite were the latter two. The top 20 techniques gives a lot of names to shots I didn’t know existed or I had heard but total forgot about (like the dutch tilt). The one-point perspective compiles many examples of the same shot (one focus or fixed point in the center with all surroundings pointing to it). Besides the art of the shot itself, I loved the composition of the video, making all the scene line up with the music.


The movie that I watched was The Night of the Living Dead and I chose it because it’s a classic that I’ve heard so much about but I had yet to see. I tried taking it seriously, but there were some parts I couldn’t help but make fun of in my commentary.

Knowing I was going to make this commentary helped me watch the movie closer. I started editing using Movie Maker, since my other programs weren’t cooperating. The final product isn’t exactly what I had hoped for it to be, but after finally using a Mac and putting the video together, I was glad to be done.

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