Gravity Opening Scene Analysis

Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) 

Gravity is an action thriller featuring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, in the opening 15 minutes of the film you see the two working on a space mission until the situation goes wrong.

The opening scene is shown a close up of the earth with the camera panning to the left, you can hear some dialogue with a static sound in the background, this scene goes on for about a 1 minute and 30 seconds. With the dialogue continuing in the background a space station begins to get closer to the camera showing someone floating around the outside of the station, the dialogue continues possibly showing that the person in the space suit can hear what is being said. As the camera gets closer to the station you see another person working on the station and begin to float away from it.

The camera begins to get closer to the woman who is in the space suit, in a mid-range shot you can see the dialogue being exchanged between her and the people who are back on earth. The mid-range shot lasts about 10-13 seconds before panning to the other person in the space suit. A two shot is then used showing the two astronauts exchanging dialogue between each other; this shot lasts about 20 seconds.
The camera then does a 90 degree pan before zooming in on the man while he is talking to the other astronaut. The camera continues to zoom in whilst panning up to show the earth then the camera panning around and back down to the man in the space suit while he begins to talk once again.

A mid-range two shot is used while the man is continuing the dialogue. The camera continues to zoom out slowly showing the two astronauts clamber towards the rails on the station while the camera pans around and down to show the station and another pan back around to show them. A tracking camera is used to show the man go down towards the bottom of the station.

As the music that is used in the background begins to pick up you can see that it is a tense situation as they begin to panic. A zoomed out shot is used to show the station begin to spin out of control and a long shot is used to show the woman spinning out of control into the darkness. Another long shot is used showing earth and the woman coming towards the camera then getting to a close up shot of her panicking under her space suit while trying to communicate with the other astronaut involved in the mission.

Prelim Task Video and Evaluation

Above is my groups prelim task video, the video is 32 seconds long featuring an opening transition, different camera angels and credits at the end of the video. In my evaluation of the video I conclude that the editing of the video, mainly the editing of the video was good enough, the parts that we had filmed were edited together with the fading transition so that it would fade from one scene to another showing a different angel to the task. However I do believe that there were different issues with the video, for example one of the flaws that was in this video was the volume of the dialogue, we could improve on this for the next time that we shoot a video by using a microphone to enhance the volume or shooting the dialogue in an empty room so that we could hear the voices properly. Another thing that could have been improved on for the next time I film the next task is making sure the camera is steady when using it in a handheld way, when I use the handheld camera I may have to film it a few times before I have suitable footage as I do not want the footage for my final edit to be shaky and having the issue of filming the footage more than once or twice after the editing phase.

Premilinary Task Part 2

In today's lesson (Tuesday 26th) we started editing our final video for the preliminary task. Editing our video was a fairly straightforward task as our footage didn't need much editing for the final video to be presentable, there was an issue in the footage that the audio was quiet when we listened to the footage through headphones however we can overcome this problem by either re-filming the footage needed or dubbing it over with audio that we recorded through a microphone in a empty room. For the editing of the final video i had added in a credit title which took sometime to put together as I didn't fully know how to add it into the video but it was added in the end.