I analyzed the move J.Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood. There weren’t too many clips on YouTube of the movie, so I chose what I could find. I think I got some important scenes. I wanted to focus on Eastwood’s decision to focus on an aspect of Hoover’s life that most would not choose, because it makes the movie what it is. I used iMovie to create this. I just edited the clips, put them together, and did a voiceover. I think there are a few glitches in it, but I think it came out well for the most part.

For this Video Essay Assignment you had to select several scenes from your favorite film (or one of your favorites), and edit them together and comment on some of the filmic elements of the scenes? Why do you like these scenes? What strikes you about them? What makes them good cinema? Is there a subtext at work in this film? In short, construct an essayistic commentary on the scenes as a narrator explaining to your audience what you find important about the scene, and why. What’s more, what do the details you have pinpointed say about the film more generally.

I chose this movie because it is one of my favorites and the concept of it is very sweet and hart warming. What i saw as the directors vision behind this movie was that unconventional families are more common than we think, and that it doesn’t matter what background or class you come from love is love.

Five Stars

Process

This was a bit confusing at first. I was not sure if I wanted to keep the audio or not but I decided it would be more effective to take the audio out of the video. I thought by removing the audio from the actual video would force my audience to pay attention to the elements I was analyzing. After I decided to make the remove the audio from the video and I then proceeding to download youtube videos of important scenes from youtube. I used keepvid to download the videos. Afterwards I edited the scenes through MPEG streamclip and removed the audio from the videos. I then recorded my voice and comments through audacity while watching the clips. My last step was to put the videos onto windows live movie maker as well as the putting the extracted audio recording from audacity.

Motivation

I am not too familiar with critiquing film and art for that matter. Moreover, I am terrible at paying attention to the details of the surrounding to indicate a message or mood of a scene. Considering my deficiencies I wanted to find scenes that connected to a broad theme within       the Dark Knight. What I found was the connection between film angles and editing with the Joker’s influence on the world. As I stated in my video: if the camera starts going crazy it is connected to something the Joker is doing or saying that is causing chaos in the world. Hopefully my brief commentary gave a convincing argument for my hypothesis. =0