It’s one thing to do this with a film. I thoroughly enjoy a movie from time to time where at the end of it I’m left going, “What the heck just happened? I don’t get it.” and then dwelling on it for a bit.

It’s an entirely different thing when instead of a two hour film, it’s a 117 hour Television series wherein, between every single episode I’m left conjuring up ideas of what is going to happen next and how it will ultimately play out in the end. You can’t tell me they ran out of time.

Now, maybe my disappointment in the ending is because the biggest questions I wanted to know the answers to were A) What is the Island? and more importantly B) Why is the Island?

If you’re alright with the ending being that everyone was sucked into an electro-magnetized island, then fought and killed one another, for the purpose of eventually reuniting then so be it – but that’s not why I was watching the show.

Perhaps the biggest reason it irritated me is because I felt like I was seconds away from having my answers. The entire show – up until the last 10-15 minutes or so, was the best two hours and fifteen minutes of television I’ve ever seen. It looked like I was going to be able to forgive some of the random side stuff that was unanswered throughout the story because those are the questions I wouldn’t mind conjecturing about.  I could even see a way for them to work Walt back into the mix so that we could figure out why he was truly, “special” and that was something to which I never thought we’d return.

Seriously, it was epic. I even tweeted about it early because I was so confident that things were coming together. Then Christian Shephard walked into the frame and let us know that flashing sideways is parallel not only to your current time, but also to purgatory.

I know, I know.. some of you loved the ending. That’s totally fine – you were just looking for a different type of resolution than I was from the outset.

Feel free to tell me how wrong I am in the comments.

- Forever a Lostie regardless of the end

Ted

Anyway, I circumvented my OS’s feeble attempt to keep me from screen capturing with the DVD player open and got 8 frames that I think really sum up the move nicely. (Click here for the movie synopsis)

The first frame is John Wayne’s character Sean Thornton and Barry Fitzgerald’s character Michaleen Oge Flynn. The frame sums up both of their on screen persona’s nicely.

The second depicts the beginning of the rivalry between Thornton and Danaher who is Mary Kate’s (The lead actress and Wayne’s crush in the movie played by Maureen O’Hara) brother.

The third is of Mary Kate (Will your 1950s self please marry me?).

The fourth and fifth sums up Sean and Mary Kate’s relationship quite nicely. One second it’s great and passionate, the next it’s gone and confusing.

The sixth sums up Sean Thornton’s masculinity – he’s just struck his match on the crossbeam above his head in this frame and he is about to put Mary Kate in her place. This was my favorite scene in the movie.

The last two are of the gigantic boxing scene at the end which alone makes the movie worth watching.

Hope you enjoyed this! Let me know if I should do more “movies in 8 frames” (I’ll probably go into more detail in the future as well)

- Ted

Akira Kurosawa is a Japanese filmmaker who directed films in the 40s, 50s and 60s. The clips from above are from one of his more famous films, Rashomon. Kurosawa basically puts on a school for shot composition and texture throughout every scene I have watched of his so far. I love the way he uses the camera narratively and the overall look of his movies. His movie Seven Samurai is incredibly long, but definitely worth the watch if you are ever feeling like a black and white movie night.

As a random tidbit: George Lucas was influenced by Kurosawa. Something about Samurai swordsmen perhaps?

- Ted

I recently got to spend a week in Hawaii with seven of my friends and naturally I took my camera.

Although it was an absolute pain to separate my computer, camera and microphone into different containers to be screened before boarding the plane it turned out to be absolutely worth it. I ended up shooting about an hour and a half’s worth of footage which I then edited down to about fifteen minutes. Then I broke that down into a YouTube version which is what you see above.

I colored a lot of the clips you see above individually in post to give it a slight old-school feel. However, at one point I just started copying and pasting the same effect onto clips with similar subject matter because the difference was very minute and I have other stuff I have to work on.

Anyway, I found that with a gaussian soft edge border and some color correction into the blue/cyan area of the color wheel and a slight adjustment of the contrast with the proc amp tool (my favorite video correction tool in Final Cut) that you get a High Definition version of older film. Cool, huh?

- Ted

No. Don’t read this yet. Watch the video above first.

Alright now that you’ve gotten that out of the way:

I mentioned on Twitter the other day that I’ve noticed a recent trend in video/film in the emphasis of ordinary sounds – taking normal, minute sounds and making them the most audible parts of the clip.  Now I may be wrong, but I honestly think this is partly due to the way we currently like to participate in media. We expect response when we engage and so when we see visuals of earthy things, we expect an overly earthy response (such as the beginning of the video above) and we are able to attain this if the sound matches the engagement.

The film I noticed it in most recently was Shutter Island, which I saw over the weekend. Martin Scorsese used a very intricate interaction between imagery and sound in the direction of this film. Robert Richardson also did an absolutely incredible job with the cinematography as his images made the emphasized sound relative.

Anyway, I’m interested in trying this in the next short I make. What I’m going to make – don’t ask me yet.