SEP 22, 2023
For my AICE Media Studies AS level class, our teacher assigned us the Camera Angles/Shots quiz. Many, including everyone else in the classroom at the time, may have assumed that this would be a paper and pencil-based examination, where you had to answer a few multiple-choice questions about the specific angles/shots directors use for their films. We couldn't have been more wrong; Mrs. Stoklosa, our teacher, had given us a project instead.
She created pairs of two randomly selected students and gave us the task of telling a story surrounding an inanimate object using the following Camera Shots we've learned about in class: An establishing shot, A Long shot, Two medium shots,close-ups, extreme close-up, point of view shot, high angle, and low angle. We were told to create fifteen different shots to tell the story, so me and my partner went straight to work. After budding heads and storyboarding, we decided to center our story around a piece of paper, showing how showing that objects of hate used for evil can be turned into objects of love used for the power of good. Our story was about a who student sits sad and alone in his classroom before being interrupted by a bully. The story centers around a piece of paper being used to spread hatred among others. The protagonist reads the note and decides to use the same piece of paper to write something more positive and righteous. We used an iPhone to get the shots, and after exporting them into PowerPoint, it was ready to submit. Most of them came out great. The story wasn't confusing, a lot of the angles were shot correctly, and we were able to meet the requirements needed for the project. If I had to change anything about my project, it'd definitely be the vertical shots we took as opposed to horizontal ones and the poor extreme close-up that ended up deducting our grade by a few points. Most movies use a horizontal format to execute these shot/angle devices much better than a vertical one would, and the extreme close-up needed to be closer to my face.
