actually reading some movie scenes

For this assignment, I watched a scene from Iron Man. We had to watch the scene three times to analize three different things, so I begin with my notes on…

Camera Work

This scene uses a lot of jump cuts in order to keep the scene moving- there are times where the character talking is either supposed to be center scene- thus using an eye level angle, single medium shot, to show who is talking. Whenever someone who appears to be part of a bigger group is talking, it turns into a long shot, showing the full room of people. There is also a large amount of zooms, usually done to establish the location of the scene. There are a couple of over the shoulder segments, likely done to show that people are watching the scene playing out in the movie.

During this part of watching, I also kept in mind Ebert’s ideas on reading a movie. I believe that Tony Stark is meant to be the protagonist of the movie, and for the most part, he’s always on the right side of the screen when talking! Just like Ebert said, this is the “positive” side. The press is always on the left side, which makes me believe they are the antagonists in this scene.

Audio

I think the main thing I noticed with the sound in this scene is the ambient sounds used. In the beginning, there is a lot of mumbling and quiet talking, but there was lots of it, signifying that there were a lot of people in the scene. When Tony Stark starts talking, the talking dies down, making him the center speaker of the scene. When the audience picks up again and a women starts speaking, you get this sense of chaos- like something is happening. When Tony Stark reveals he is Iron Man, the scene gets very loud and there is lots of talking very suddenly, showing how shocking this revelation must have been for the audience.

Both!

Okay, the first thing I would like to mention is that I’ve never actually seen Iron Man before, so upon rewatching this the third time, I realized this was actually the ending to the movie! That’s kind of a crazy ending…

But anyways, I don’t have many comments on this other than you can really feel the chaos of the end part of the seen when watching both the video and the audio together. Everything jumbles up to create such a huge moment.