Blair Witch Project

In the year 1999 a movie called the Blair Witch Project came out. It was a horror movie based off a story about something called the blair witch that lived in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland and killed people who went camping. The movie is based off of 3 friends who are making a documentary about this phenomenon. The movie made millions when it came out because the people that made it were very clever. 

The whole movie is shot half on a hand held consumer based camcorder and the other on an actual film camera. In the entire film, aside from the woods, they use 2-3 actual locations one of which is a parking lot. Also, aside from the 3 main characters there are maybe 4 other people in the whole film. They shot and produced the entire thing for roughly 25,000 dollars but made millions at the box office. This is because they spent a ton of money on advertising and they started hyping the movie about 6 months to a year in advance. During the ads they played they hyped the movie as the scariest thing ever. Because of this insane advertising, hyping the movie as the scariest thing ever, everyone who went to see it was extremely scared. The funny thing is, is that the movie itself is horrible. Its not very scary and its very poorly acted. The way in which it is shot is confusing as well because they switch between the film camera and the camera the main characters are using for there documentary a lot. I really don't like this movie but i also appreciate how the producers made millions because they were very clever. It proved that advertising is extremely powerful. This was also one of the first movies to use the internet to advertise for it. The movie was touted as a true story online and thus millions were already wrapped up in seeing it.

The Hunger Games (Movie)

The other day, I watched the move, The Hunger Games, with my friends.  I had read all the books and frankly, was in love with them.  I'd seen the movie before, but decided that this time, I would watch it from an analytical film perspective rather than judging it on how much different it was then the book because frankly, no movie can capture an entire book or book series perfectly as we've seen many times (Harry Potter, Twilight, ect.).

I loved the DIY approach that Gary Ross took when shooting the movie by having most of the movie shot "hand held" which most feature length blockbuster movies never do.  I noticed very quickly that whenever the scene was taking place in a high tense situation or an impoverished area, everything was shot hand held and the editing was extremely fast jump cuts and very bare bones from an editing perspective.  This puts the audience in a certain mood I could tell from watching it.  It became even more noticeable during the few scenes that were in the rich capitol where every shot was either a tripod, steady cam, or jib type shot with extremely smooth cutting from an editing stand point.  Everything was very refined and more typical of most blockbusters to show the wealth of the area they were in.

They way this movie was shot was very different in my opinion from most blockbuster type large budget movies and from that aspect, I thought the movie excelled.  They did a great job of capturing the "indie feel" that the book had been written in.  There also isn't a ton of music in the movie which I think is very important because most of the "districts" didn't have any organized music so it wouldn't make sense with the story.  The only songs were folk type songs which was cool because they were sung by the actors and no instrumentals.  It was very affective in that sense as well.

Overall, it was a well done movie in my personal opinion from a film perspective.  I enjoyed the indie look because that is personally the style that I am drawn to.

Tyler Chadwick