CSI: Miami shot by shot

The first shot shows two people speding down a river in an airboat. One of them is sitting down, and the other is standing behind him, as id observing. This could be seen as showing power or authority over the other person as he could be his superior officer in the case they are working on.

The next show is only on the screen for about a second, and simply shows two characters, who, if you don't know the show will have no significance whatsoever, but if you are a fan you will realise that they are very important people within the show. They appear to simply be standing around talking when they suddenly turn to look at where the camera is, though past it, not at it. If you look carefully, you can see they are stood behind a police car, and are probably discussing whatever criume scene they happen to be at, when something else attracts their attention.

In the next shot, you see one of the people from the airboat. A ginger guy in sunglasses. Again, irrelevat if you don't know the character but as i do i will refer to them by name where appropriate. This guy is called Horatio. The camera is slightly angled up towards him, and the look on his face with his big sunglasses (which have great significance throughout the course of the series) is surprisingly calm, considering they arespeeding along a river, possibly chasing someone.

Then the camera switches to a pan over a city. I'm not certain, but i am almost positive this city is going to be Miami, as that is where the show is set.

It then shows a woman doing something, but the effecs over the camera limit you to what you can see, so it is hard to register who she is or what she is doing.

The next shot is of Horatio. When the camera turns to him, he looks round so you can see who he is, although he is relatively recognisable if you watch it.

It then cuts to a shot of him getting out of a lift, looking slightly concerned.

Again him. Although this time in a whitey orange coloured background, and he simply changes from looking at the floor to looking up. Something has either caught his attention or he is looking at something. The fact that his character profile came up first in the order of appearance suggests he is probably the main guy you want to be looking at.

The next shot is of him leaning over a desk, possibly talking to someone. These shots individually don't suggest much about his character, or even that he could possibly be a cop. However all played together you get the impression that he is the guy that wanders around the crime scenes vaguely looking for evidence, but his main job would be talking to or interrogating the suspects when they have arrested them.

The shot after this changes to show a Blonde woman aiming a gun towards the camera. Ordinarilly anyone aiming a gun at someone/something would be portrayed to be the "bad guy" in the show, however as she has big ear defenders on to pretect her ears from the deafening bang a gun makes, it suggests it is her job to shoot it for whatever reason.

It then changes scene and appear to be following a cord of some kind. The then rolls up to the phone, being held by Calleigh (the blonde woman)as the appears to be talking on the phone while writing something down, or dusting for prints or something. I'm not quite sure, these shots are all very quick, however they suggest her role in the whole "gang" is to carry out some experiments to try and work out who did what, with what and where.

The next scene simply shows her turning her head tolook toward the camera. Though again, some of these shots are similar to those of Horatio possibly suggesting she is also important to the show and general running of the team.

The next show shows an autopsy. Someone is standing in the ofreground, but the camera is looking past them toward the computer screen, showing what is going on.

There is then a shot which is very dimly lit, showing someone who appears to be looking at some tweezers. Probably examining evidence or something.

Suddenly, the camera switches to a brightly lit, outdoor scene, when a guy appears out of the water in diving gear.

You are then shown a close up of a guy, you assume to be the same personholding a torch, looking through a small gap in a wall or something (?). These two shots suggest his role is to look for evidence, which is why he was diving in the lake and why he is looking through all the little bits to see if they've missed anything.

The next scene is a shot of Miami again.

Then it shows a computer screen displaying a fingerprint and the computer is doing something.

It then shows a black woman in a white coat leaning over a body. The fact the she appears to be examining the body and is prodding it with something suggests her role could have something to do with the morgue and corpses.

The next shot is just her looking down.

The next shot is of a long pair of womens legs walking past the screen.

Then there's a couple of shots of... something...

It then changes to a guy in a white shirt with some sunglasses on, Though this guy has short dark hair, which is what differs him from Horatio. This character, Speedle, appears to be looking at a gun in a plastic bag. Probably examining evidece as you are led to believe these guys are all cops. It then shows his lifting a nice big camera up to his face to take a picture. This suggetss his role is to take pictures of the crime scene and everything that is in it before anyone can come in and contaminte it.

It then shows some woman taking her sunglasses off.

Then shows her opening a door. In the background you can see a whole wall of identical shiny metal doors, so i think it's a morgue, though i could be wrong.

She is then shown outside. Though you can only see her face she appears to be sitting down. I say this, because you can see some guys back arched forward, slightly in front of her. She looks up.

It then cuts to an overview of Miami and the title comes up.

It then cuts to the back of Horatio's head, looking into the distance still with the titles up.

Tags

The general outcome of my searching through crappy YouTube animations would appear to be that the tags aren't that interesting. Some animations have millions of hits, and are simply the name of the show or song they are animating. It would appear that it ismoe important that a few people see it and tell hundreds of other people, than you just use popular tags.

Some of the more popular videos appear to have tags that have nothing at all to do with the video such as this one:


Some of the tags on here having absolutely nothing to do with the video, they may just be whatever the creator felt may get searched.

I think my groups tags should be the usual cmdiploma jazz like a usually put, along with with the title of the show, stop motion, which seems to come up quite a lot, and lego etc.

TV opening Homework

This sequence is going to be quite hard i think. Most of it should be alright as it would appear to be mainly faces and people. however there are also quite a few effects and scenery shots, which will be hard to recreate especially with birds and stuff flying past. The bullet at the end will also be hard as we need to find a way of making it work without any way of keeping it in the air. There is also quite a lot of animated stuff we need to look at doing because some will be very hard, such as the dollar with the fingerprint on, or them using the tweezers to hold stuff up.

Ah, well.. What's the worst that can happen?

Importance of Coverage and Cutaways when shooting a scene

Coverage is important while shooting a scene, because it is basically the amount of shots you have from various camera angles, and different types of shot. The more coverage you have, the mroe raw material you have, thus making it much easier to do a good job when it comes to editing the piece of work. If you only shoot the scene from 2 angles, you are going to have much less choice of shots than if you filmed the shot 10 times as you would have a vast range of angles and shots to choose from.

Cutaways are also important in filmmaking, because it gives you freedom to make shots slightly longer by cutting to something relevant, although at the same time unnecessary to add suspense. Such as in a drama, if a director wants to change between two different shots, it could be seen to be made cleaner by putting a few seconds of footage of someone watching the character, possibly from a window, or alley. This extra footage is unnecessary, though adds tension to the scene, it would still make sense if it wasn't there.

It can also be used to show responses, such as in the film airplane while something is going wrong, it will suddenly cut back to the flight control and their response to what is happening. This is generaly followed by a cut back to the main character as he resumes whatever was happening beforeth cut.

Homework

1. What's the website where you can find the creative tube maps?

The website that i would have posted had been shut down due to copyright infirngement or somethying, but i found this one with some other creative tube maps on.

http://www.petercooper.co.uk/archives/001169.html


2. How do you get from Blind Boys of Alabama to Steve Earle in five steps? (put the linking factor up so we can hear it)

Blind Boys of Alabama, Tom Waits, the Neville Brothers, DoMaJe have all covered the theme song to the Wire. Steve Earle is set to do it next.

3. If 'The Grove Family' were to be at Ongar, what would you expect to find at West Ruislip?
ummmmm.....


4. Why do you think Omar is our favourite character from 'The Wire'? Paste one of the videos from Youtube featuring him onto your blog and write a short paragraph about what you can tell about the character from it

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=8gLvic55FXs

From this clip, you see that Omar is clearly in some form of gang, and is used to doing things like this. He appears relatively calm and confident given the situation he is in and can guess when someone is lying to him. He also appears to be used to being caught in gun fights as they got jumped by about 6 other people, and all knew exactly what to do and how to escape.

5. Ash showed us a machinima video of 'House'. Find a lego one based on another TV drama and paste onto your blog, ready to talk about it.

http://uk.youtube.com/results?search_query=lego+lost+animation&search_type=&aq=f

Underground TV Drama Map

Today we were trying to recreate the London Underground Tube map using different TV drama shows as the different stations. At first, this task seemed relatively simple, though as the day pregressed we realised how much harder it was getting.

At the start, we were al a bit of a mess all looking for the same thing and whatnot, and we didn't pregress very far at all. After break, however, we realised this and started to do things slightly more constructively. We started with Kings Cross as that is the station that has most lines running through it and tried to think of a show that could be connected to at elast 6 others. We chose Eastenders. We then had to set about naming all the other lines so that we could think of shows that could match up of the lines crossed.

This became increasingly difficult as time went on, so we started to do the crossovers first, and work our way fromt there.

Unfortunately, we had to stop to do a fun little maths test, though if we continue i think we had a good system going and we shoudl continue to work as we had been before we stopped. It will be difficult to conplete the map, ot complete it properly at least, but if it works, it'll be great :D

UK Detective Drama

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Agatha Christie's Poirot
Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime
Cadfael
The Chinese Detective
Crime Traveller
Hercule Poirot
Inspector Morse
Inspector Wexford
Midsomer Murders
Miss Marple
Paul Temple
Public Eye
Rosemary & Thyme
Shoestring (TV series)
The Inspector Lynley Mysteries
The Last Detective
A Touch of Frost
Van der Valk
Wycliffe
Waking the Dead