I chose One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for my video analysis.  iMovie was a great tool for taking clips that I had taken from youtube.  The assignment: you need to select several scenes from your favorite film (or one of your favorites), and edit them together and comment on some of the filmic elements of the scenes? Why do you like these scenes? What strikes you about them? What makes them good cinema? Is there a subtext at work in this film? In short, construct an essayistic commentary on the scenes as a narrator explaining to your audience what you find important about the scene, and why. What’s more, what do the details you have pinpointed say about the film more generally.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest is one of my favorite movies.  Editing the scenes together was pretty easy thanks to iMovie (as I mentioned before…).  I was also glad to find that it was easier to download the clips from youtube than I had expected.  I used the microphone tool to add in commentary over the film.  Realizing that I could control the volume of my comments as well as the film clips themselves was very handy.  I also liked that I could use different transitions between clips, so that it didn’t look too choppy.  One of the most difficult things I thought was cutting all the clips I wanted to show down to 5 minutes or less.  I think that choosing perfect sections of the film, that illustrate why the film is so great was apart of the challenge of the assignment.  I also found that it was a lot easier when I wrote a script, and stuck with it.  I tried to improv with bullets at first, and it was very unorganized, and I took up more time because of awkward pauses.   In the end, here’s what I got:

Assignment worth 5 stars.