The goal was to pick a movie, preferably a classic. Toy Story, in my opinion, is one of the most creative films made so far. I chose two segments from this film that Roger Ebert’s discusses in his journal about “How to Read a Movie”.

Toy Story falls under the genre of, Animation, Action, and Comedy.

The first segment I took, was the introduction of Buzz Light Year to all the other toys in Andy’s (the “leader” or child who plays with the toys) room. Ebert’s discusses how the angle of a shot can determine the anarchy between two characters. In this specific scene the image of Buzz Light Year standing in Woody’s spot shows that his presence will be significant in comparison. Woody is now being replaced by Buzz. He stands below him, basically hiding from this new toy that is being presented.

The second segment is the use of color, contrast, and bright vs. dark. At this point in the movie, Woody is clearly jealous of Buzz and schemes a plan to temporarily get rid of Buzz Light Year. The lighting through out the movie has always been daylight, sunny, an overall nice feeling. However, in this scene, the sun is setting and its starting to get dark out. This depicts the transformation in attitude for Woody. He is starting to look like the Villin of the film. All of the toys that were once faithful to him are turning against him after he pushes Buzz out of the window. There change in lighting reflects the mood that the movie has taken towards Woody.

Link to the segments^^

This process of putting clips together was a bit confusing at first. I have NO experience with video and editing at all. I used iMovie to edit all the pieces together but it was trial and error. I couldn’t at first figure out how to even get movies into iMovie, then found the import/export tab. I used KeepVid.com to download the youtube movies. I then used Photo Booth to record myself talking just a bit about each segment. The hardest (but now the most obvious part) was to get the file to be small enough to actually download onto YouTube. In the end all I had to do was change the file to Mp4 manually.