One of our assignments for this week was to pick a video clip and watch it three different times in three different ways.

For my clip I picked this scene from Pursuit of Happiness:

The first time that I watched this clip I watched it without sound.  While watching this time I was looking at all the visual aspects of the clip.  This was very interesting for me to do.  I can honestly say that I have never looked this closely at the camera work in a movie before.  I had always kind of assumed that the camera just followed the actors around and that is how they got their shots.  But after looking at this more closely, I realized that there is clearly a lot more going on than I had ever realized.  One thing that I noticed in this scene was the use of people to the left and right of the screen.  While the actors traded back and forth a couple of times, when it got to the part where the dad was talking to the son at the end, the father was on the left and the son was on the right.  In Ebert’s guide he talked about how the left often stands for the past while the right stands for the future which makes sense since the father would be older than his son.

The second time I watched this clip I only listened to the sound.  This time through I was watching for things in the audio of the clip such as dialogue and background sound effects.  This was also something that I hadn’t payed much attention to in the past.  I guess I had noticed the music was used in movies, but I hadn’t really looked too much into their importance (except in horror films where the music is really what makes it all scary).  In this clip I was impressed with how the background noises of the city and the basketball court really make you know where they were and what was happening even though I wasn’t watching the video.  I also noticed how when the clip was beginning to get to the inspirational part a song was added in to add to the effect.  I was able to start feeling emotions that I would have never felt with out the song being there.

The third time I watched the clip I watched with both the sound and video.  I very much enjoyed watched this video after having analyzed both the video and the sound separately.     I feel like I noticed much more about this clip than I had previously.  One thing that I really noticed is how much more impactful the final conversation between the dad and son was when you both saw and heard what was going on.  The one thing that I noticed that I hadn’t noticed before was how the camera was looking up at the dad and down at the son.  This really showed how the dad was knowledgeable about what he was talking about and how the son was taking in what he had to say.  I felt as if this really showed how the dad really was admired and looked up to by his son and how the son was really taking what he said to heart.