The Dark Knight (Film Industry)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Writers: Jonathan Nolan (screenplay), Christopher Nolan.

Release Date:24 July 2008 (UK)

We have been studing the film industry on this film.
On the homepage all types of media are portayed. For example, there are three trailers of the movie so that you can see what is the film about.
There is a paragraph explaining its synopsis, cast and downloades and there you can also sign up for email updates, browse the actors, etc.
The website has a black background to highlight that the movie's genre is thriller.

http://www.warnerbros.com/?page=movies&pid=f-ce83422e/THE%20DARK%20KNIGHT#/page=movies&pid=f-ce83422e/THE_DARK_KNIGHT&asset=064159/The_Dark_Knight_-_Original_Theatrical_Trailer&type=video/

Warner Bros. Studios is one of the best motion picture and televison production facilities in the world.
It was originally built on a plot of farmland in 1926 by First National Pictures and Warner Bros. acquired it in 1928.
This 110-acre facility has in total 35 sound stages ranging in size from 6,000 to 32,000 square feet, including nine "deluxe" audience stages equipped with built-in star dressing rooms, green rooms, makeup & hair, control booths, bleachers and central air conditioning;  plus a 20-acre backlot that can double as almost anywhere (jungles, metropolitan cities, etc).
Warner Bros. Studios maintains one of the largest collections of costumes for film, television, theater and commercial productions, and they are usually rented and sent to clients world wide. It also can provide productions with the best special effects known.

Two other companies:
http://www.thewb.com/ (Warner Bros.'s television)
http://www.dccomics.com/dccomics/  (comics)

interview with Nolan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj7Vts95b2A

How thriller conventions are used in Insomnia and in Memento.

In both movies, the titles appear over a background with blood. In Insomnia, a withe title appears over a close-up shot of a stain of blood seeping into a piece of fabric that then turns into a blackout, and in Memento over a close-up shot of a hand holding a polaroid photograph of a dead men with blood around him. That scene is going backwards. In both films there are close-up shots of the blood but in Insomnia there are also establishing shots that show an exotic landscape (ice).
In Memento there are lots of close-up shots : man's face, camera, blood, the bullet, glasses, dead man's head. and then there is a medium shot of the man looking at the dead one and everything starts going backwards faster with a tension building music and suddenly he appears on a motel in black and white to create the atmosphere and disorientes the audience.
In Insomnia, the music moves to a crescendo as the editing cuts between shots and during all the opening secuence there are close-up shots of the blood in the fabric, and thestablishing shots of the view of the snowscape they have from the plane, and then the vision blurres and turns again into white screen. Then a man apperars rubbing his jacket to remove the stain of blood so that the audience think that he has murder someone and he is trying to hide it, intrigueting the audience.

what we are doing so far

In this media studies class we first studied some of the tools of film language:
- Lighting (the choice of lighting and the way it is used).
- Sound ((the dialoge, sound effects, musical soundtrack... )
- Mise-en-scene (everything we see on the screen)
- Camera movements (angles and shots)
- Editing (putting all the film footage which has been shot in the required order  and joining all together)


We have also studied the media consumption and the film iconography and we have analized several film extracts.
We have done an introduction to weblogs and he have seen some film's key concepts (genre, representation, narrative...)
Now we are making a video (the phone call) after seeing what a storyboard is and making our own one.