Editing for Mood: Digital Stories
For this assignment you will be creating a digital story that will, like the examples you’ve just seen, use shot composition, arrangement of shots, the order of shots and rhythm to create two works with very distinct emotional effects.
1. Draw or photograph ten shots which must include:
a) An action shot of a character doing something
b) A reaction shot showing a character’s emotion
c) A detail shot of an object or location
2. For each shot, consider:
a) The angle of the shot: is it level, low-angle (looking up at the character) or high-angle?
b) The distance of the shot: is it a long shot (where all of a character can be seen), a medium shot (generally from the waist up or shoulders up), a two-shot (a medium shot broad enough to show two characters), or a close-up (usually just a person’s face, or even closer for an extreme close-up)?
3. Once you’ve sketched out these ten shots you’ll use the digital story maker to make two digital stories, each with one of the following tones or genres:
a) Funny (like a comedy)
b) Suspenseful (like a thriller)
c) Sad (like a drama)
d) Scary (like a horror movie)
e) Exciting (like an action movie)
Both of these will use at least seven of the ten shots you sketched, but you can change:
• The order in which the shots occur
• The composition of each individual shots (a neutral shot might be done as a low-angle shot for one film and a high-angle shot in the other, for example, or the same shot might be a close-up in one film and long-shot in another)
• The duration of each shot (how long it lasts before cutting to the next shot)
• The music
Genre is the types or categories into which texts are grouped. For example, film genres include action, suspense and comedy. There are also more specific sub-genres such as superhero, romantic comedy, thriller and film noir.