The Director of Photographer that I chose to write about is John Toll. To me, it seems like his visual style is kind of big and epic with a lot of camera movement of shots of land. From viewing a number of his movies I think that his visual style is one that uses beautiful landscape as a back drop to get the shot that they need. This is evident in most of his films. I noticed that in a lot of shots, rather than using shallow depth of field he has a way of using the landscape in the background of alot of his shots to bring the scene to life. Whether it is mountains in Braveheart, the jungle in The Thin Red Line, or the city in Vanilla Sky it always seems like he has massive beautiful shots of the land where they are filming. Also, I noticed that in some of his push in shots he kind of hooks it to the left or right.

"What Makes a Good Reel?"

This is the reel that I was the most impress with. I think that the director does a great job of makeing the shots with large landscape in them look very cinematic. The music is a perfect choice for this. There are also some good examples in the reel of shallow depth of field. I think that this reel shows that this director is good at film serious dramatic films. It does a great job of showing what this particular director is good at. That is something that I believe is very important to acomplish when makeing a reel.http://nicholasbentgen.com/reel.htm

Here is another great example of a reel. This editor is very talented.



Although I loved the opening shot and there were some other great shots in this next reel, it is the one I have to pick as my bad reel. The reason is the sudden and abrupt change is music throughout the reel especially the first change. http://www.planetpoint.com/jackmessitt/jack1.html

Since that link is not working, here is another reel that I was not really impressed with. I thought that all the shots in this one were great but this reel does not really show any variety.Its mostly just close ups of random objects.

Camera Movement

I think that this clip from Heroes shows three good examples of camera movement. The first good example is the shot of congressman giving his speech. Rather than just slowly zooming in on the speaker the camera almost tilts forward and then starts to ascend. I think that this shot does a good job of relaying the message to the audience that this speech is very uplifting and groundbreaking. The second example is the way that camera shakes around when the speaker is shot. This brings out the complete chaos that is going on. The third example is towards the end of the clip when the shot starts at the top of a building and sinks all the way to the bottom where the nearly defeated villain sits.