The video I choose is a part from Hannibal, a very famous movie about offender Hannibal Lecter. I choose some fragments from the movie to analyze its pedagogic metalanguage.
Above all, I have to say that there aren’t many vividly and vibrant camera shot. Because of Hannibal is a brilliant psychologist and surgeon, The film pays great attention to the psychological game between the characters. Now I would like to analyze some pictures.
The first picture focuses on the painting of character. From the point of view of prominence(visual), its size is small. And its Sharpness Foreground is in focus. Color is foreground with high contrast. The movie’s address(visual ) is direct gaze. The Mood (Visual) , Color lighting is dark. The power(visual) is low angle. The Distance(visual) is close shot social close.
This camera shot is so close that you can see Hannibal’s deep blue eyes. The whole shot rendered a dark blue. The dark background and Hannibal’s pale skin makes a drastic contrast. According to the context. The scene shows Hannibal's deep malice and dark side as a prisoner. At the same time, it also shows that he is very easy to see through the heart of the high psychological quality. His gentle appearance and speech contrasted with the heinous crimes he had committed. Using a single shot to show the image of the character, and enhance the atmosphere .
This shot has out of focus. The Contrast is low. The Address (Visual) is indirect gaze. And Color Lighting is dark. It uses low angle. Low angle camera shots are a perfect camera angle for signaling superiority or to elicit feelings of fear and dread. It also uses Close shot social close.
This shot is interesting. We use the first person view. We can see the main character’s world when she was semiconscious. This shot contains a head of little sheep with red eyes in darkness. That little sheep implies the main character that she is kind, honest, but weak. In this vision, we can understand that she is in grave danger totally.
This shot has in focus. The Whole Contrast of color is low. The Address (Visual) is direct gaze. And Color Lighting is dark. It uses medium angle and medium shot social close. The medium shot is one of the most common camera shots. It emphasizes more of your subject while keeping their surroundings visible. In this picture, we also have to notice the position of light. The contrast of light and dark is obvious.
Hannibal stand behind the police who already noticed his identity. He give the police some warning by telling his families story that his ancestor dead in a terrible way. The position of light and his words shows that he is a bad prisoner. And he is going to kill him if the police tend to annoyed him. A bad man stands behind you is awful. The shot shows it to us successfully.
This is a typical long shot. Th e long shot makes your subject appear small against their location. If your subject is a person then his or her whole body will be in view — but not filling the shot. It has large size and the color is background. It has on gaze and has natural color lighting. It has many religious elements in the scene.
The scene is a background and spot where Hannibal starts his hunt. The play adds the atmosphere and echoes the story Hannibal told earlier to the police. Hannibal has his own belief of beauty so that he chooses this scene as the ending place of police. This makes the scene dramatic and full of mystery.
In a high angle shot, the camera points down at your subject. It usually creates a feeling of inferiority, or “looking down” on your subject. In natural color lighting with high contract.
The police wore deep blue coat and leaned against the wall. He smoking tinged with tension and thoughtful. He tried to confirm the Hannibal’s identity so that he can make a sum of money. He aware that Hannibal is dangerous but he really needed the money. He is nervous and he was already on a path of no return.
My reflective journal:
Through the study of two workshops, I have learnt a lot. These workshops enriched my understanding of multimodality. The multimodality contains plenty of various type of detail model. The skills used in multimodality is very different. Whatever the practice of using appropriate music and gesture, or the understanding of pedagogic metalanguage, they all inspire me a lot. What’s more, I analyzed many videos. During that, I learnt more about the system of multimodality.
Using these skills, we can be the creator of multimodality. The knowledge can boost our videos’ quality and help us show more nice videos to more people.
To improve future workshops, I suggest that we can do more practice instead of only analyze them. We can write short plays based on narrative texts using the skills we have learnt.
Finally, the workshops impacted me more emotionally. Through the workshops, I appreciated many wonderful videos and enjoyed them. I obtained many feeling of beauty and the wisdom of human.
I wish I could hold my passion of movie, video, literal art and multimodality.