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Lydia Eichler Director/DP Reel and Artist Statement

Lydia Eichler Spring 2018 Director/DP Reel from Lydia Eichler on Vimeo . My mother is a designer and her father is a painter. At one point or another, both of them have tried to teach me how to "do art." But as all artists know, this process is open to lots of learning, but very little teaching. You create, critique, and then create something better. This has very much been my process with film. Using a camera has always seemed pretty frightening to me. Compared to creative processes like writing or directing, or even painting, the task of getting exactly what I wanted to translate onto a tiny screen always seemed like an enormous feat. I've learned, though, it's not necessarily what you make happen inside the camera; it's more of what you create in real life. The camera is simply a tool to capture what is happening in front of you. When I first began applying for colleges, studying film wasn't even on my mind. Through senior year of high school, I w
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Eichler_JCM350_Final from Lydia Eichler on Vimeo .

Shot by Shot Analysis: Moonrise Kingdom

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Moonrise Kingdom (2012)-Wes Anderson (first 2 minutes of clip) Shot 1: Wide shot, begin to track on dolly This establishing shot begins the long dolly shot that brings us through the scene. Throughout the shot, the characters move to different places on the screen, but the camera stays in the same place, tracking along beside them. This is broken up several times with cutaways, but makes up the majority of the scene. The scoutmaster is making his morning rounds to each of his scouts in order to check on their activities. The forward movement and framing of the scoutmaster and his assistant scout, in addition to the music, create a militaristic feeling of order and power. Shot 2: Stop tracking, medium shot, then continue tracking The camera has stopped tracking for a moment and the characters have moved forward in the frame tok a medium shot. While we've been seeing the same shot for several seconds, the frame within a frame and movement of characters in and out of

Camera Movement

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One of the most famous examples of camera movement is the opening scene of Boogie Nights  (1997). A steadicam is used to track various members of the nightclub, swinging from one subject to the next, as if the camera itself were a character in the bustling scene of the crowded club. Another extremely famous tracking shot is from The Shining  (1980) where the camera tracks young Danny on his big wheel as he rides through the hotel. To achieve a tracking shot at such a low angle, the steadicam operator was actually pushed on a wheelchair behind Danny's character, holding the camera low. This long tracking shot lets the viewer feel the enormity of the hotel and  puts emphasis on how much of a maze the place is, as a lot of the places Danny cycles through smoothly would not connect geographically in the film. Wes Anderson is known for his masterful camera movements, one of which occurs in this scene in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). This crane shot is used to explain

Lydia Eichler Doc Project

https://vimeo.com/254863050

Blog #3: Gearhead

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I am definitely a new comer in the world of equipment, but these are some of the blogs I found interesting: 1. Zacuto Blog http://www.zacuto.com/how-to-shoot-rain-like-a-pro I read a very interesting post on the technicalities of shooting rain. It's ironic that rain can very often ruin an outdoor shoot, but when you're shooting rain, you have to work extremely hard to recreate what is usually a nuisance. I learned that you have to very closely monitor the natural lighting so that the fake rain doesn't look fake. Rain can add so much depth to a shot because of the way water reflects light onto the actors, but it is extremely expensive and difficult to reproduce artificially. A trick that this article mentioned was to make it look like it had just finished raining by slicking down the street and pouring water over trees so that it would be dripping from the leaves during the shot. 2. The Black and Blue Blog http://www.theblackandblue.com/blog/page/3/ Scrolling th

Making a Movie-durer

1. The Shining: John Alcott Stanley Kubrick is not known for being a reasonable and mild-mannered man. Coupled with his visual work, his ability to maintain a relationship with Kubrick for four different films makes John Alcott basically a superhuman. Alcott shot   The Shining , Barry Lyndon (for which he won an Oscar) , A Clockwork Orange, and the famed "Dawn of Man" sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (which means he probably also helped Kubrick fake the moon landing but that's neither here nor there) as well as many commercial works. Born to English film executive Arthur Alcott, John Alcott grew up on sets and gained an incredible knowledge on film stock and lighting techniques. In the prime of his career, Alcott preferred natural and practical lighting and would often wet down roads when shooting at night to achieve a reflective light rather than lighting the set entirely artificially. After he completed The Shining, his last work with Kubrick, Alcott went on to DP se