My Son the Fanatic trailer 2014- Lancioni, Panebianco & Prandi

Critical reading and creative writing

A- Trailer for “My Son the Fanatic”

B-  It took us some time to decide which story we were going to work with. We finally selected My son the fanatic. We first selected the parts of the story we were going to include and then we agreed on three famous actors to carry out our film, which were Irrfan Khan (as Parvez), Dev Patel (as Ali) and Natalie Portman (as Bettina). Then, we made a research on which films these actors made in order to take some scenes from them (“Slumdog Millonaire”, “Closer”, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, etc). We had some inconvenience when finding the same actor performing different activities, for example, in finding Dev Patel playing football, cricket, studying, etc but we more or less managed to look for other films in which there were similar actors or at least they were not clearly seen.

In connection with the trailer itself, first we show Parvez’ s and Ali’s lifestyles in English society. Parvez portrayed as a Pakistani taxi driver, alcoholic person and a tolerant Muslim. His wife does the ironing and Parvez has intimate conversations with his close friend, Bettina. His son Ali plays cricket, football and studies hard. Then, Parvez’s life takes an unexpected dark turn when his son Ali converts to fundamentalist Islam, leading to a family breakdown and social conflict. We quote some phrases from the story to show a serious conversation between Parvez and Ali discussing about religion and their roles English society. Last, we include a violent scene between father and son and the final words of the story which are “Who’s the fanatic now?”. In this way we want to anticipate that the story begins just there whith Ali’s words.

As regards the bibliography used, we have taken some sentences in direct speech from the story “My Son the Fanatic” such as “We are not in the village now. We are in England. We have to fit in!”//“You’re too implicated in Western civilization”// “You musn’t give up on him”,  images from “Google images” and scenes from the films mentioned above. We used www.imdb.com to get informatin about the films in which the actors chosen have performed.

C- We took those videos from Youtube and we downloaded them with JDownloader in an mp4 format for better quality. We chose a muslim music and some film sounds to add to our trailer. In order to make it, we used Windows movie maker, which is quite simple and easy to use.

Tatiana, Guillermina, Angela

Loverboys (by Lu and Agus)

B- This cartoon stands for the break up scene in Castillo’s Loverboys that has deeply affected the main character of the story. We believe it represents the writer’s intention and  the whole story: it is about love and its universality, everyone can feel identified with a love story in spite of their believes, age and sexual orientation.

We have chosen to represent both the characters thoughts and her actual words as the writer does in the story Loverboys to illustrate the narrative techniques Castillo uses (free direct speech, spontaneous and dialogic narrative).

The first part of this comic strip is set at the character’s bar, the place where she met her loverboy, so as to represent that even though she was leaving him, she wanted him to stay. The second picture illustrates his departure. The background shows how they took different paths, but her position portrays her desire for him to come back and the fact that she isn’t over him. This idea is emphasized by the loverboy as a shadow of the past that is still present in her mind and heart. Finally, we see her drinking to forget him which is completely useless because she’s still torturing herself with her memories.

C- Fortunately, we haven’t faced any major technical problems. Toondoo proved to be simple and very easy to use. Moreover, it has allowed us to create a cartoon which we couldn’t have invented otherwise because of our limited drawing capacity.

Wide Sargasso Sea - Trailer (by Andrea Sanchez and Ma.Laura Straface)

We have decided to create a trailer of Wide Sargasso Sea. The rationale behind our choice is that we’ve really enjoyed reading it since Rhys offers an alternative explanation of Bertha’s madness  (Jane Eyre). What we’ve liked the most about Wide Sargasso Sea is that it gives voice to the Other. It isn't just a prequel. It’s the epitome of writing back to the Empire. Moreover, we consider that it has many important themes that can be fully exploited in a trailer. We watched the BBC adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea some time ago and we noticed that several scenes portraying significant events of the novel were missing, such as Antoinette’s traumatic childhood, which, in our opinion, is essential to understand her struggle for identity. In our trailer, we’ve tried to prove that our imaginary film version of Wide Sargasso Sea is more complete than the BBC version since it shows the most important features and themes of the novel. To achieve our aim, we’ve carried out research on different movies, documentaries and videos looking for visual content that could help us match those parts from Wide Sargasso Sea that we had previously selected. We’ve looked for scenes in period movies so as to find a couple with Antoinette and Rochester’s characteristics and also scenes from slavery movies in order to depict Antoinette’s past as a child. We’ve joined all these scenes together to create our trailer.

As regards our textual strategy, we’ve selected different quotations from some of the main characters to match each of the different chosen parts of the trailer. To make it more vivid, we’ve used different text-to-speech converters so as to be able to convert the characters’ quotations into natural sounding voices.  Furthermore, in order to give our trailer a proper format we’ve written some lines to sum up what the movie is about and we’ve chosen a distinctive voice to read these lines aloud.  This audio strategy has been extremely helpful because we believe that when watching the trailer the viewer can immediately differentiate the characters’ voices from the voice-over. We’ve done extensive research on this since there are many text-to-speech converters that offer kind of “robotic” voices and our aim was to give our trailer a realistic look.

What’s been really challenging is that, as we mentioned before, there is already a film version of Wide Sargasso Sea but we couldn’t use any scenes from it and we didn’t want to use any pictures either. Therefore, this has given us much scope for creativity. 

Technical comment

In order to join all the movie scenes together we’ve worked with 'Cyberlink Power Director'- professional video editing software. The advantage of it is that it allows you to cut different movies scenes, join them together, and add transitions, effects, music and text. We’ve cut the different scenes we selected from movies, documentaries and videos and we’ve added them to our ‘Cyberlink Power Director’ project. As regards the audio, we’ve recorded the quotations and voice-over (previously converted into audio with different text-to-speech software) with Windows Sound Recorder. We’ve added the recordings to our project together with the scenes. We’ve also added the names of the actors and actresses so as to resemble a real trailer. Finally, we’ve added suspenseful music to create tension.

We really hope that our trailer looks as real as possible since that was our major aim from the very beginning.

Video editing software:

Cyberlink Power Director

Text-to-Speech converters:

http://www.naturalreaders.com/

http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php?sitepal

http://www.ivona.com

Movies, videos and documentaries:

Bianco E Nero. Dir. Cristina Comencini. Perf. Fabio Volo, Ambra Angiolini, Aïssa Maïga. 01 Distribution, 2008. DVD.

Masterpiece Classic: Wuthering Heights. Dir. Coky Giedroyc. Perf. Charlotte Riley, Tom Hardy, Andrew Lincoln. PBS, 2009. DVD.

Tula: The Revolt. Dir. Jeroen Leinders. Perf. Danny Glover, Jeroen Krabbé, Deobia Oparei. Fisheye Feature Films, 2013. DVD.

12 Years a Slave. Dir. Steve McQueen. Perf. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Kenneth Williams, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2013. DVD.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte. Dir. Mike Barker. Perf. Toby Stephens, Tara Fitzgerald, Rupert Graves. BBC, 1996. DVD.

The Glass Virgin. Dir. Sarah Hellings. Perf. Jan Graveson, Christine Kavanagh, Brendan Coyle. Festival Films, 1995. DVD.

Slavery in Jamaica-Documentary. Dir. Georgina Harvey. BBC, 2005. DVD.

Witches-Documentary. Prod. Michelle Thibeault. Film Roos, 1996. A&E.

H. Kist. "Bill Viola - Fire Woman (2005)." YouTube. YouTube, 10 May 2014. Web. 07 Oct. 2014.

Clarisa & Paula's ToonDoo: "The Loverboy Writes Back"

The loverboy writes back by ppauorozco | Make your own at www.toondoo.com

Mourning in To The Lighthouse

In 2011, Laura Filiputti wrote this post in connection with the topic

I was just re reading chapter 6 (or 7, depends on the copy) of To the Lighthouse and I remembered we discussed Grief and how the death of Mrs. Ramsay had  affected the Ramsays and Lily.
This is actually a transcript from Grey's Anatomy which has, what I believe to be, a very accurate description of how one feels towards grief and losing someone. I think that the different stages presented here can be traced back to Lily in particular and how she feels towards Mrs. Ramsay's death.
Hope you like it and find it useful!

According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, when we're dying or have suffered a catastrophic loss, we all move through five distinct stages of grief. We go into denial because the loss is so unthinkable we can’t imagine it’s true. We become angry with everyone, angry with survivors, angry with ourselves. Then we bargain. We beg. We plead. We offer everything we have, we offer our souls in exchange for just one more day. When the bargaining has failed and the anger is too hard to maintain, we fall into depression, despair, until finally we have to accept that we’ve done everything we can. We let go. We let go and move into acceptance.
The dictionary defines grief as keen mental suffering or
distress over affliction or loss.
Sharp sorrow, painful regret.
As surgeons, as scientists, we're taught to learn from and
rely on books, on definitions, on definitives.
But in life, strict definitions rarely apply.
In life, grief can look like a lot of things that bear little
resemblance to sharp sorrow.
Grief may be a thing we all have in common,
but it looks different on everyone..
It isn't just death we have to grieve, it's life, it's loss,
it's change...
And when we wonder why it has to suck so much sometimes,
has to hurt so bad, the thing we gotta try to remember is
that it can turn on a dime...
That's how you stay alive. When it hurts so much you can't
breathe. That's how you survive...
By remembering that one day, somehow, impossibly, you
won't feel this way. It won't hurt this much...
Grief comes in it's own time for everyone.
In it's own way...
So the best we can do, best anyone can do, is try
for honesty...
The really crappy thing, the very worst part of grief,
is that you can't control it...
The best we can do is try to let ourselves feel it, when
it comes...
And let it go when we can...
The very worst part is that the minute you think you're
past it, it starts all over again...
And always, everytime, it takes your breath away...
There are five stages of grief.
They look different on all of us.
But there are always five...
Denial...
Anger...
Bargaining...
Depression...
Acceptance...

Art in the 19th and early 20th century

The term Impressionism derives from Claude Monet's painting "Impression Sunrise" (1872)

You can read an interesting chronology of this movement and look at some paintings here.

For an overview of French painting in the 19th century, go to the USA National Gallery of Art, where you will also find a discussion of Post-Impressionism.

Post-Impressionism can be exemplified by Georges Seurat's "The Lighthouse at Honfleur" (1886)

Cubism started in Paris in 1908, reached its peak in 1914, and continued into the 20's. Watch this slideshow of works at the London Tate Gallery for an explanation of its features or read this discussion of its features

Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907) forecasts the new style.

Virginia Woolf dates the change in "human nature" to December 1910, when the first exhibition of French Post-Impressionist and Cubist painting took place in London.

Can you suggest what elements  you can find in common with modernism?

This is an optional activity.

Life in the UK

Extract from

Scenes of a Sexual Nature (2006) 

Unfortunately, really poor subtitles