20th Anniversary of Se7en

After watching the title sequence of Se7en in class, I was very interested to learn more about the movie and what happens so I looked it up. As I was looking it up, I came across some articles mentioning that the 20th anniversary of the film is coming up. As I was reading one of the articles, there was a YouTube video explaining the pre-production of the film, how it all came about, and then how it was filmed. The YouTuber spends most of the video focusing on the last scene in the film, the "Box Scene" explaining how the editing, sound, and the cinematography all create this fantastic mood which helps with the revealing shot, aka what's in the box. If you want to find out more about the film and how the end scene was created, watch the video! I promise it's worth watching the whole 14 minutes of it. But there are a lot of spoilers in the video so if you haven't seen it yet, or don't want to know what's in the box, then don't watch it!

Tree of Life Special Effects

The Tree of Life released in 2011 and was nominated for three academy awards: best picture, director, and cinematography. The first time I saw this film, it blew me away. It was a little too long, but other then that I thought it was fantastic. Other then the performances of the actors, the feature that really stood out to me was the special effects.  This film took thirty years to make, which sounds ridiculous but it shows. The special effects supervisor wasn’t a fan of CGI, so they created their special effects the old fashioned way. They took footage of smoke, liquid flowing through funnels, etc. to create the cosmos and space imagery. My favorite use of special effects was the scene with the dinosaur’s. They used real footage of a stream with rocks and added in the dinosaurs which made them look even more realistic. I highly recommend this film for anyone who loves experimental films since the plot isn’t linear.