Film Festival Masterclass

As part of our media course, on the 9th of November we went on a media trip to the ASSF film festival in York. During this trip we went to two masterclasses, the first was a talk with the head of production at Warp   films Barry Ryan and the second masterclass was a talk from the successful cinematographer Danny Cohen.

Warp Films (Barry Ryan)

As it is the 10th year that Warp Films have been in production Barry Ryan was talking about its success over the years and how it came to be what it is now. He firstly started off by telling us about his latest films which he as the leading producer helped make and do and explained his role in the company, he also told us of another few films to expect to see in the future which he is currently working on. As the masterclass went on Barry talked about how to make a business work and how it fundamentally works in many film companies, he explained all about the budgets and costs of movies and how the money made from the movies (box office) was broken down to pay certain people for the help and jobs that were required to make the movie itself happen. Finally Barry went on to explain how Warp Films advertised and presented cover art for their films to draw the attention of the viewers. He stated that to get the attention of the viewers you must show them what they want to see.

Danny Cohen 

The second master class was with Danny Cohen and Mariayah Kaderbhai. Mariayah Kaderbhai did a live interview with Danny and asked he him numerous amounts of questions about how he came to be a cinematographer and what he had to undergo to get to where he is. Firstly Danny started  of by talking about how he got into the industry and how initially he did a social science degree then became a photographic technician which eventually lead on to him becoming a famous cinematographer. During the master class Danny was asked about how he made the variety of different scenes for numerous films. These scenes would be played to us and then he'd explain how he put them together. His best example was a scene from This is England, he explained how it was difficult to find an the correct are in which everything in the area had not changed much and had some of the features of what a town and streets would have appeared to look like in 1983. As it was difficult to find a perfect area Danny had to make make changes to the area, such things as changing the satellites on the house roofs and all the vehicles had to be from the 1980's time period. He explained to us how some cars were used more than once in any scene as they were on a low budget. The last thing that Danny went on to mention was how that natural light and the use of different camera angles and shot helped make a film better.