Blog Assignment 5

Ben Stiller, the director of Tropic Thunder, did a great job making this movie by the book. Within the first ten seconds we notice the 180-degree rule being used perfectly. We always see the character that goes by the name Osiris on the right side of the screen looking to the left at Four Leaf. Four Leaf has a straight on shot which is just on the line of the 180 degree rule but the camera never passes it leaving us with a perfect understanding of where everyone is and what’s happening. Osiris always moves from right to left as Four Leaf always looks from left to right. This is mainly because Four Leaf is trying to get away from the people shooting at him and can only desire to go one direction

The rule of thirds plays an interesting role in this as the middle third pulls our attention to the bottom lip of Four Leaf as he over-acts his role in the pretend movie. This is supposed to be seen as satirical toward Hollywood. This rule also pulls our attention to the side when Osiris isn’t doing much but Stiller wants us to see that the other characters are providing cover fire for him. Another way this rule makes the scene flow is because there isn’t ever more than two main objects in the shot at one time. The two objects allow us enough room to see both those and a little scenery in the background.

Throughout the entire scene we see the rule of 30 used well for the most part. Sometimes it seemed as though the helicopter was a little too far in the back from where we saw it last but it flowed nicely. I didn’t notice any jump cuts in this scene that stuck out at me. When we see a medium shot in on Four Leaf, the camera switched to Osiris before it showed a wide show of Four Leaf. This eased the transition from being zoomed in to zoomed out.