October Sky Opening Scene

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OCTOBER SKY ESSAY:-) In the film, October sky directed by Joe Johnston, the opening scenes are essential as it crafts the way of how the film flows and ends. October Sky is set in the town of Coalwood in 1957, where Homer Hickam and his three friends, o'dell, roy lee and quentin are inspired to build a rocket, after viewing the launch of sputnik. In the hope of fulfilling their dreams and making it out of Coalwood through other ways such as football scholarships instead of being stuck as a coalminer, Homer does face problems. These include his father, John Hickam being strongly opposed to Homer's choice of career path in rocket science, the loss of equiptment and others. The openiing scenes help me to understand the events that were to follow…show more content…
A section to the opening scene that helped me to understand what the film was going to be about was at the beginning of the opening scene.. In this section, it displayed various shots of Coalwood and what the people of Coalwood did as part of their daily lives. Here, the director used the film technique of lighting adding effect to me as a viewer. The lighting in this particular section of the film was dark as the director had used a blue filter to make everything seem gloomy. As a viewer, the blue filter caused me to see hardly any color in the different shots, ultimately portraying Coalwood as a town that was dull, sad and quiet. The sky was not bright blue but of a grey colour, the clothing of people were of a dull colour too as well as the greeness of the trees being toned down due to the use of the blue filter. The lighting gave me the effect of thinking that this movie was not going to be a generally happy one but a serious one with some dull moments bound to be included further down through out the duration of the film. As a result of the dim…show more content…
This film focused on World War II and the way jewish people were treated. The story is told through the eyes of a young boy who came from a german family and who's father was in charge of a certain concentration camp that they lived close to. The director like Johnston used lighting to emphasise emotions of sadness and dullness. In one scene in the film directed by Mark Herman, he used dim lighting when Bruno, the young boy's, family went out searching for him although he had already died in the concentration camp. The lighting gave off a sense of sadness which is what the director intended to do, telling by what was happening in the scene itself. He also used cut shots to show emotion or the impact of a certain situation on characters. For example when one of the german soldiers had gotten furious with one of the jewish slaves that was a servant at the house, a close up shot of the german soldier's face was displayed showing the rage, anger in the character himself. Also, emotions of fear built within me as a viewer as because of the facial expressions the character was portraying due to anger and outrage. The close up shot made me feel like i was part of the movie and it helped me to understand that in this movie, the Germans very much hated jews and treated them in the most inhumane ways as
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