Our Bridge 4 Project is a visual analysis essay of a dystopian film. I watched several clips of some dystopian films from the recommended list, such as Uzumaki, the black mirror series and the Omega Man, and finally settled down on the Omega Man. Because I liked old things and its 70-ish feelings really attracted me. This film is really rich in visuals. I watched it twice and always found a lot of well-designed elements to write about.

Currently we’ve only finished the first draft of the essay. My first draft is kind of disorganized and my thesis doesn’t summarize my main points well. After doing the peer review and individual meeting with Rachel, I know better how to fix these problems. I also learnt some new perspectives of analyzing the visuals from the essays wrote by my peers (Alex and Prachi)

At the same time, the project of  my studio class is to create a dystopian film. Since we need to have a film that is completely different from any dystopian we’ve ever seen, the content of The Omega Man doesn’t help us too much.  Although both of the dystopias include a city infected ( the Omega Man’s city is infected  by a plague and ours is infected by bugs). However, writing the seminar essay helped us in the shooting and editing processes. For example, I changed the contrast, exposure and saturation of one of our scene to show a eerie aura. This was inspired by the color used in The Omega Man which I analyzed in the essay.

Originally I was a bit confused about how to shoot a dystopian video. However, after watching the Omega Man and other film clips in the seminar class, I got a better sense of dystopian videos. The previous excursion of going to Moschino and writing a paper about it also helped me with this assignment. I knew better how to do close visual analysis, such as color, costume, and how to connect the visuals to a specific theme. Both Fashion and Film share this connection.

For the research part, I searched some film reviews and scholarly sources. The film reviews were super helpful, although most of them were written in an informal way, they helped me to see the film in different perspectives, so that I can dig out more interesting aspects of the film. The scholarly sources helped me to enrich my content. For example, if I don’t understand color theory, I can search it in scholarly sources and blend it into my paper to make it more persuasive.