Blog 3

Relationship Between Shots

For this post, I am going to be examining the highway battle scene from Transformers: Age of Extinction. I chose this clip because I remember being frustrated by the camera angles when I first saw it. I’ve embedded the clip below. However, the only YouTube video that I could find is a little bit long, so skip to 2:00 for the scene that I’ll be analyzing here. Everything before that is just a long chase scene filled with explosions noises, and dizzying camera movement. There’s really not much to say about that part.

At 2:00, we see Optimus Prime (the large red and blue robot) being flung down a road by an explosion. Optimus begins to stand back up, then the camera cuts to Mark Wahlberg’s character calling for his daughter. The camera then cuts back to Optimus. The cuts are very quick and add to the overall feeling of danger and panic.

When the camera cuts back to Optimus, he’s knee deep in a fight with Galvatron (the large silver robot). This is a bad transition because Galvatron comes out of nowhere. We never saw him catch up with Optimus, so this all seems rather sudden. There should have at least been the sound of footsteps so the audience could know that he was coming.

For some reason, Optimus and Galvatron are never in the camera’s focus. Instead they are always in the corner of the screen with a significant portion of their bodies obscured. I’m not sure if this was done to show how big the robots are or to draw attention to the girl running away from them, but it’s very distracting and annoying.

Sometimes, the camera angle is not as bad. There’s one part where the camera closes in on Galvatron’s face when he speaks. It really adds to the effect.

At 3:00, a missile comes out of nowhere and hits Optimus. Optimus moves in slow motion as he gets hit. The tone of the scene changes dramatically. Dark clouds fill the sky and the music changes to a slow, ominous orchestral piece. Lockdown, the robot who fired the missile, calmly walks onscreen. This scene is better edited than the last one. We get a good shot of Lockdown entering the fray and the camera focuses on him when he starts speaking to Optimus. I also like how the use of shadows and the color black