The Great Train Robbery

As part of Digital Media, it is the students' job to analyze different types of media. Since we are starting the class with making videos, it only made sense that we start analyzing other picture shows at the same time. And when learning how to make a video, what better way to start than at the beginning when other people were creating movies for the very first time. For our first blog assignment, we were given a select few silent films to watch and then critique, focusing on similarities and differences between the film we chose and movies today, differences in acting style, plot line, special effects, camera positioning, editing, etc.

Out of the four films to chose from, I picked 'The Great Train Robbery' mainly because I had heard of it before. The first thing I noticed about the film was the year it was made: 1903. Immediately this video won props in my eyes. But once the film started my eyes went all buggy- not only was the quality terrible, but the four-shade black and white coloring was awful! I had troubles depicting what was going on and differentiating what was the background and what was a human.

Another strange part of the movie was the music- it was completely inappropriate for the media. I predicted that the film was going to be a comedy based on the happy-go-lucky music, but instead there was a lot of killing and the robbers got robbed by other robbers. . . altogether no comedy was visible except for the atrocious acting. Of course this is due to the fact that the camera's didn't zoom in on the characters faces, but their body actions were either over-dramatized (such as when they were 'shot') or under-dramatized (I couldn't figure out what they guy in the train was doing even when he was killed.

The plot was very different from what we see in movies now because it didn't have much to it. There was one story with no twists or problems for the characters. I was shocked in the end when another gang stole the money from the robbers- it was not exactly a happy ending, but it was still too random to be ironic. I believe that the characters were very flat too- no one stood out because they didn't have personalities, just actions that their actors carried out. The camera was almost always in one position, far away so that no screen changing was needed to see all of the characters. I also noticed that the transitions were messy, just a blink and the characters were moved without actually moving.

But, with all this negative being said, it was still very impressive. This was one of the first films ever made, the beginning of a long train of trial and error. For being so old, the ingenuity that was required to make this film is unbelievable. Even nowadays, CGI and other high tech sources would have to be used to make the train move with people on it and the gun scenes would take a lot of coordination to pull off. All in all, this movie is a credible pioneer for movies in the twenty-first century. It paved the road for many movies to come and proved that, with great determination and creativity, anything is possible- you just have to take the first leap to start a revolution.