Shelton Jackson Lee known as a "Spike Lee" is an American director and writer born 20 March 1957 in Atlanta. He graduate New York University Film School. "He Got Game" was one of his subsequential movies created in 1998 (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 2023).
According to Collins(2018) "He Got Game" is a film about a young, talented basketball player at the beginning of his career who has to make important decisions that his entire environment wants to influence in order to benefit from it.
The film featured many cinema and sports stars. In the main roles we can see Denzel Washington, Rosario Dawson, Milla Jovovich and the then rising NBA star Ray Allen.
The first video shows a duel between the main character and his father. Unfortunately, I managed to find the film in good quality only with Hungarian dubbing. However, this is not too important because my main goal is to focus on game shots.This fragment of the film shows a lot of close-ups of actors playing against each other on the court. There are also several shots from above and covering a wider perspective. The editing is quite dynamic. Thanks to the involvement in the main role of professional basketball, all movements and plays look professional. All this is intended to show the most realistic duel possible.
The second video is higlights from the game.It shows the most interesting actions and plays of the main character and his teammates. "On the technical side, Lee’s enthusiasm for the game and its professional athleticism clearly shows. His style of camerawork and editing is to keep the players in shot when they are making their dunks, slams, or shoots, rather than trick it with quick editing(Brown 2019)." At the end of this video you can see the performance of the high school team. It looks identical to similar materials from real teams, which gives the whole thing a very realistic look.
The last video shows interviews with professional basketball players and other people related to this sport, such as coaches and journalists. They are mixed with what is happening on the pitch and in the locker room. In the meantime, the reactions of the main character and his father to these statements are shown.A similar solution is used in many documentaries about athletes, such as "The Last Dance". All the techniques used add realism to the entire film. Thanks to this, the viewer has the impression that he or she is watching a documentary and not fiction.
In this post I would like to focus on analysis of few shots connected with my project.
The first video shows a duel between the main character and his father. Unfortunately, I managed to find the film in good quality only with Hungarian dubbing. However, this is not too important because my main goal is to focus on game shots.
References
Collins, K.A. (2018). 20 Years After Its Release, Spike Lee’s Basketball Epic He Got Game Remains Searing and Essential. [online] Vanity Fair. Available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/05/he-got-game-20th-anniversary [Accessed 13 Nov. 2023].
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica (2019). Spike Lee | Biography, Movies, & Facts. In: Encyclopædia Britannica. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Spike-Lee [Accessed 13 Nov. 2023].
You need to use much more film vocabulary - discussing camera angles, cinematography - how did they shoot this? You need to research further and discuss in more detail
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