What is camerawork?
- How the camera is used in TV and film to serve story, character and action
- The arts of cinema photography
Basic elements of camera work
- The shot - affects our emotional and psychological relationship with character and setting through composition and speed
- Movement - affects our emotional and psychological relationship with character and setting through changes in visual speed and action
Why do we use shots?
- The basic building blocks of visual grammar
- The visual equivalent of sentence structure
- If shots are words, Mise En Scene is meaning and editing is narrative structure
The basic shots
- Wide shot - Establishes location, setting or character's context in setting
- Medium shot - characters dominate the frame
- Close up - face or specific objects dominates the frame
- Extreme close up - specific detail on something specific (e.g. eyes, mouth, etc.)
- Wide shots conveys sense of place and context, can also convey characters relationship to surroundings, or social relationship to other characters as an 'establishing shot'
- Medium shot focuses viewers attention on one or more principal characters. Commonly used for dialogue scenes as 'two shot' or 'over-the-shoulder', emphasise personal relationships
- Close up conveys intimacy and emotion. Often used for interior monologues/voiceover or speaking directly to camera
- Extreme close up conveys heightened emotion (fear, suspense, desire), dramatic tension or reveal. With documentary making, you won't often see extreme close ups unless for extreme emotion. If you see your interviewers crying you might want to focus on that for the editing room so you have it
Alfred Hitchcock - 'The size of the image is important to the emotion, particularly when you're using that image to have the audience identify with it'
Classic framing and composition
- Rule of third - subject placed at aesthetic interest
- Derived from 'the golden mean' - classical concept of nature's balance and harmony reflected in art
Breaking Bad used a lot of different angles and speeds:
- High angle shot (overhead shot, birds eye view) - objective alienating, diminishes character or subject in frame, emphasising vulnerability or isolation
- Low angle shot - Emphasises character or subjects dominance. Often used for 'hero shots' or menace
- Dutch/tilt angle - Disorientating, creates psychological tension
Expressionism
- Angled shots are a common feature of expressionism, particularly the classic german expressionist films of the 1920s-30s
- Expressionism present the world sole from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality
- Slow motion/fast motion - alters audiences perceptual or emotional response to dramatic action
Motion & Emotion
Why do we move the camera?
- To heighten action or emotion
- To coney the object or subjective viewpoints
- Refocus audiences attention within the scene
- Explore or change setting/environment
Alfred Hitchcock - ' I believe in using the camera movements when it helps tell the story more effectively... I think one of the first essentials of moving the cameras that the eye should not be aware of it'
Alienation
- Hitchcock's use of reverse crane/tracking shot is an example of alienation effect
- Alienation is the extent to which one maintains a critical vista ce from cultural production. The more immersive a piece, the greater associated with passively experiencing the media
- Contrastingly an alienated audience remains removed from the media, critically considering the signs, narrative an so on. This is often considered in a relation to artifice, with alienated media not attempting to hide the constructed and artificial nature of the production; showing scaffolding, using minimal staging, etc.
Key camera movement techniques
- Pan, tilt and zoom - This are classed as the most basic camera movements you can do with the camera without having anything like dolls, cranes, etc.
- Handheld/steadicam
- Dolly/Crane
- Drone
We watched a small clip from the 1978 film 'Halloween' which was the first horror film to use a steadicam as a technique.
- Heightens action and emotion through subjective POV
- Switches between subjective POV
- Switches between subjective (steadicam) and objective (crane) viewpoints
- Refocuses audience's attention within the scene (movement through set and pans)
Explores character relation to environment
Elements of visual style (Boardwell)
- Denotative (directing attention
- Expressie (bringing out or magnifying feelingful qualities)
- Decorative (Flourishes or stylistic patterns that are independent or semi-independent of narrative design)
- Symbolic functions (invoking abstract concepts)
Use of handheld in documentary
- Heightens action and emotion (conveys urgency)
- Dynamics of transition (moving from one location to another)
- Places characters in context (life on the streets). Authenticity.
How the camera serves filmmaker and audience
- Narrative - visual story telling
- Aesthetics - frames the mise-en-scene
- Psychology - insight into identification with character
- Analysis/interpretation - objective/subjective POV pr artistic vision
Editing Lecture
What is editing?
- The assembly of visual material into sequences
- Constructs a narrative (linear or non-linear)
- Manipulates time (condense, lengthen, flashback, flash forward
- Juxtaposes ideas and concepts (visual and intellectual)
You don't HAVE to have editing, there are films such as Birdman, Russian Ark and Rope (1948) which appear to be done in one complete take and no edits involved.
Creating visual meaning
- Mise-En-Scene and cinematography create implicit meaning within shots
- Editing creates implicit meaning between shots
Surrealism film is where the film is almost like a bad acid trip. It's very artistic and can be very graphic at times as well.
Four Key elements of editing (Bordwell & Thompson, Film Art)
- Spatial - the relationship between different spaces and the editors manipulation of them e.g. cross cutting
- Temporal - Manipulation of time within the film in relation to order, duration and frequency e.g. montages, dissolves, wipes, fades
- Rhythmic - manipulation of duration of the shots: accents, beats and the tempo e.g. action and suspense scenes, jump cuts
- Graphic - the relationship between pictorial qualities of shots or scenes e.g. graphic match cut
Why editing is important
- Creates strong visual narratives from simple script descriptions or unedited rushes
- The most creative aspect of filmmaking
- A good editor can make mediocre shots work; a mediocre editor can ruin (or ignore) good shots
- Shooting ratios have an impact on editing (film is 10:1, Documentary 60-100:1)
Two schools of editing theory
- Classical Hollywood continuity - Primarily used in mainstream cinema and television and drama and classical formal documentary
- Soviet montage - influences still felt in avant-garde documentary filmmaking, and independent and experimental cinema
Continuity editing - Set of editing techniques used to create a cohsive sense of space and continuous time by maintaining consistent graphic, spatial and temporal relationships between shots
180 degree rule - Scenes are constructed along an axis of action, spatial positions in the frame are consistent, eyeliner consistent across shots, screen direction consistent across shots
Eyeliner match shot - First shot shows the character looking offscreen, second shot shows us the character is looking at
Shot-reverse shot - Alternates between two shots framed reverse angles, often used to depict conversations
match on action - action begun in first shit is completed in the second shot, maintains continuous action (and therefore continuous sense of the passage of time) across edits
Soviet Montage
- Formal theory and technique where editing serves an ideological purpose
- Not escapist drama through continuity, but challenging audience to thought and action through image montage
- Key filmmakers and theories: Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshow, Dzig Vertov
Ideology
- Set of opinions, values, beliefs and assumptions that ones uses to think about and relate to the world
- Ideology is not objective truth but perceived truth; a systems value
- It is common to conceive of ideology being the only way of understanding the world; that there is no position of objective truth from which to interpret things
- Soviet filmmaker served a communist ideology: that film could serve a political education purpose for the betterment of society
Eisenstein on montage
- Eisenstein argues that montage, especially intellectual montage, is an alternative to continuity editing
- "Montage is conflict" (dialectical) where new ideas emerge from the collisions within the montage sequence
- Thesis/shot a + antithesis/shot b = Synthesis
The Kuleshov effect
- a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation
- So each single shot has its own intrinsic meaning, and a new meaning when two are intercut
5 principles of soviet montage
- Metric - editing which follows a specific tempo (based purely on frame count), cutting the next shot regardless of action in the frame
- Rhythmic - similar to metric but allowing for visual continuity from edit to edit
- Tonal - uses the emotional meaning of the shot e.g. sleeping baby to date peace, calm
- overtonal/associative - a fusion of metric, rhythmic and tonal montage intended to have a more intense effect on the audience
- Intellectual - editing together shots which, when combined, convey an intellectual or metaphorical meaning
Modern documentary editing
- Evidentiary (or expositional) editing - explicit meaning of edits is reinforced by narration or dialogue. shots are often illustrative and usually maintain some visual continuity
Bill Nichols In evidentiary editing expositional images "... illustrate, illuminate, evoke or act in counterpoint to what is said... [we] take our cue from the commentary and understand the images as evidence or demonstration"
- Dynamic editing - modern narrative style dominated by jump cut and other elliptical edits that often ignores classical visual continuity
In dynamic editing, concepts of matching and continuity rarely apply. Shots are ordered by meaning but not necessarily by their relationship to each other in time or space
Modern intellectual
The films of BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis combine evidentiary editing (narration and expositional archive) with increasingly stylised poetic montage sequences
His latest 'Bitter lake' explores how Afghanistan became of vital significance in the modern world
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