In class we began with "Director's Chair" and then discussed some key terms of filmmaking (I'll post these in a separate post). I'll try not to give you guys too many things to memorize, but these terms are essential to be able to speak about film and filmmaking.
We analyzed a scene from Star Wars (1977), discussing the coverage of the scene (how many setups were used and what type of shots were used). We found out that for this four-minute scene of dialogue between primarily two characters (where Obi-Wan Kenobi shows Luke his father's lightsaber and explains to Force), George Lucas used 17 separate camera setups. This is normal for a scene of this length. The scene in its final edit has 58 cuts, meaning the average shot length is around 5 seconds. As I said in class, this is actually fairly typical for a scene like this. Action movies today usually have an average shot length of around 2 seconds; the Hollywood average is 4-6 seconds.
I speculated in class as to how long it would have taken to film the scene; I have since looked this up in the incredibly thorough book The Making of Star Wars by J.W. Rinzler. The scene was shot in a studio in London primarily on two 12-hour days, with an additional day of "pickups" (a term for the shooting of additional shots after seeing the footage and finding that it is not satisfactory).
I realize this activity was a bit dull for some of you (and went on a while), but I think the activity that I have planned fro next week (9/30) will make much more sense now that we have gone through this. I promise next week will be a bit more active.
We ended the session by beginning to edit our "magic trick" exercise from last week. We'll finish that up next week.
Stay tuned for a separate post with those important terms, along with some pictures and links to illustrate them. (Edit: you can find this post here.)
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