Monday Film Class Recap 11/16

Last week I began by showing a few humorous videos to demonstrate how so much of a movie's tone or even content can be a result purely of the editing. Editors can take pieces of performances and string them together in such a way to create a performance the actor never actually gave (this can be good or bad; bad performances have been saved by clever editors and great performances have been ruined by bad editing). The context of scenes or shots can be completely changed. There is an old saying in the film world that says that a movie is written three times: first as a screenplay, then re-written during production, and then re-written in the editing.

The videos I showed are all fake trailers that take footage from classic movies and make them seem like they come from a completely different type of movie. The videos I showed were included two children's films made to look like horror films:

'Mary Poppins' re-cut to look like a horror movie.

'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' re-cut to look like a horror film.

And an actual horror movie made to look like an uplifting family film:

Stephen King's 'It' as a family film.

And a brutal, bleak war film advertised as if it were a comedy:

'Saving Private Ryan' as a comedy.

After that we did a 'Jeopardy'-style quiz game focusing on the vocabulary terms from a few weeks ago.

We then broke into groups. Lucas and Daniel G. finished editing the commercial they shot last week (I'll post it soon). The other two groups came up with ideas for commercials and we began filming one of them. We'll film the other one this week.

Monday Film Class Re-cap 9/23/13

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.)