shot page

Shot Page for Film Directing Class

FILM analysis * more @ composition (visual)

or maybe the place to start is @ aesthetics.vtheatre.net

direct.vtheatre.net [stagematrix.com]

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cinematography page?

shot analysis unit

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SHOTS

Atomic and Molecular Structures of Film

* filmplus.org/shot

"Listen to yourselves when you describe these shots. When you use words "just" "kind of" and "sort of" you're diluting the story. The shots shouldn't be just, kind of, or sort of anything. They should be straightforward, as straightforward as the first three shots in the movie." Mamet

You can call it "framing" -- or focusing on. In some fundamental way each shot is POV. You DIRECT me to see it. You DIRECT public to see it "this" way. It's a choice and should be recognized as such. It's camera's dictatorship. It follow the logic of the story, just one step ahead of you, reacting to your desire to see the NEXT.
When in doubt, look in your frame and think what you want me NOT to see, what you want to SHOW later.
Think about CUT...

Eisenstein: [ ru - text is gone, 1929 ] Read Cut, Sound and Color

Shot Analysis is always contextual.

200X Pages

Directing Y2K Forum

Amazon Books

Book-Page @ Film-North

USAOL

Film Directing

LINKS: Evolution of Architecture

Deleuze List and Film-Philosophy

BWO (Body Without Organs) concept (see photo: emphasis by leaving a head off frame!); we see only parts!

NEW:

Summary

More in Filmmaling Directory (Film Directing 101) @ Film-North

Questions

see Film Terms & Abbreviations: CU, XCU, MS, LS and etc.

[ another page in film directing shots ]

Homework

Bring in class your favorite shot!

[ this page must be read together with CUT ]

Notes

How to connect F&D class pages with the film directing directory? Do you see the banner below? I will try to put it everywhere... Sight, Sound, Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics Developed at San Francisco State University, this textbook isolates the five fundamental image elements of television and film--light and color, 2D space, 3D space, time/motion, and sound--examines their aesthetic characteristics and potentials, and structures them in their respective aesthetic fields. The fourth edition adds sections on inductive shot sequences, electronic cinema, and alternative storytelling techniques. *** Bergman: 7th Seal (script) *

Mamet: A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.

"Tell a story in 5 frames" (Visual story telling) -- flickr group and (assignment) class forum posts (?)

Tell a Story in 5 Frames has two important parts. The first part is creating and telling a story through visual means with only a title to help guide the interpretation. ...

"Guidelines for Telling a Story

Guidelines are not rules, but a formula that can be used to suit your creative imagination. Several avenues exist for story telling, such as journalistic reporting, sequential photos that reveal a moment, photographic poetry, and narrative. The following guidelines are for narrative.

A good story has characters in action with a beginning, middle, and an ending. Fortunately a lot of information can be given in a single photograph, enhancing the limitations of five photographs for your story. Location, time, and atmosphere aid viewer imagination. Keep standards of pictorial beauty, but pack as many story telling elements in one photograph as possible to develop an action.

1st photo: establish characters and location.

2nd photo: create a situation with possibilities of what might happen.

3rd photo: involve the characters in the situation.

4th photo: build to probable outcomes

5th photo: have a logical, but surprising, end."

together with haiku assignment?

2007 -- new textbook "Film Art"

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Virtual Architecture

Eisenstein: [ru] text is gone.

Dynamic composition is nothing less than experiencing space. Our current visual culture is about to produce new sensitivity.
Viewing world in shots, segments, which are associated by thought not by space. It's "humanized" space, preconditioned and ideological. It's always somebody's space. Framing start with seeing. It's MY choice and "edited" reality.
The tention is in not shown! We adding to the mystery of life by making it into man-made anigma. Very playfull concept.
New (processed) reality is more powerful than the material (original reality)...
See Montage and Drive-Through-Theory
Film Site and other affiliated pages from POV (book-in-progress): Title Page for "View Points" and Java Page for the Chapter "Gaze".
Also, see Self and Tech from Post-American Book.
Theatre w/Anatoly: Visual Composition
Virtual Film Project for 1999+ ...

Collection of Great Shots:
from Fellini
[ image : 8.5 selection ]
Fellini

Kurosawa
[ image ]
From Cinema

Bergman
[ images analysis ]
From Film

Tarkovsky
[ image ] http://picasaweb.google.com/anatoly.antohin/Tarkovsky
Tarkovsky

...

So, you understood the main power of the shot -- the suspence, what we do not see. This is open structure principle, when you challenge viewers' imagination. When they want to see more...
Show more... but in the same way, when they want more and more! Oh, you got them!
The rule: if you do not see the shot before and shot after in your mind -- don't shoot!
Never shoot "isolated" shot, then you better switch to photography. "Cinematography" means movement (cinema = kinema = dynamic). In short, motion pictures!
If you feel that your story board looks like a slide show, you have problems.
Go back and "unlock" your shots. Disbalanced them, make them crave for a CUT.
Cuts make shots!
An advise. Keep returning to spectatorship, when you are shooting, but watching your film.
Using Internet terms, each shout must be hyper-linked with the rest of the film. Each new shot continue this development of the frame of references. Like in music. Visually, you "sing" -- and here come the style.
If you can manipulate shots, you are in business. Most of the movies you see are done by tv-minds (recording). If you shot didn't process reality into new reality, you go to television.
But first, try the art of film-MAKING. Did you notice it? The making! You MAKE your shots. (Don't get confused with this "take #1, #2 -- there is nothing there to take until you make it).
Strange Rule: I think that each film begins with one single shot you want so bad. So, you see it, but you know that this beautiful shot needs another one... no, more than just one... No, I need to shot that first before I can get to MY shot...
More rules later...

[ I don't remember why and how this page was made in film analysis directory and not in filmmaking 101... I do not want to dublicate pages and you should return to Film directing pages. This page has another form Shots (unfinished). Most of the pages in Fundamentals of Film directions are not developed and will be updated only when I teach this class again. 2003-2004? Read the textbook for now... ]

directing.filmplus.org :

"A famous example of experimental cinematic effects is the supposed Kuleshov Experiment of the early 1920s (perhaps as early as 1919) when the very young Lev Kuleshov joined his collaborator, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, in assembling film clips in differing ways. Pudovkin (1929) offered the classic description of this effort:

Kuleshov and I made an interesting experiment. We took from some film or other several close-ups of the well-known Russian actor Mosjukhin. We chose closeups which were static, and which did not express any feeling at all--quiet close-ups. We joined these close-ups, which were all similar, with other bits of film in three different combinations. In the first combination the close-up of Mosjukhin was immediately followed by a shot of a plate of soup standing on a table. It was obvious and certain that Mosjukhin was looking at this soup. In the second combination the face of Mosjukhin was joined to shots showing a coffin in which lay a dead woman. In the third the close-up was followed by a shot of a little girl playing with a funny toy bear. When we showed the three combinations to an audience which had not been let into the secret the result was terrific. The public raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same. (Pudovkin, 1929 quoted in Holland, 1989, pp. 415-416)

So, what was learned in this "experiment"? (See Note 2.) Uhde (1995) offers the predominant explanation when he argues that "Kuleshov proved that two shots projected in succession are not interpreted separately by the viewer; in the audience's mind, they are integrated into a whole according to the well-known equation A + B = C (in which A and B are the two joined shots and C is a new value, not originally included in any of these shots)." In other words, the constructivist or active mind engages in a process of interpretation. "A scene, for example, consisting of the shot of aircraft dropping bombs followed by the shot of a burning village will be routinely interpreted as "these aircraft have bombed this village." Needless to say that these two shots could have been filmed at different places, at different times, and the burning village may have been the result of an accident." (Uhde, 1995). A more fundamental equation in Kuleshov's work lay in his conception of film and its elements as analogous to linguistic production: "Kuleshov [conceived] of the shot as a 'shot-sign' which could be syntactically combined with other shots to comprise scenes and sequences. His analogies of shot to word, sequence to sentence and film to language were central to his establishmment of montage as the medium's primary structural principle--Kuleshov consequently set the pace for both montage theorists (e.g., Eisenstein and Pudovkin) and for film grammarians/linguists (e.g., Raymond Spottiswoode and Christian Metz" (Berg, 1975, p. 474)." *

[ THR470 -- Fall 2006 ]

POV:

@1999-2003 film-north * Next: Make FILM w/ANATOLY your homepage -- click here!

shot : tarkovsky, mirror

Related pages : Edit It, Camera, shots (filmmaking pages), visual composition (from stage directing), cinematography, visual literacy (200X).

1. Your favorite shot(s) -- homework!

2. Best shots in film history (questions page).

Shots on this pages [ captions: Pulp Fiction, Olimpia ]

Fine art history -- paintings (samples -- El Grecko, where? Klimt, Leonardo -- list). (assignment?)

Flickr (my) collection in "film class" group = subscribe!

[ note to myself ] Use stage directing shows (anatoly.vtheatre.net) notes for in-class exerc.

[ visual composition film-north ]

[ images ]
From Film