To Do This Week
Read: Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.
Watch: Run Lola Run (Youtube of Prime Rental)
Blog: Choose a scene from Run Lola Run (make 1-3 screen grabs of the scene for your post). How does the scene fit with the overall narrative structure of the movie? How is continuity editing used in the scene? What narrative forces/desires drives the edits of shot to shot? How is time stretched or compressed and why? These questions are only “prompts” for your own thoughts about the narrative and editing styles of the scene and of the movie as a whole. (make screen grabs of the movie)
Continuity (5%) :
no more than 60 seconds
Shoot and edit a short video that follows the principles of continuity to create the illusion of continuous space and time. Try to vary the angles and distances of your shots: establishing shot, medium-shot, close-up, extreme-close-up. Sound may be an element here, but please do not include talking, music or verbal explanations. We are working on visual explanations, depicting continuity of action. Below are some ideas.
- Making or Doing Something:
Document someone making something or doing some focused activity. The process may take 3-30 minutes, but the final video should be no more than 60 seconds. Document a single continuous action (making art, playing sports, cooking a meal, walking a dog) and edit it into a sequence that is between 30-60 seconds.
Post your Continuity Assignment with a Vimeo/Youtube embed (place the url on its own line) and write a 500 word assessment of your video from the standpoint of framing and continuity editing. What works and what doesn’t work to tell the visual story?
Video Lectures
Friday Class (Zoom)
Prep Job Profiles…
View Continuity assignments
Discuss story world of Run Lola Run
Continuity > Narrative
Lunch Date
Notes
Building blocks of cinematic storytelling:
Framing: distance from subject, angle, diagonal lines, foreground, middleground, background, depth, light/shadow, focus/unfocus, focal length, depth of field, rule of thirds, moving frame, duration
Continuity Editing: extended cinematic space – screen movement + narrative momentum + viewer imagination – the motivated shot, screen direction, 180 degree rule, 30 degree rule, match on action, graphic match, eyeline match, POV
Montage: juxtaposition of discontinuous shots: rapid cuts, rhythm, emotional sequences, thoughts, ideas, summary of events, passage of time, voice-over sequence, associational thinking, commentary, evidence, split screen
Mise-en-scène: all that that is captured by the camera: set design, costume design, make-up, actor movements, gestures and expressions
Time, narrative and editing…
Aristotle’s Poetics, 335 BC:
- plot = “the arrangement of the incidents” into a whole
- dramatic action vs. narration / show vs. tell (mimesis)
- unity of action (cause and effect chain)
- complex plot: reversal and recognition
- tragedy arouses pity and fear and then purges them (catharsis)
The Classical Hollywood Style:
- objective camera (no looking at lens)
- cause and effect editing
- goal or desire and an obstacle to goal
- closure – plot resolved
Continuity as Narration:
His Girl Friday, 1940 – directed by Howard Hawks
Continuity determined by character quirks: gestures, glances, reactions…
Continuity Tricks
All edits are discontinuous. Editing is a trick of condensing and expanding illusions of space and time for story effects. Story effects are built from the juxtaposition of discontinuous units: Frame-Shot-Sequence-Act-Story.
Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister’s ‘Listen to Britain’
Jump Cuts – Godard, Breathless
Cinema Narration:
The Lunch Date is a 1989 American short films directed by Adam Davidson.
– selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
-won Short Film Palme d’Or in 1990 Cannes Film Festival.
-won an Academy Award in 1991 for Best Short Subject.