WEEK 4: Time Frames (February 12)

To Do This Week

Read: Time Frames, by Scott McCloud 

Blog: The art of cinema involves the manipulation of the viewer’s experience of time. The duration of a shot is like a temporal framing.  In “Time Frames”, McCloud describes the various comics techniques for creating different temporalities.  Reading McCloud, consider the framed panel in a comic as a cinema shot.  Wider or longer panels are like shots with longer durations (“long takes”).  Smaller panels are like shots of shorter durations. The main difference between comics and film is that with a page of arranged panels, the reader has a spatial “time map”  in the simultaneous display of frames. In cinema, shots are mostly sequential and present an unfolding now.  Discuss some aspect of McCloud’s visual essay that makes you think of the possibilities of time manipulation in digital cinema or of a certain movie scene that plays with time.


Video Lectures


Friday Class (Zoom)

  • continuity projects…
  • Run Lola Run (web movies)- loops, shuffled time, random access, generative, fractal
  • temporal montage and narrative rhythm – Forever
  • short loops > repetition, cyclic, narrative
  • making loop (Premiere)
  • HTML5 loop

Notes

Time, narrative and editing…

Run Lola Run

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parallel Action:

From Misery (1990):

 

 

Temporal Montage

 

screen time <= story time

 

Illusion of Continuous time: screen time <= story time

 

Narrative Rhythm

Forever with Maya Rudolph sequence – narrative rhythm – slow down and speeding up.

 

Compressed time:  screen time < story time

 

Long takes:  screen time = story time

The Cranes Are Flying – by Mikhail Kalatozov

 

Expanded time: screen time > story time

 

Alternating Expanded and Contracted time

160 Characters from Victoria Mapplebeck 

 

Post-continuity or “Chaos” Cinema


LOOPS

Exact Repetition

short-term memory =  under 20 seconds

beginning > middle > end

semi-static (infinite loop)

complex loops – variable duration of each shot

fookedonhonix

fookedonhonix

@madmatthies

Took a couple days to relax – but I’m back with some new moves 😍 #transitions #transitioner #epictransitions #crazytransitions #foryou #transition

♬ Hai phút hơn – marlene

loops in new media – movement and interactivity

FilmText, by Mark Amerika

Zoe Beloff

 

Simultaneous Loops

spatial montage = “coexisting temporalities” (Lev Manovich)

Flora petrinsularis by Jean-Louis Boissier 1993

Interactive Cinema, by Uda Atsuko http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~makura/index_old.html

 

Sequential Loops

Eric Loyer calls “temporal polyrhythms”

The temporal map of the comic’s inter-panel progression with the various nested intra-panel movements.

 

“Our Toyota Was Fantastic” -Gilles Roussel a.k.a. Boulet

Interactive Cinema, by Uda Atsuko http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~makura/index_old.html

 

Nested Loops

an asynchronous assemblage of nested loops offers a picture of fractal time;

simultaneous temporalities of different scales, rhythms and durations.

 

Cinemagraphs (portion of image is in movement)

 

ASSIGNMENT: Due Next Class 

Loops (5%):
no more than 10 seconds per loop
Shoot and edit 3 video loops (6-10 second mini-narratives) that depict,  emphasize or evoke different subjective experiences of time: cyclic, slow, timeless, frantic, rhythmic. In one loop try to incorporate continuity editing – POV shot, match on action, etc – to maintain unity. In another, try out a more discontinuous/montage style by contrasting edited shots – dark/light, fast/slow, close-up/long-shot. In the third, attempt a perfect/infinite loop.  Create a variety of shot durations for emphasis. A 4-second shot sandwiched between 2-second shots, will seem to stretch time.

The best way to show the loop is to repeat (times 3-5) the edited loop in the video track before uploading. 

Or host the short videos in your DTC directory and add it using the wordpress shortcode for video. Do NOT set to autoplay.

 

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