Week 3 — Time Frames

To Do This Week

Read:

Time Frames by Scott McCloud

Prepare for Discussion sessions:

The art of cinema involves the manipulation of the viewer’s experience of time. The duration of a shot is a form of temporal framing. In Time Frames, McCloud describes how comics construct time through panels.

Consider the framed panel in a comic as a cinema shot. Wider or longer panels are like long takes, while smaller panels function like short-duration shots.

The key difference is that comics offer a spatial time-map— multiple moments visible at once—while cinema unfolds sequentially as an ever-present “now.”

What in McCloud’s visual essay inspires you to think differently about time in digital cinema, or analyze a film scene that creatively manipulates time.

Class

View:

Break Space videos

Overview: Montage

• Metric: Editing based on fixed shot duration or frame count.
• Rhythmic: Editing guided by movement within the frame.
• Tonal: Editing driven by emotional or visual association.
• Overtonal: Combination of metric, rhythmic, and tonal.
• Intellectual: Editing to generate abstract or conceptual meaning.

Scott McCloud: Time Frames

• Time as expressive: frames, panels, shots, fragments.
• The frame/shot as a container of subjective time.
• Stasis versus movement within the frame.
• Duration and the long take.
• Cinema as an unfolding present.
• Timelessness and repetition.
• Looped and parallel time.

Parallel Action / Cross-Cutting

• Converging lines and continuity pacing.
• Condensed time

Expanded time through cross-cutting: screen time > story time.

Alternating expanded and condensed time

160 Characters by Victoria Mapplebeck

Long Take

Screen time = story time

The Cranes Are Flying by Mikhail Kalatozov

Complex Narrative Time

Associational Montage

Timelessness

Loops

Expressive Repetition

The Faithful Heart by Jean Epstein (1923)

Exact Repetition

Short-term memory ≈ 20 seconds

Semi-Static (Infinite Loop)

In-Class Loop Activity

1. Continuity loop
2. Montage loop
3. Infinite loop
4. Narrative loop (Beginning → Middle → End)

Assignment: Loops (5%)

No more than 10 seconds per loop.

• Create three loops exploring different temporal experiences.
• One continuity-based loop.
• One montage-based loop.
• One perfect or infinite loop.

Repeat each loop 3–5 times before exporting. Vary shot duration to stretch or compress time.

Final Project (20%)

Create a project exploring at least two techniques of digital cinema: continuity, montage, temporal manipulation, loops, compositing, networked or database video.

• Formats: fiction, non-fiction, abstract, experimental.
• Group projects allowed.
• Each student must submit an artist statement.