To Do This Week
Break Space (5%) : Shoot and edit a 30-60 second video that uses montage or discontinuity in editing to evoke an idea, emotion, dream or thought process.
Read: Time Frames, by Scott McCloud
Blog Prompt: 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.
Class
View Break Space videos…
Overview:
Montage:
- Metric – editing follows a specific number of frames, duration of shot
- Rhythmic – editing based on movement in the frame, continuity editing is rhythmic
- Tonal – editing follows visual correspondences/associations for emotional effect, graphic match
- Overtonal – combines metric, rhythmic and tonal (a chase scene, any intense action/motion)
- Intellectual – editing to create abstract, non-representational ideas
Scott McCloud: Time Frames
- time as expressive – panels, frames and shots, fragments
- the frame/shot as a container of time, subjective qualities of time
- stasis/movement within the frame
- time duration, the long take
- cinema is always now, even the past is present
- timelessness
- repetition, looped time
- simultaneous events, parallel action
Parallel Action/Cross-cutting
Perception of slow down time – multiple POV shots (continuity) – – screen time < story time
Converging lines, continuity pacing – screen time < story time
expanded time thru cross-cutting – screen time > story time
Alternating Expanded and Contracted time
160 Characters from Victoria Mapplebeck
Long Take – screen time = story time
The Cranes Are Flying – by Mikhail Kalatozov
Complex Narrative Time – narrator driven, voice over, multiple levels of story time
Associational Montage – extending space and time
In-Class Exercise:
Create a montage comparing two very different students arriving to class, turning on the computer, getting ready, etc. One is calm and organized, attentive and the other is frantic, disorganized and distracted.
Use the editing techniques of time manipulation to show the subjective experiences of the two different students.
- expanded time, slow heightened moment
- fast and frantic time, increasing intensity
- flashback: cutting to a past event
- flashforward: a future event, imagined, a plan
- timeless time
- time loop, repetition