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.
The very first thing that come to mind based off of this is in discontinuity. One where an individual is speaking to the outside as time passes on by hours, days, or even seasons all the while cutting back to the speaker show no time really passed for him. Does this imply him to be ageless, immortal, or was the time lapse even real or just in his head.
Displaying a pause by having a single panel that was lengthened out is such an obvious thing for comics that I can’t believe I never noticed it before. Adapting it for film could help imply longer time has passed by having a longer shot or just imply that the parties were given a moment to think.
In a medium that is more restrictive in how it can display motion, it has to get creative, and these creative ideas don’t just work for comics, but can be extrapolated to other mediums as well. I probably would have used a long shot for the reasons I described above just because maybe “it felt right for the scene” but because of the ability to understand why it works in a different medium I understand the principal in this one better. Because I know why it works, I can use the tool better.