To Do For This Week
Assignment: One Day in 30 seconds (5%):
Using your smartphone in HORIZONTAL mode, record your experience of one day in short 2 to 6-second shots.
- Try to capture various types of images and sounds, in various shots positions (close-up, medium, long-shot) and in various locations (in your home, with friends, commute, job, errands, campus)
- Take lots of shots throughout the day and be willing to put only 30% these into the final video.
- See if you can make visual, auditory or even metaphorical connections from shot to shot. In other words, consider what your are framing in each shot. A coffee cup on a table? A shot of a sunset or sunrise? Moving quickly down a busy and crowded hall? A close-up of the screen showing a video game?
- With Premiere, edit shots into a 30 to 60-second video. Export with Format setting of .H264 and a preset of Youtube or Vimeo at 720p. Upload to YouTube or Vimeo and post to the blog.
This is an assignment to use a variety of framed shots (close-up, medium and long) to create a montage of one day in your life – morning to night – this week. You may use text if you like, but no music or voice over. Use only the sound you capture in the shot. Also, this is to be “first person” shooting, what you see around you, where you are. So no selfies, please. You can show parts of yourself, just no direct shots you of you staring at the camera.
* Please shoot all videos in this class in landscape or horizontal mode (like Youtube), NOT portrait/vertical mode (like Tik Tok)
** In Adobe Premiere, export your videos to .H264 format with a preset at 720p for YouTube or Vimeo. If you don’t know what that means, I will go over this in class and you can upload then. But do export your 30 sec video in a format that you can bring to class!
Blog Prompt:
Although Run Lola Run has a discontinuous style – made of many types of cinematic images, including color, black and white, animation, video and still shots – it is held together as a whole by following rules of continuity to keep the viewer oriented in the fragmented spaces and times.
How does the movie retain narrative momentum despite all the time shifts? What narrative forces/desires drives the edits of shot to shot? In what ways is time “stretched” or “compressed” and how is the effect achieved? These questions are only “prompts” for your own thoughts about the narrative, cinematography and editing styles of the Run Lola Run. Take screen grabs to support your thoughts.
Notes
Assignment points change…
Adobe Premiere
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html
Phones and Camera shooting: set for HD 720p and always shoot horizontal or landscape mode.
Adobe Tutorials
edit by dragging clip into timeline
Premiere export in codec .H.264, format .mp4
Presets for Vimeo and Youtube
Upload to Vimeo
compression guidelines
Upload to YouTube
compression guidelines
creative playbook
Building blocks of cinematic storytelling:
Framing: distance from subject, angle, diagonal lines, foreground, middle-ground, 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, eye-line match, POV
Montage: juxtaposition of discontinuous shots: rapid cuts, rhythm, temporal shifts, subjectivity, emotional sequences, thoughts, ideas, dreams, summary of events, passage of time, voice-over sequence, associational thinking, commentary, evidence, split screen
Mise-en-scène/Production design: all that that is captured by the camera: set design, costume design, make-up, actor types and their movements, gestures and expressions
The Classical Hollywood Style:
Silent 1895-1915 > Studio System 1915-1960s
- Individual characters are causal agents. Characters make things happen in story. Psychologically rooted
- Desire of main individual (protagonist) sets plot rolling > goal.
- Opposition to the goal > conflict
- Chain of cause and effect. We don’t see what is outside the chain of cause and effect. Plot will jump in time to show only the important links in chain. The deadline as defined time marker that motivates action.
- Objectivity. Omniscient pov. Unrestricted access to all events whether protagonist sees them or not.
- Closure. No loose ends.
Run, Lola, Run Discussion Points:
- time and narrative – chains of cause and effect, continuity system reinforces this causal chain
- hypertext aesthetics > bifurcations in narrative linearity, loops, digressions
- assemblage of different media types: bw and color, video, film and animation
- spatial techniques to orient viewer in complex temporality of story, how?
- classical continuity + intensified continuity (Bordwell):
intensified continuity: reduced shot duration (faster cutting), combining styles in the same film, tighter close-ups, free ranging camera movement - stretching and compressing time
- screen time vs story time
Style: Video Game Aesthetics
- 360-degree spin shot
- short still frame montages of future
- character goals and countdown: 20 min x 3
- respawning > game strategy
- flashbacks & flashforwards
- temporal loops
- multi-linearity, implied branching and nesting of story elements = database structure
- simultaneity – split screen, multiple frames, frame-in-frame
- complex temporality- skipping around, stopping, compressing/decompressing (or extending) time
Narrative: Cyclical & Multilinear
- RLR – clear cause and effect chains, goals, continuity editing helps make the complex plot intelligible,
- Still, there is complex temporality that makes it difficult to map.
- Screen time vs story time: each episode takes 20 minutes in screen time, but story time varies in subjective quality (slowing down and speeding up)
- Connections between cycle/episodes: Lola uses her knowledge of how to unlock a gun – Manni taught her in the first episode – this enables her to rob the bank in the second.
Time, narrative and editing…
Structure of looped time:
Backstory Scene – Black and White, Narration
Roulette – tension
Watch:
30-second-day videos…spatial and temporal discontinuity (montage)- read as continuous.
Continuity
“Rules” Continuity Editing (and Shooting):
- Establishing shot
- 180 degree rule
- 30 degree rule
- Cut in / Match on Action
- Motivated Pov shot
- Eyeline match/ Shot Reverse Shot
- Empty frame
- Graphic Match
- Parallel action/ Crosscutting
Movement through spaces driven by the narrative.
Making Space > Storytelling
Continuity Editing: connecting shot to shot so that there is momentum in the narrative telling and a seamless narration of causally connected events. All edits are discontinuous. Story and character drive the editing and the sense of continuity.
Her Trust – D.W. Griffith (1912)
“A shot of a whole battlefield would be incomprehensible because looking at real things, the human vision fastens itself upon a quick succession of small comprehensible incidents like a mosaic out of such detail- the director counterfeits the operation of the eye with his lens and varies the length of shots to avoid the hypnotic affect.” – Griffith
Charles Dickens (from A Tale of Two Cities):
The obscurity was so difficult to penetrate that Mr. Lorry, picking his way over the well-worn Turkish carpet, supposed Miss Manette to be, for the moment, in some adjacent room, until, having got past the two tall candles, he saw standing to receive him by the table between them and the fire, a young lady of not more than seventeen, in a riding-cloak, and still holding her straw travelling-hat by its ribbon in her hand. As his eyes rested on a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes that met his own with an inquiring look, and a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth it was), of lifting and knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions― as his eyes rested on these things, a sudden vivid likeness passed before him, of a child whom he had held in his arms on the passage across that very Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted heavily and the sea ran high.
Continuity and tension /parallel action or crosscutting
POV Shots – watching character watching/thinking
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.
@madmatthies ✨Groovy baby✨ transitions tiktoktransitions madmatthiestransitions smoothtransitions fypage
Assignment: Due Next Class
Make Space (5%) :
Shoot and edit a 30-60 second video that uses continuity rules to connect shots taking place in in one continuous space. For example, someone making toast in the kitchen, etc. Or you can use uses continuity rules to connect discontinuous spaces into an imaginary whole. For example, a character leaves a bedroom and walks into a parking lot, etc.