WEEK 4: Time Frames (January 30)

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 Takescreen 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

 

 

 

 

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