Class 2: Film Style

The main additional resource for today are the notes handed out in the previous class, which go some way towards explaining style, some of the nuances of thinking about it, and how you can be making use of it already. Check your email for that dropbox link containing some of the clips we'll be focusing on this week.

A good practice exercise would be to seek out a film you're particularly taken with and study it for style cues. Look at the sorts of frames it uses, settings, lighting, camera movement, sound effects, editing style, performance and music.

Another approach: look at any of the cinema classics - Vertigo, Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, for example - and study the style choices within these films. (Note: the style in these films is not constant, but often changes with the story.)

Some thoughts on those clips handed out today, and others we looked at in class. (I'll put my thoughts here after the classes for the week have passed.)

Lawrence of Arabia  - Tripod shots of varying size, obeying rule of thirds and 180 degree rule. Seamless continuity editing. Clear screen direction (Lawrence looking right, all of the Orient looking back to frame left). Music and sound atmospheres echo the shape of the drama. We never think about the view back the other way. Performances give a strong sense of what characters want and inner concerns also. Believable settings with some sleights of hand (day for night). CLASSICAL.

A Zed and 2 Noughts - Patterns galore, with recurring symbols, image motifs and ideas. Symmetric, closed frames. Recurring figures over many frames (the zebra texture, the missing leg) and overt visual arcs (the poster frame in the background of the crash site). Foregrounded visual transitions. Camera movements independent and choreographed. Expressive colour scheme and lighting. Characters feel like caricatures, mannered in their preoccupations, emotions and dialogue. (This could be a satire, but the performances are even a bit further than that.) The titles sequence typifies montage editing. Music has a strikingly independent presence, both the agitated saxophone of the opening titles and the grim adagio that follows the death of the swan. The music is not particularly cued to character actions, unlike Lawrence above. ('Something else on its mind.') We laugh at death. Highly FORMALIST.

Husbands and Wives - Restricted POV, long takes, jump cuts, whip pans between positions, at times clumsy camera repositioning as actors move 360 and action heads into unanticipated territory. Lived-in locations, believable costumes, strong sense of natural light (clear practical sources, soft depth of field that results), grainy resolution. Characters conscious of camera. Emphasis on real sound. All of this suggests REALISM.
Note also the sense of design at work here, subtle enough that we're not even aware of it: despite the odd stumble, the camera achieves clear framings - two shots, singles, behind the head shots - that suit each story moment. Consider that the couple breaking up mostly are observed in well-lit two shot positions while the surprised couple are rarely connected without a whip-pan. That says something. Also the fact that all characters, including the one that moves to another room, are on-mike, is a concession to the storytelling.

Naqoyqatsi - Montage editing, where edits create connections between unrelated images, is the driving force here. The image is largely graphics and 'filtered' footage, often with colours inverted and natural image qualities severely bent. The images ride the music more than the other way around. The Qatsi trilogy (which began with the groundbreaking Koyaanisqatsi) largely are FORMALIST wordless documentaries, and Naqoyqatsi is the most formalist of them.

Mon Oncle - Formalist elements: designed settings (whether it's the rustic village or the suburban architectural holocaust of that house), caricature performances, (people compared to dogs, and the dogs have more personality), imagery syncing to music (the car indicator), footsteps that sound very unrealistic, 'writing on the wall' (credits written on the walls of the story world). Classical elements: Ubiquitous camera mostly cutting around seamlessly from one moment to the next, tripod use. FORMALIST-CLASSICAL.

If there's 5 types overall, the missing one from this set was Realist-Classical. Take a look at any of the following: Captain Phillips, Z, Battle of Algiers. Any will do, and all combine those two traditions in similar ways.

Films played over the classes over the last two days: (note: not all clips plays on both days)
Realism: that youtube video of the woman diving, Husbands and Wives, Flight of the Red Balloon, Cloverfield, Tree of Life, My Blueberry Nights, Meek's Cutoff (realist western)
Classical: Inception, Lawrence of Arabia, Mad Men, North by Northwest
Formalism: 'Clarity', 'What Does the Fox Say?', Tears of the Black Tiger, Standard Operating Procedure, The Great Beauty, Moonrise Kingdom, A Zed and Two Noughts, The Great Gatsby 
Style Shifts:  I Am Love, The Grey, Killing Them Softly.

Another reading on the subject, with other examples: Film History

Follow up: On mise-en-scene and frame design last week, in the Tuesday class Ethan mentioned a recent video on the way the frames of Refn's Drive employed 'the Quadrant system'. Here's that video. The main idea here is that dynamic framing takes the eye on an interesting journey around the whole frame, using all of the space in an interesting way. It's not the only way to do it, but if it helps you achieve the effect yourself, by all means use it.

Style and Substance

Formalism.

Classicism.

Realism.

And, if you're in the mood, the difference between surprise and suspense.

Class 1: Mise-en-scene

It was a pleasure to meet you all today. A few links to follow up on things we saw in class 1.

Things to remember:
1. Form a group of 2 with a fellow classmate to tackle Tasks 1 and 2. (The question arose - should your individual storyboards be based on the same story? Yes.)
2. Take a look at the Film Style clips and the reading handed out for our week 2 class. (See your email for the dropbox link to that clip).
3. Look at the reading from Katz on Storyboards, and the chapter from on mise-en-scene.

The documentary Touch the Sound (our first example) is actually entirely viewable on youtube. (That can't be great for the film's acoustics, but it's a start.)

If you want to see more of Lumiere and Company (which contains the Lumiere exercises of 40 directors, including David Lynch, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke), large sections of it are viewable on youtube. (Type 'lumiere and company' into google video.)

The elements of imagery we explored today: line, shape, colour, tone, depth, texture, space. You could add 'movement' to that list as the main difference between still frames and live action.

We talked about a few qualities images could have:
* Balance / Lack of Balance (this is where symmetry, the rule of thirds, the golden ratio all come in - see links below)
* Open / Closed frames (see link below) - Spike Lee's film was an open frame, the Lumiere frame was a bit more closed
* Finally we talked about a couple of ideas about how to use images over a story. One was an image motif - a repeated frame whose features are echoed in some way throughout the film. (Remember the image from The Conformist.) The second was a visual arc - where some visual quality (e.g. a horizon, a costume, a colour) changes over the story as a way of expressing what's happening. (Remember the arcs in Her, or in Manhunter.)

Some readings on mise-en-scene: an accessible article, and a denser chapter from a book.

On open and closed forms, and how they apply in film. (No pictures here, but still good points.)

On the Gestalt principles: this and this will give you a good start. (Both come at it from more of a flat art / graphic design perspective, but the ideas are clear.)

On the Golden Ratio and composition: this and this.

Lastly - all those stills we saw in class. What films were these? A lot of films were in there, including Manhunter, Persona, Mauvais Sange (Bad Blood), Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom, The Conformist, Moving, The Mirror, Under the Skin, Frozen, Her, Broken Embraces, In the Mood for Love, Rear Window, North by Northwest, The Red Balloon, A Zed and 2 Noughts and, for Monday's class, Infernal Affairs.

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to Story through Sound and Image. This blog will serve to reprise the odd key point from class, and also to provide links for further investigation.

Some key links:

David Bordwell's Observations on Film Art - Of all film's academics, Bordwell strikes closest to the tools we work with as filmmakers. His textbook is a worthy acquisition also, and you'll find sections of it for free on his website.

Tony Zhou's Vimeo Page - Tony Zhou has an editor's eye and a filmmakers' sense of form. If you're not a reader, you'll find his short videos on key aspects of film art a good path into the subject.

Mark Cousins did a series for Channel 4 based on his book The Story of Film: An Odyssey. If you don't know much about the history of cinema, you'll be amazed at what you've been missing. A humbling vision of what has been done with the art form.

Gustavo Mercado's book The Filmmaker's Eye provides a strong visual demonstration of the key types of shots that recur throughout films. The publisher, Focal Press, maintains a blog that features occasional posts.

And if I had only one book on screen studies to keep me company, I'd probably take one of Cherry Potter's books. Particularly Image, Sound and Story.

And one last film link, which isn't so much about Story through Sound and Image. Hollywood screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin have a podcast called Scriptnotes, and it's a valuable compass for aspiring screenwriters.

Lastly, my own, occasionally-tended blog, which largely seems to be comments on films.

Keep in mind that online film resources to arm yourself for your work are close to limitless and largely free.