Friday 29 August 2014
Glowing Boards And Drone-Cameras Ensure This Is Not Your Average Skate Video
The film follows a skater as he travels along doing tricks and stunts, shot with a camera suspended on a RC helicopter so we get a drone’s eye view as the skater journeys on through the darkness, his board illuminating the ground below him as he flies down stairs and glides around the city.
The angle it’s shot from and the illuminated board gives the whole thing an ethereal, almost CG quality, making it somewhat of a departure from your average skate video. You can check out the BTS below.
Source: newcinema.net/site/news
Thursday 28 August 2014
The Kuloshev Effect: Editing
The Kuleshov Effect is a well-documented concept in film-making, discovered by Soviet film editor Lev Kuleshov in the 1920s. Kuleshov put a film together, showing the expression of an actor, edited together with a plate of soup, a dead woman, and a woman on a recliner. Audiences praised the subtle acting, showing an almost imperceptible expression of hunger, grief, or lust in turn. The reality, of course, is that the same clip of the actor's face was re-used, and the effect is created entirely by its superimposition with other images.
More generally, the Kuleshov Effect is the basis of Soviet montage cinema, and is used in many many films since. The idea is that, by editing different things together, it is possible to create meanings that didn't exist in either of the images put together - constructing 'sentences' and 'texts' out of film.
Wednesday 27 August 2014
Performance, editing and framing in classic filmmaking
The scene below, from Budd Boetticher’s Western 'Seven Men From Now' (1956) exemplifies the subtlety of performance, editing and framing in classic filmmaking. Watch the scene and consider the key points listed to deepen your understanding of cinema as a creative means of expression and modern art form.
Check how the actors are directed and how they perform. There is no attempt to ‘express’ feelings or emotions. This is classical acting where the burden of performance is transferred from physical behaviour of individuals to a pregnant, anxious network of glances. These skewed glances, directed sideways or off-screen, simultaneously perform the task of evoking necessary emotions as well as creating meaning through their association with whom they are directed at.
Check how the actors are positioned and framed. Each of the setups – the close-ups and the two shots – finds its proper place and generates its own tension. The two shots, even though partly the result of a necessity, consist of either Gail Russell and Randalph Scott sitting besides each other or Lee Marvin and Walter Reed, the former perched just behind and above the latter, and forebodes relationships that would become significant from here on.
Check how the whole conversation is edited. Each shot both carries the burden of the previous and prefigures what is to follow. Each one is cut just as a glance is cast and carried to a finish: long enough to register whom it is addressed to and what it means and short enough to avoid ramming down the idea or emotion down our throats. The audience’s gaze, likewise, is transferred from one actor to another in the same fluid movement, with precise vanishing points, as the chain of glances.
Edited from The Seventh Art website
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