Film Studies: An Introduction by Ed Sikov vocab/ glossary Full glossary

180° SYSTEM

a convention of narrative filmmaking in which the director establishes an imaginary line running across the set; the director then keeps the camera on one side of this line for every shot taken so as to avoid making characters and objects appear to flip suddenly from one side of the screen to the other when the sequence is edited together and eventually projected on a screen.

ACADEMY RATIO or ACADEMY APERTURE

the standard aspect ratio established in 1932 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; it's often said to be 1.33

ALGORITHM

a set of instructions to be followed in solving problems or making calculations, particularly by a computer.

AMBIENT SOUND

the appropriate sounds of daily life that accompany the image, whether the scene is set inside (a restaurant scene may include the clatter of dishes and flatware hitting tables, distant conversations, and so on) or outside (a scene set in a farmer's field may be accompanied by the sounds of chickens cackling or the rustle of leaves).

AMPLITUDE

the loudness or softness of sound; its volume.

ANAMORPHIC LENS

a lens in the camera that squeezes a widescreen image onto a normally shaped frame of film, and/or a lens in the projector that unsqueezes the image back out to widescreen width.

ANIMATION

any process that simulates movement by filming a series of individual drawings, objects (such as clay figures or dolls), or computer images; tiny shifts in the positions and shapes of these drawings, things, or images create the sense of motion.

ANIMATION CEL

a clear sheet of plastic on which artists draw individual elements of an im- age; when aligned with one another, cels form an impression of depth; the stacks of cells are then photographed onto motion picture film, and the slight variations of position from one stack of cels to another create the impression of movement.

APPARATUS

the apparatus consists of the devices and operations required for the production of a film and its projection. These include the film stock, the camera, editing, the movie theater, the projector, the screen, and the spectator.

ASPECT RATIO

the ratio of the film image's width to its height. See Academy ratio, Cinema- Scope, Panavision, VistaVision, and widescreen.

AUTEURISM

a critical theory developed originally in France in the 1950s by critics affiliated with the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma, and later popularized in the United States by Andrew Sarris, that views the director as a film's chief creator, values a director's personal style over whatever literary merit a screenplay may have, and ranks directors ac- cording to the perceived morality of their worldviews.

AVANT-GARDE FILM

any experimental and noncommercial film; from the French, meaning advanced guard.

BIRD'S-EYE SHOT

a shot taken from an extremely high angle.

BLUESCREEN

a type of traveling matte in which a specific color is rendered invisible, unable to register on film or video; actors are then placed before a screen that has been painted uniformly in that particular color, usually blue, and their images are recorded against a blank background; later, that background is filled in with separately shot images; also known as chroma key.

BOOM

a long, broomstick-like arm onto which a microphone is attached before being held out over the heads of actors just out of camera range

CAMEO

an appearance by a recognizable star in a very small or even tiny role.

CAMERA OPERATOR

the member of the cinematographer's crew who is chiefly responsible for running the camera and setting the camera in place with the aid of a viewfinder.

focus puller

first assistant camera operator, who is in charge of keeping the image in focus during camera movements,

clapper

second assistant camera operator, who marks the slate and operates the clapboard, the device with a hinged arm that snaps shut at the beginning of each take so that the editor can match the soundtrack with the image track (the frame in which the arm hits the slate on the image track matches the clap sound on the soundtrack).

CELLULOID

the transparent plastic material, technically cellulose nitrate, that was originally used in motion picture photography; because cellulose nitrate is extraordinarily flammable and prone to rapid deterioration, its use was discontinued in favor of cellulose acetate, the term celluloid continues to be used to describe both film stock and processed film in general.

CGI, OR COMPUTER-GENERATED IMAGERY

the creation of 3-D computer graphics in cinema and television instead of real physical objects and people; the benefits of CGI include decreased cost and fewer personnel; drawbacks include the tendency of modern audiences to assume that every visual effect has been faked

CHARACTER ACTOR

a secondary performer who specializes in playing a similar, recognizable character type from film to film.

CINEMASCOPE

the anamorphic process for widescreen films introduced by 20th Century- Fox in 1953; its aspect ratio was originally 2.35

CINEMATOGRAPHER

also known as the Director of Photography or DP; the person in charge of selecting the cameras, lenses, film stocks, and overall lighting design in the making of a motion picture and overseeing the work of the camera operator if he or she is not operating the camera him- or herself.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

the photography of motion pictures.

CINERAMA

a lush but cumbersome widescreen process that used three interlocked cameras to record three separate images which, when projected across a specially curved screen, yielded a single continuous widescreen image with an aspect ratio of 2.77

CLOSE-UP

a shot that isolates an object in the image, making it appear relatively large.

COMPOSITION

the formal arrangements of shapes within the image, including people, sets, props, and landscape elements.

COMPUTER GEEK

a person who spends too much time in front of a computer screen, especially playing games or making picky corrections to Wikipedia entries; the word geek was originally used in the world of circuses and carnivals to describe a sideshow freak.

CONTINUITY EDITING

a set of editing practices that establish spatial and/or temporal continuity between shots; the various techniques that filmmakers employ to keep their narratives moving forward logically and smoothly, without jarring disruptions in space or time despite hundreds or even thousands of the discrete bits of celluloid called shots, and without making the audience aware that they are in fact watching a work of art.

CONVENTION

an artistic practice or process or device that is widely used and commonly accepted and understood within a given culture;

CRANE

a camera movement in which the camera moves up and down through space; the camera is mounted on a kind of cherry-picker, which enables it to ascend from ground level into the sky or descend from the sky to ground level.

CRAWL

a series of words that appear at the bottom of the screen and moves upward; the end credits of a film often take the form of a crawl.

CROSSCUTTING

editing that alternates two or more lines of action occurring in different places or times, thereby connecting them

CUT

the simplest form of transition from one shot to another; in filmmaking (as opposed to video), the first shot is literally cut with a blade and taped to the second shot, which has been similarly trimmed; in video, the process happens electronically.

CUTTING

the process of splicing one shot to another; synonymous with editing; see montage

DAILIES

a day's worth of processed but unedited footage freshly back from the lab; also called rusbes.

DEPTH OF FIELD

the distance between the nearest and farthest objects that are in focus at the same time.

DIACHRONIC

concerned with the way in which something, especially language (in this book, mostly film language) has developed over time. It can also refer to the temporal order of shots across an entire scene, sequence, or film.

DIEGESIS

the world of the film; all the story elements presented by the narrative, no matter whether they are actually seen or heard onscreen or not; music broadcast from an onscreen radio is diegetic, whereas the film's musical score is nondiegetic.

DIEGETIC SOUND

sounds (including most dialogue and sound effects and some music) that are sourced in the world of the film's story; see nondiegetic sound for its opposite.

DIGITAL AUDIO WORKSTATION (DAW)

a computer and accompanying software used to edit motion picture sound digitally.

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY (DP)

see cinematographer.

DIRECTOR'S CUT

the version of the film the director considers to be finished, without interference from the studio or the producers.

DISSOLVE

a transition from one shot to another in which the first shot fades out while the second shot fades in, creating a superimposition at the midway point.

DOCUMENTARY

a film about facts rather than fiction; an account of real events. Documentaries often take a particular point of view toward their subject(s), and they are always a matter of selectively presenting the facts they chronicle. They may or may not tell stories, but they are always nonfiction.

DOLBY

the noise-reduction system invented by Ray Dolby in 1965; Dolby reduces back- ground noises, cuts down on the noise created by the process of recording itself, and en- hances the clarity of dialogue, music, and sound effects.

DUTCH TILT SHOT

a shot that tilts, often drastically, off the standard horizontal and/or vertical axes; Dutch angles are commonly used to express abnormal states of mind; also called a canted angle shot.

EDITING

the process of splicing one shot to another; synonymous with cutting.

END CREDITS, OR END TITLES

the list of personnel involved in making the film, from the actors to the caterers, that appears at the end of the film, often in the form of a crawl EXTRA

EYE-LEVEL SHOT

a shot taken from the height of an average human being, so the camera appears to be looking straight at the characters and/or objects being filmed.

EYE-LINE MATCH

a type of continuity editing that relies on the direction of one or more characters' glances to maintain spatial relationships from shot to shot; for instance, a char- acter looking offscreen right in the first shot is followed in the second shot by another character looking offscreen left, the two characters appearing to look at each other even though they are in separate shots.

FABULA

the events of the narrative in chronological order, along with the personal associations brought to the narrative by each audience member; more or less synonymous with story, but in addition to the story the film tells us, it includes the individual stories we tell ourselves.

FADE-IN AND FADE-OUT

the gradual increase (fade-in) or decrease (fade-out) in the strength and clarity of the filmed image or recorded sound; fade-ins generally begin with a pure white or pure black screen in the case of the image track and silence in the case of the soundtrack, while fade-outs usually begin with a clear image or sound, which then disap- pears to white or black or diminishes to silence; fade-ins and fade-outs are often used as transitional devices between scenes.

FILM STOCK

raw, unexposed footage.

FINAL CUT

the last version of a film as it is being produced-the one that is released to the public; see rough cut and director's cut.

FLASHBACK

a shot, sequence, or scene that takes place in the past, before the present-day time frame established by the film.

FLASHFORWARD

a shot, sequence, or scene that takes place in the future, after the present-day time frame established by the film.

FOLEY ARTIST

a member of the sound team who specializes in duplicating sound effects that, for whatever reason, don't sound accurate when recorded directly at the time of shooting.

FORM

in art, the shape and structure of the artwork; in film, all the specific techniques used by filmmakers to create expressive meaning.

FRAME

(a) the individual rectangular photographs on a strip of motion picture film which, when run through a projector, yield the impression of movement owing to slight variations in the position of the objects being photographed; (b) the four borders of the projected image

FULL SHOT

a shot that includes the entire human body from head to toe, with little space above the head and below the feet.

GENRE

a category of film, such as the western, the horror film, the costume drama, the melodrama, and so on, with recognizable conventions and character types.

GLANCE-OBJECT MATCH

an eye-line match that occurs between a human being and the object he or she is supposed to be looking at; for example

GRAPHIC MATCHING

a type of continuity editing that relies on the similarity of compositional shapes from one shot to the next to bridge the cut smoothly; for instance, a shot of a doorway is followed by a shot of another doorway, the two shots being matched by the similar positions the two doorways occupy onscreen.

GREENLIGHT

the permission given by whoever is financing a film to proceed with the production.

HAND-HELD SHOT

a shot taken from a camera that is small and lightweight enough to be carried by the camera operator, unlike cameras that are mounted on devices such as tripods or dollies or cranes, hand-held cameras record the bodily movements of the camera operators, lending a somewhat jerky quality to hand-held shots.

HIGH-ANGLE SHOT

a shot taken from a camera that is positioned much higher than the subject being filmed, so that the effect is that of looking down on the subject.

IMAGE COMPOSITING

the combining of visual elements from separate sources into a single image, creating the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene.

IMAGE TRACK

that portion of the cinematic medium that contains the picture, as opposed to the soundtrack.

INDEPENDENT FILM

not a film that feels edgy or especially contemporary, but a feature film or short film that is produced outside the major film studio system, in addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment companies. Independence in cinema is about financing, not content.

IRIS-IN AND IRIS-OUT

transitional devices between shots and/or scenes in which the image appears first as a small circle in the center of the screen (iris-in) and expands outward until it fills the screen, or the reverse (iris-out).

J-HORROR FILM

a gruesome Japanese horror subgenre with a perverse psychological bent.

JITTER

the almost imperceptible jerks a film makes when it is run through a projector.

LETTERBOXING

preserving the original widescreen aspect ratio when transferring the film onto video.

LEXICONNING

a process by which films are shortened for broadcasting on television; the standard 24 frames per second speed is increased by a matter of hundredths of a frame per second, the cumulative effect of which may shorten the film by as much as 6 or 7 percent of its total running time.

LINEAR EDITING

an editing process of selecting and arranging images and sounds into a sequence by scrolling through the original source material, such as a roll of film or tape, on which those images and sounds were initially recorded.

LOCATION

a real place used by filmmakers as the setting of a given scene, as opposed to a set that is specifically designed and constructed for a film; outdoor scenes in westerns are usually shot on location

LONG SHOT

a shot in which the camera appears to be fairly far away from the subject being filmed, though special lenses can create the impression of great distance where much less distance exists.

LONG TAKE

a single shot of an unusually long duration

LOW-ANGLE SHOT

a shot taken from a camera that is positioned much lower than the subject being filmed, so that the effect is that of looking up at the subject.

MASKING

covering the top and/or bottom of the image with an aperture plate to create a widescreen effect.

MASTER SHOT

a shot taken from a long distance that includes as much of the set or location as possible and all the characters in the scene

MATCHING

any of three ways of diminishing the jarring effect of splicing one shot to an- other; see matching on action, eye-line matching, and graphic matching.

MATCHING ON ACTION

an editing technique that uses an action begun in the first shot to bridge the cut to the second shot; for example

MATTE

a type of special effect in which one area of the image is filmed, either by shooting a real background directly or by painting one and shooting the painting, while the remaining area is left blank by blocking a corresponding area of the lens; the blank area is then filled by filming, with the opposite area being blocked, after which the two areas are combined in processing.

MEDIUM SHOT

a shot taken from a medium distance from a person or object; with a person, a medium shot is from the waist up.

METHOD, THE

an acting technique derived from the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavsky and popularized by Lee Strasberg and his New York drama school, the Actors Studio, through which performers explore their own feelings and memories in an attempt to create more naturalistic characters onstage and onscreen.

MISE-EN-SCENE (also MISE-EN-SCÈNE)

all of the elements placed in front of the camera to be photographed

MIXING

combining dialogue, sound effects, and music (both diegetic and nondiegetic) onto a single soundtrack; adjusting and balancing volume, tone, and direction of sound.

MOBILE FRAMING

the general term that describes the camera's ability to move; whereas still photography is, in a word, still, cinema is about motion-the objects and characters in the image move, and so may the camera itself; see crane, band-held shot, moving shot, pan, Steadicam, and tilt.

MONTAGE French definition

any type of editing;

MONTAGE American definition

a rapidly cut, rather kaleidoscopic series of images that often condenses (but sometimes expands) time and space, such as a travel montage showing a character's progression across the United States in a matter of 20 seconds;

MONTAGE Soviet definition

, a dynamic, expressly political type of film editing that uses the dialectics, or conflicts, of a given situation (a thesis and its antithesis) to produce a revolutionary synthesis in the mind of the spectator

MORPHING

a CGI technique in which images of two or more distinct objects, animals, or humans are blended together to form a new, interpolated result.

MOTIVATED CAMERA MOVEMENT

motivated camera movements are those that are prompted by the characters and events in the film

UNMOTIVATED CAMERA MOVEMENT

are those that pertain to the filmmakers' commentary on characters and events. Unmotivated camera movements are something of a misnomer; they, too, are motivated-but by the director, not the characters or events in the film