Film language

  • millennium mambo intro

  • → start but feels like the end of long story

  • About course: 75% attendance, goal is to refine ideas and conceptualize. Participation is also graded.

  • Moodle: new stuff to read every week

  • Shot size, angle, motion

  • Film analysis

  • → fancy dance

  • No. of changes? From foraging to stealing from an illegal fisher

  • Redemption

  • Characters are portrayed to be close since they are shown close each other in the shots even it one if in the distance

9.9.

—> Contents found in Moodle, here just notes in general

  • Levels of narration

    → Book on topic: Branigan E. Point of view in cinema

  • Subjectivity on narration: process of knowing a story - telling and perceiving it

  • Subject perceives object

  • “Thousand and one” shots from a scene, subjective or not, angles, camera heights etc. what they indicate

  • Identification - seeing the world through a singular mind

    → identification deals with our emotional response, involvement, appreciation, empathy, catharsis, or feeling toward the film

  • Analyzing Depeche Mode’s “Walking in my shoes”

    → forced subjective through shots

  • Character and narrative

    - Exists to serve and mask unconscious forces as they are played out in a drama which implicates the viewer. Thus, a character may at one moment be a narrator and at another a narratee (Branigan)

    - Is information aligned with the character or not

    - Whose perspective?

  • Second example: Son of Saul

    - Extreme subjective, only existing via character

    - Camera movement driven entirely by character, no outside information

    - After title card, he begins to break the previously established rules; we see more, he interacts more with the outside, we see further, we have cuts between

  • Third example: Evil does not exist by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

    - Beginning of the film, long shot POV of the child looking up, tree branches.

    - harsh cut to objective shot, then very objective shots of the man.

    - forest's POV?

    - interesting point: as we measure shot sizes according to the human body, seeing just a forest makes us imagine it’s empty. even if it is full of life

    - Turns out it’s nature POV, so close enough :D

  • Shot List Excercise

    - Scene from Goonies

    - choose a perspective from which to tell story from

23.9.

Visual storytelling book in the slides of today (click the arrow)

Principle of contrast and affinity

Contrast = greater visual intensity

Affinity = less visual intensity

Clip from ”a touch of sin”

  • start was more contrast and intense, gradually moved towards more affinity

Basic Space in film:

Deep, Flat, Limited, Ambiguous

Secondary Space:

Aspect Ratio, Surface Divisions (e.g. Two channels, different things side by side), Open (e.g. Desert), Closed

  • Depth Cue - Light, dark, things that help you understand your viewpoint in relation to the space shown

  • Maybe the background is blurry and foreground not, colour of sky could differ etc.

Clip: Viceroys House

  • Creating a sense of grandeur, of size

  • Harmonious colours, people cleaning in clean rows, but in smaller areas chaos

  • Start full of very wide shots, monuments and buildings in relation to humans

  • Through cleaning we see the static ways things must be done in the empire

Clip: Neptune frost 2021

  • Very dark, ambiguous, seemed like it was closed

  • Everything was only related to the characters, human beings

  • Once we see the moon and sky, it felt like the space opened in a way

Line and Shape

  • Visible due to tonal contrast, it stands out from its background

  • Revealed or hidden depending on its tonal relationship with the background

  • Many objects have an invisible line or axis that runs through them, which can be perceived as a line

  • Edge, Contour, Closure, Intersection of planes

  • Shapes are created by lines and lines require tonal contrast to be visually useful

  • The same is true for shape

Tone

  1. Use art direction

  2. Use lighting

  3. Define the Subject

  4. Hide or Reveal Objects

Colour:

  • Additive RGB

  • Substrative CYM

  • Hue, Brightness, Saturation

Hue: Position in the colour wheel. Only eight hues.

Brightness: Brightness applied to Hue (it goes to white)

Saturation: The amount of colour in correlation to its complementary colour (it goes to grey)

Clip: I saw the TV glow

Movement:

  • Actual movement

  • Induced movement

  • Apparent movement

  • Relative movement

Objective movement / Camera movement / Point of Attention movement

Rhythm in:

  • Stationary objects

  • Moving objects

  • Editing

Visual structure vs Story structure

  • Graphic of intensity

  • Plan of how to distribute them to make it as interesting as possible in a way that makes sense storywise as well

Clip: The Iron Claw (look for the film online)

  • from black and white to heavy saturation of tan skin