“I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging” | Hacker News Reader

“I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging”

extension765.com

100 pointstmflannery18 comments

for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are

This is a massive problem, both with less experienced directors and even some famous ones. It's important to establish the geography of a scene because if you don't the audience will be constantly distracted during action sequences - Michael Bay's Transformers films are particularly egregious offenders in this regard, despite having massive budgets an thus access to the best skills that money can buy. In the 3 I've seen so far, I end up getting completely lost during the obligatory climactic battle between the good and bad robots after about 3-4 minutesand the only way to get through it is to sit back in numb passivity (which I suspect may be intentional givent he semi-propagandistic nature of these films, but that's another story).

It doesn't help that the geography of many scenes is wholly imaginary, as many scenes are not shot in a contiguous physical location but may involve trick positioning within the same location, two wholly different locations, or apparently contiguous events that are shot at completely different times. Furthermore, there's a rule of thumb called 'the 180 rule' which holds that there's an imaginary line of interest between the primary character in a scene and the object of his/her scrutiny, and that editing continuity demands you pick one side of that line and keep the cameras within that 180-degree side of an imaginary circle - otherwise the audience (and indeed the editors) get confused about who is looking at what and which way they are positioning themselves within the scene. One can break this rule like any other but it needs to be done deliberately and in a way that signals a shift of focus to the audience.

Keeping track of all this during the often-chaotic environment of production is a lot harder than you might imagine. Almost all films, even vary large-budget ones, have at least one shot where the image has to be flipped from left to right to correct a camera positioning error - it's better that Brad Pitt's wristwatch seem to momentarily be on the wrong arm than that the positional grammar be broken by a poorly-chosen angle.

For people (not just film students) interested in this sort of thing, I recommend "The Grammar of the Film Language" by Daniel Arijon. A fantastic book that's fundamentally changed the way I see movies.

http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Film-Language-Daniel-Arijon/dp...

Seconded. It is the only book I've seen that takes a truly systematic approach. It seems to have fallen out of favor due to the 1970s-era line drawings involving increasingly naked people which some people find sexist or just weird.

Two other books worth mentioning are The Visual Story by Bruce Block and If it's Purple Someone's Gonna Die by Patti Bellatoni. The first one is about shapes and the second one is about color.

You can pick up all 3 for under $100 and you will get more out of it than most people do from spending many thou$and$ on film school.

Agreed on the book. It's great.

Another one of my favorites on this topic is this scene from Paprika:

http://youtu.be/e9xD_YYZrbA?t=23s

Spielberg is the grand master of staging, he makes it look almost effortless. RAIDERS was maybe the peak of his staging skill, so it was a perfect choice, but Spielberg is always wonderful with it.

A simple scene for it is the start of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, the beginning when they find the planes in the desert. Watch the flow of the camera moves and the cuts. Notice how he uses the fence to establish geography and directions. The rhythm of the plane inspection edits. It's all absolutely perfect.

I'm really happy Soderbergh is doing this. He's one of the very best at editing and this kind of staging construction. He's not quite Spielberg, but even Soderbergh's "bad" films are very well put together. We're lucky he's sharing this stuff with us, how he sees things. Not something that's been able to happen so easily in the past.

Or maybe you just shouldn't watch terrible Micheal Bay films.

But seriously, what are you basing this on? Film sets aren't chaotic at all. Independent ones - maybe. But 100 million dollar pictures are meticulously ordered and have several ADs keeping to schedule. Source: I work in production.

Crossing the line is also not as much of a problem as you make out. Everything is super storyboarded, or a DP will no instinctively if the 180 rule has been crossed.

I also work in production, and sometimes as an AD, mostly as sound mixer. I like a smooth well-oiled machine too, but even with previz, boards, and continuity people mistakes arise.

I don't sub to American Cinematographer any more, but that's a great place to find DP horror stories about 2am match mistakes and suchlike.

Soderbergh has a couple other re-cuts on his site, too. One intermixes the two PSYCHOs, the original and the shot-for-shot remake.

The other is a radical re-cut of HEAVEN'S GATE. I've watched a couple hundred movies this year, but it's that HEAVEN'S GATE edit I keep coming back to in my head. I'm not really sure why (which is probably why). He somehow found the movie lurking inside the sprawling version that was released.

http://extension765.com/sdr/16-heavens-gate-the-butchers-cut

I watched a few minutes and was really impressed. I don't feel like I have the time to watch all of it, but I totally would have if this was an assignment in a film class (I remember watching a single film 5 times in a row or one scene 30 times).

I made a short film in college and it's terribly embarrassing as an artifact, but I just rewatched it without sound and it's quite awesome that way. :)

Hehe, once you start noticing staging, lighting and framing, looking for shadows of the boom mic shadow from above, you won't be able to stop easily. You'll be enjoying a movie and all of the sudden instead of just watching the movie you are explicitly noticing editing cuts and camera positioning and thinking about it.

So how were any of you able to watch this? ("Sorry Because of it's privacy settings, this video cannot be played here.")

For me it says "The server refused the connection." where the video should be.

This really needs a more descriptive title.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/raider-of-the-lost... is an interesting look at a few of the highlights.

A hard one for titles. We gave it a try by picking a sentence from the article.

Who is we?

dang is one of the HN mods

I think you did fine; if anyone disagrees, they should post an alternate suggestion in reply.

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