Seeing the big picture : Movie Mosaics

Among the most vital of skills the digital filmmaker of the 21st century should have at their disposal is not camera or editing skills, or an ability to handle cast and crew. The most vital for producing vibrant innovative work is the ability to analyze, breakdown and comprehend both the work of others and their own. The ability to investigate a cinematic work and articulate how it works, why it works and what effect it has ensures a director comprehends the implications of directorial decisions.

Of late the viewing of film mosaics has become popular as a means to take a macro-analysis view of a cinematic work. Frames taken every second or so are assembled into a grid-pattern to be viewed as one image. From this macro position holistic patterns of colour and form can be viewed as they evolve over the course of a film.


{Black Hawk Down}

A number of these mosaics generated from popular and classic works of cinema are available online for viewing and download. However a clever chap by the name of Ben Sandofsky has released a little MacOSX app called Thumber that allows anyone to generate their own overview mosaics from any QuickTime file. The app allows you to nominate the specific pixel dimensions of each frame and the duration of the interval between frames.

The concept owes much to the Cinema Redux project of Brendan Dawes. The result of this clever little utility is the ability to custom generate mosaics from any movie clip. For directors, editors and cinematographers, particularly student filmmakers, such a tool is very valuable to dig deeper on favorite sequences and see in detail how they are constructed, to find specific patterns you may wish to emulate in your own work.

By way of example, there’s a particular sequence - the opening of the episode of the TV series Deadwood entitled ‘Jewel’s Boot’ - which I often use with students to look at ideas of shifting audience POV in editing. Using Thumber to breakdown that sequence into a frame mosaic allows precision clarity in seeing exactly where the shifts in POV occur and the clear beats of action in the edit. Showing and viewing the sequence is one thing, viewing it has precise frame can unveil a clarity of process cinematic assembly that holds enormous value for both filmmakers and teachers of filmmaking.