Jackie (Francesca Gasteen) and Lucy (Cindy Nelson) - together nicknamed ‘Jucy’ - are 20 something best friends who do everything together. Their days are spent working at a local alternative video store serving a variety of equally emotionally disenfranchised freaks and geeks. Always on the outside looking in but never alone as long as they have each other, they combat boredom with their own special brand of ‘joie de vivre’. When badgered by friends and family for being in a ‘womance’ (the girl equivalent of a bromance - codependent, weird and incapable of living a normal life), the girls decide it’s time to grow up. Jackie will snag the dreamy boyfriend and Lucy will land the job of her dreams, but will growing up mean growing apart? In the spirit of Muriel’s Wedding and Bridget Jones’ Diary this Aussie comedy speaks to everyone who survived the all too common quarter-life crisis with a little help from their friends.
Jucy restores faith in indie filmmaking, fresh ideas and popular appeal without trading in heart and soul.
Jucy opens on 5 screens across Australia on the 3rd November 2011 and the stars are going on the road to meet and talk to audiences!
Catch them at these places:
Manuka Event Cinema (ACT) Wed 2nd Nov 6.30pm screening followed by Q&A with stars, director and writer
Wagga Wagga Forum 6 (NSW) Thurs 3rd Nov 7.30pm screening followed by Q&A with stars, director and writer
Orange Odeon5 (NSW) Fri 4th Nov 7.30pm screening followed by Q&A with stars, director and writer
Indooroopilly Megaplex (Qld) Sat 5th Nov 7pm screening followed by Q&A with starts, director, writer and producer
Adelaide Iris Cinema (SA) Thurs 10th Nov 6pm screening followed by Q&A with director
I think we have a problem, a deeply flawed sense of what these two monikers mean. And in the digital age of the internet free-for-all, the problem is getting Worse.
This post may feel like a rant, but if you bare with me i promise to get to a positive and constructive point by the end.
Here goes…
Would all you multi-hyphenate, DSLR shooting, one-man-band, editor / director / screenwriter / colour-grader / filmmakers, with your ultra-shallow depth-of-field, Vimeo hosted music-video showreels - who have never actually had a paid professional gig in your life - please, for the love of God, SHUT THE FUCK UP…!
Please Stop blogging, please Stop tweeting, please Stop dispensing advice or setting up websites with your ‘pro’ techniques and commentary, please Stop propagating fallacy and ignorance, please Stop offering your opinions on what is or isn’t Cinematic, Please Stop signing your signature with a litany of job titles just because you own a fist-full of software plug-ins and a Mac. Please Stop Pretending…
Deep breath…
Ok, Allow me to qualify my consternation.
There has been a distinct trend shift over the past decade in the way we discuss and use the term ‘professional’ particularly in relation to the screen media production. Once upon a time the term Professional had a very specific meaning - a doctor, priest or lawyer - specialized positions of trust. Later the term broadened and embodied a person who makes a living from a knowledge-based art or craft and is hence denoted as belonging to a ‘profession’. The word ‘profession’ derives from someone who ‘professes’ for gain or livelihood in an activity or field of endeavor often engaged in by amateurs.
However the moniker of Professional seems now to be adopted not just by those who possess specialist knowledge and make a living from that knowledge, but also by those who simply claim to have a professional attitude, a professional mindset, a professional demeanor irrespective of whether they actually make a professional living from that knowledge or even whether they possess that knowledge or experience at all. In short, the notion of a screen media ‘professional’ has been watered down into a evaporating puddle of mediocrity and irrelevance.
Now certainly many praise the breakdown of such hierarchies and the, so called, democratization of creative screen production. And moreover, many companies have made a whole shit load of money selling stuff because of this breakdown (witness FCPX which will make 100x more money for Apple than FCP ever did) And I would be the first to champion the dynamism and vibrancy of a society as a whole when creative engagement is undertaken at a popular grass-roots level. To this I raise my glass in full and vocal support.
However, there is a downside to this watering down that i feel compelled to point out.
Now, don’t get me wrong - acting ‘professionally’ is certainly an admirable quality and one certainly doesn’t need to be a working professional, to act ‘professionally’. (and arguably theres a lot of ‘professionals’ who rarely display ‘professionalism’) But acting professionally and having a professional attitude is Not the same as actually being a Professional. And to confuse the two is to do yourself a great disservice. Very often such delusion will deny or hinder opportunities to actually become a real professional.
Let us also not confuse Professional with Art. You, of course, do Not need to be a professional to make art. Indeed there is arguably no direct connection between the two at all. A Professional-Writer for example may occasionally write art - personally motivated creative expression - but more often a Professional-Writer will more likely be writing for a living - writing to commission, writing to a brief. In such acts of writing, ‘art’ is either incidental or a bonus rather than a requirement or goal.
This again is the difference between the amateur and the professional. An aspiring filmmaker may spend a decade making art they love in an artform they are passionate about, even producing work of quality. And yet never actually be a ‘professional’ and make a living from it. Which is to say, they never need to have a daily rigor of discipline and deep knowledge-base to produce their art, but which would be crucial to day-to-day making a living from it.
So, having made these distinctions (not as a value judgement of worth but as tangible fact about what a ‘professional’ is) we can make a broad assumption about most Aspiring Filmmakers - that they actually do desire to make a living from it and build a professional reputation over a life-long career. Thus I come to my argument - that those calling themselves ‘Professional’ before they actually are, do their ambition no good.
My reasoning is very simple. The people best placed to be able to help them fulfill their ambition of becoming working professionals are those who already are working Professionals. They are the people who may hire you, give you work experience, introduce you to people, be your referee or recommend you for gigs. They may also mentor, teach, advise or guide you.
BUT, if you jump the gun and declare and pretend yourself a Professional, an expert, before you’ve earned it, then those Professionals will see right through your fraud and will likely Not have any interest in helping you.
(I will refrain from naming names; needless to say a swathe of websites, bloggers and vocal ‘filmmaker’ online personalities and forums spring to mind that clearly fit the category of the fraud attempting to pose themselves as a professional; pretense at being a bastion of knowledge and experience when they have scant of either. I will leave these sites and individuals nameless for now in the hope that they will do some examination of self and realise their folly.)
Allow me to use myself as a case study. I call myself a professional for one simple reason; I’ve never worked in any other industries. I’ve never had a ‘day job’. Writing, shooting, editing and, in more recent years, teaching screen production is all I have ever done. Those skills and knowledge have in turn lead to opportunities in ancillary roles as critic, curator and commentator on screen production and even software development of tools for filmmakers. My profession has also taken me across mediums - from film, TV and radio, to online, live events and gallery spaces - fiction and documentary. This is how I make my living and along the way I’ve done many years of post-graduate formal training and study to continually make my profession viable as a living. It has taken nearly 20 years to get to a point where I now no longer have to hunt work, make a very comfortable living, and have some degree of flexibility to pick and choose projects that interest me creatively. My job is a working profession.
Now imagine what happens when the Wannabe fraud filmmaker described above - who calls themselves a professional but whose skills, knowledge and opinions are wafer thin - encounters someone like yours truly, who has taken decades to build a career and knowledge base in order to sustain their professiona as a living.
It’s not a fight that happens, or an argument or even angry words. or even some sort of snobbish exchange. What happens by and large, online and off, is…. Nothing. The Wannabe filmmaker armed with their DSLR’s, software plugins, blog website, Vimeo account, and a dangerous mix of ignorance and arrogance, is simply ignored; dismissed as irrelevant by the greater working professional industry.
The sad truth is that, despite the accessibility of both the tools of production and the means of distribution, the great champions of the successive DV, HDV and DSLR “revolutions” are generally NOT working professionals. They are NOT making a living from their craft. And whilst some may produce interesting creative works, their opinions and perspectives on ‘industry’ and ‘practice’, ‘aesthetics’ and ‘form’, rarely have any basis in real experience.
Don’t get me wrong, Thats absolutly a-ok. They don’t Have to make a living to make art or contribute to the greater creative consciousness of the world. BUT, if they do wish to be a professional (in the purest sense of the word) then declaring their expertise in excess of their experience is NOT the way to achieve that goal. It doesnt help, it just makes them look stupid and arrogant to the people who could otherwise help them in their ambition.
The anti-film school wannabes seem to think that by avoiding, bypassing, ignoring or circumventing formal training they also bypass the label of ‘Aspiring’. The sense of entitlement the so-called digital revolution inspires, convinces them they can jump straight to being the ‘real thing’ simply by saying they are and avoiding a position where they would have to admit to not knowing. Which is what film school is, a place where you go to learn what you don’t know. Thus a student is invariably someone who admits that they don’t know and seeks to change that.
On the flip side, this disease of the pseudo-professional filmmaker-fraud knows no bounds. I’m just as dismayed by the number of film school students who seem only to have enrolled in order to validate what they think they already are rather than learn what they don’t know. Film school is a waste of time for such people and teaching them is painful because they arent there to learn, they are there to prove.
Without doubt, the key to learning and success is being able to know what you don’t know and finding a path to remedy that situation. Inside or outside of film school there seem far too many who are blind to this truism. The broad rejection of learning and knowledge that prevails in western societies is surely the reaosn why, despite having so many cameras and so many screens and so many opportunities, we’re still making a lot of crap.
But, I think the answer is really very simple.
It’s time we reclaimed the word ASPIRING as a prestigious descriptor rather than a term to be circumvented or avoided. To say you are Aspiring is constructive. To say you are Aspiring is honest. Rare qualities in an online and interconnected world filled with fraudulent voices pretending to be something they have no claim yet to be and dispensing knowledge they don’t have the experience to understand.
In short, my message to those who may be guilty of these crimes (yes, you know who you are) is this - Start acting like an Aspiring Amateur rather than a Pretending Professional and I think you’ll find you get to your goal of making a living as a professional a lot quicker. Start acting like someone who wants to learn and knows they have much to learn openly and honestly, rather than slipping into the pit of self-delusion that will result in nothing but the perpetuation of ignorance. Be careful who you read, choose your sources carefully, check the ‘about’ page of the website to see if the author has credability. Cross-check opinions on technology and technique with writers who do know what they are talking about. I am a vivacious reader of websites and blogs about production technology but I can assure that 16 out of every 20 websites and blogs I encounter propogate nothing but fallacies, innacuracies and misunderstandings. To be an effective Learner you need to have good powers of critical-thinking to sift through the bullshit. Because there is a whole lot of Bullshit out there.
True Professionals are more likely to take you seriously and be inclined to help you if you dont try and pretend to be something you’re not. The honesty and openness of being Apsiring is much more productive than the close-minded arrogance of the fraud-professional.
What is crucial to remember is that whilst anyone can make something, not everyone can or will be TRUSTED to make something with someone else’s money. This is the difference between the Fraud and the Professional. Professional screen production is ultimately a trust game. I was recently discussing this idea with Kris Wilde - arguably one of Australia’s most successful television writers and creator of outstanding crime drama series such as Wildside and EastWest 101. Kris commented that the idea that a great project, talent or script will ultimately win out is a myth. The only thing that matters is Trust. And Trust has to be built up over time. Trust has to be earned. This is true at every level; from a kick-starter indie project, to a major international production. Thus your ability to make a living from your knowledge and skills is based almost solely on how much people trust you and how well that trust is warranted.
And quite frankly the brigade of DSLR-wielding, Vimeo showreel hosting, film-tech blogging, aficionados spouting their multi-hyphenate job titles, have absolutely Zero Trust Value in the grand scheme of things.
So, Stop pretending - if you are an Aspiring Amateur then proudly say so - you’ll learn more and have people far more willing to help you and offer you opportunities. But if you persist with being a fraud, with pretending your merit exceeds your experience, if you insist on calling yourself a professional when you clearly are not making a living in the profession, then the only people who will buy into your trust value will be other frauds and non professionals.
If you would like one day to make a living making screen media, then start acting like an Amateur. You’ll get there faster.
—
Heres a few websites that have the good-oil - written by folks who truly know what they are talking about…
And, Trawling the plethora of websites of online fraud-pros that embody the issues above, I have concluded the following golden rules which apparently equate to being a ‘Professional DSLR filmmaker’.
The shallower the Depth of Field, the more professional you are.
Always shoot aperture wide open despite the fact that wide-open is where the lens is least sharp, least clear and least effective.
Always matte to 2.40:1 despite the fact that it throws away 1/3 of the screen real-estate when your entire audience will watch on a 16:9 TV.
The dirtier the image the better; Lens flare, grain and artifacts are what make you a Pro. If you cant shoot them, add them in post.
Use the word ‘industry standard’ a lot. It allows you to validate yourself by your tools when you cant validate yourself by experience.
Avoid ‘narrative’ and ‘meaning’ at all costs. The mark of the real Pro is dreamy showreels of clouds and sunsets scored by Sigur RosRadiohead music tracks on Vimeo.
Colour Grading always begins with a Bleach-Bypass filter.
Always have actors walk into focus (preferably with a melancholy expression). It makes you and them look cool. It’s a win win.
Ignore sound, it doesn’t matter. They’ll be listening to your ripped Sigur Ross Radiohead tracks anyway.
Size matters. Always make your camera look as bulky as possible with as many handles, follow-focus knobs and cables hanging off it as you can.
Rack-Focus everything. Professionalism is directly proportional to how many focus moves you can squeeze into a shot. It also helps you justify the cost of the follow-focus rig.
No one will take you seriously unless you use Prime lenses for everything.
Mass Effect and the Thrill of Seeing Genre’s of computer gaming have long found their conventions identified by modes and mechanics of viewership and control than more traditional narrative and thematic traits. Thus games are foremost referred to by terms such as First Person Shooter (FPS) Role Playing Game (RPG) and Real Time Strategy (RTS) rather than SciFi, Horror or Noir (though they very often possess these traits as well)
What this implies is a primary concern of games being focused on How a ‘story’ is engaged over the What of the ‘story’s’ depiction. The mechanics of engagement on the part of the viewer are governed by the vantage point of control they are presented. This range spans from the intimacy and immediacy of First Person (Bioshock, Half Life, et al) through to the omnipotent remove of a ‘God-View’ 3rd Person (Command and Conquer, Company of Heroes etc).
Between these two extremes - and their various implementations and variations - sits the venerable 3rd Person Shooter. The addendum of the term ‘shooter’ constructs an intimacy to the scene whilst retaining a remove from the immediacy of 1st Person. Into this vein of games that exploit this viewership of Intimate Remove we add recent titles such as Arkham Asylum, Dead Space and Mass Effect.
Here we find a question begging - Why 3rd Person? What does removing the player from the personal avatar embodiment of 1st Person add to the experience?
The simple answer would be the “thrill of seeing” that for the viewer/player the thrill of the game is in seeing the “performance of execution” on the part of the avatar and controlled by the player. This is, in effect, a form of digital puppetry where the thrill for the puppeteer is in seeing the puppet come to life and perform physical feats of movement.
In 1st Person by contrast the thrill of seeing is fundamentally different - focused as it is not on the avatar/puppet itself but rather on the immediate first-person world depicted. Aside from hands and the pointy end of a firearm the puppet is unseen.
So we might conclude that the justification and appeal of a using 3rd Person view-mode is to centre game experiences around the ‘performance’ of the puppet. One need only look at the plethora of martial-arts fighting games (such as Tekken) To see this in action. Such games are akin to circus performances – the thrill in seeing feats of skills, acrobatics, dexterity and spatial defiance. Nor should we neglect more base descriptions of “stuff that looks cool”, a coarse term that belies that important notion of appeal centred on the puppet rather than the world the puppet is in.
In Arkham Asylum for example the thrill of seeing is in the viewing of the Batman puppet in the performance of extraordinary feats. Similarly the player challenge lies in the puzzle of navigating a space in 3 dimensions from a position of the puppeteer who can see beyond the first person perspective of the puppet itself. The experience is therefore not in the immediacy of the experience of the avatar but in the orchestration of the experience for the avatar as an agent.
We might also look at an RPG game such as Dragon Age which justifies its choice of the 3rd Person by understanding the nature and appeal of sword-play and melee combat. The thrill of seeing would be largely lost if the players acrobatic and dexterous sword swings and parries could not be seen from a cinematic remove.
However this understanding of the appeal 3rd Person - and acknowledging particular games where its use seems wholly in tune with the games’ mode and intentions - brings up the issue of games where 3rd Person seems out of place and without justification….
Mass Effect I’m looking at you…
Mass Effect (1 and 2) is an epic narrative shooter with an RPG structure of progression and level-ups. Mass Effect is also a Third-Person shooter where the player’s perspective is not experienced from the immediacy of the first-person but rather from an immediate and behind POV as you marionette the character of Shepard around the galaxy.
The camera of viewership is fixed; the distance of its placement from behind the avatar is locked and cannot be zoomed in or out. Nor can this fixed third-person camera be swung or controlled from its static vantage independent of the puppet. The issue with this viewpoint is that the choice for Third-person in Mass Effect seems to serve no viable or tangible purpose and have no direct connection to the experience the game provides. Since mass Effect is a shooter and the focus is primarily (if not solely) on the targets of that shooting there is virtually nothing of performative interest in watching the back of the characters head and shoulders. There is no ‘thrill of seeing’ that might otherwise be gained from a sword-wielding character. There is no thrill of seeing because frankly we’re not seeing much and the perpetual view of the back of my puppet’s head is nothing more that a visual impediment to the screen.
In a game such as oblivion (which shares so much as an RPG to Mass Effect) the camera viewpoint of the player can be freely moved from First-Person, Third-Person and withdrawn further to an omnipotent, almost god-view over a scene. In this regard to ability to move out of first and into third person becomes a strategic tool, the means to see around corners, pause and take a strategic view of an environment and obstacles. But Mass Effect has no such function, the camera is simply locked in stasis serving almost no game play purpose, unable to be zoomed back to garner any strategic advantage.
Some may argue that the third-person view for a shooter facilitates the “duck + cover” game mode where the player can position their character behind cover whilst still being able to see enemies from their 3rd person view. The idea is that duck+cover gameplay has a greater level of strategy about it than run+gun, point+shoot first-person. It’s an idea directly connected with that expressed earlier in regard to Arkham Asylum where the player is puppeteer with a privileged all-seeing perspective over the scene rather than the intimate immediacy of first-person embodiment.
But if this is the case then why not make 3rd person a ‘mode option’, selected with a button when the player moves their avatar into cover? Why is it necessary to spend the entire game with 20% of the screen real-estate taken up by the decidedly dull back, shoulders and scruffy head of an avatar just to facilitate a game mode that makes up less than 2% of game time..?
Its seems to me that the Third-Person perspective in Mass Effect is pointless, serves no purpose and adds nothing to the game. Third-Person makes sense for sword and melee games and spatial strategy gameplay but it makes no sense for shooters. Such a flaw is all the more apparent on a otherwise superb and groundbreaking game as Mass Effect.
Not just the passive annoyance many of us feel when tele-marketers call your house or spam your inbox. My hatred is deep-seeded, scourged into the fibrous sinews of my being, and fills my mouth with insipid bile whenever I am forced to even speak to someone who emblazons the word marketing on their business card.
Make no mistake my hatred is profound.
Marketing is what people do for a living when they have no particular skills, knowledge, insight or opinions. Marketing is a career path designed for the empty, the vacuous, the uninspired, the banal and the intolerably mediocre.
Marketing is the venerable haze cast about like a suburban musical society smoke blower to obscure ideas, imagination and progressive thinking.
Marketing is knowledge of Nothing masquerading as the understanding of Everything.
Marketing is not a Science (marketers are regularly guilty of crimes against statistics) Nor is Marketing an Art (it doesnt seek to create, inspire, shape or inform - its very existence serves only to regurgitate and reconstitute. To present the same old shit in a different bucket and charge good money for the privilege of the excrement remix)
To this I am forced to concede that I am myself may, as a journalist, be part of a marketing machine. But rather than lead me to renege my position this pseudo-fact just makes my hate all the more manifest fuelled, as it is, by a tinge of self-loathing.
But before I spill any more venom onto my digital page let us take a step back to review the definitions of Marketing. First to point out that Marketing is NOT Advertising.
This from the American Marketing Association Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
This from the text-book Principles of marketing by Philip Kotler, Gary Armstrong, Veronica Wong, John Saunders A social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and values with others
And I cry Bullshit…! (Particularly the society at large bit - stop fooling yourself you mindless hacks)
I cry Bullshit on many grounds but the one particular bone I would like to pick is that above all else Marketing, as a process/entity/business exists wholly and solely to justify its own existence.
Without Marketing people would still make things and sell them. People would still identify a need and produce a product to service that need. And if nobody needed that thing then the person would stop making that thing. If lots of people needed that thing then they would make more and better things. Marketing is utterly supernumerary to this process. It is human imagination that drives the invention of things. Marketing does not make people more imaginative. Many of the greatest inventions of the modern world were created by accident or without specific market opportunity. Science itself is founded on the premise of open exploration and all the major discoveries in science and medicine in the modern age have come about through exploring with no particular market aim. Penicillin, Xrays, the Internet….
Necessity is not the mother of invention. Very often Invention precedes Necessity and produces its own self-fulfilling necessity. Invention is the Mother of Necessity.
Accepting this profound truism leads to a profound conclusion; if Marketing is not at all required for the creation of things, the need for things, nor the selling of things then Marketing exists with only one aim - to justify its own existence. I am reminded of that famous quote (from someone insightful) The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
If Marketing is not at all required for the creation of things, the need for things, nor the selling of things then Marketing is only required to sell things we dont need to as many people as possible who dont need them.
Marketing therefore has the prevailing, perennial, primary objective of justifying its own existence.
I am no market fundamentalist (the pinko commy lefty, greeny badge on my forehead prevents the self-lobotomy that would be necessary to be one) but when stripped to essentials there is undeniable truth in the notion that if you have something people need then people will want it; subsequently an economy is born. Marketing therefore is about identifying need where there isnt one, creating a want where there isnt one and determinging if there is a market for a thing that is unnecessary.
Market research is conducted to prove the worth of the market research. Marketing strategies are developed to identify the need for a marketing strategy. Marketing plans are written as mindless busy-work to justify the expense on the creation of a marketing plan. Worst still is when (and this is where I get REALLY irate) good ideas, insightful speculation, informed hypothesis, educated guesses, bold risk-taking, a good hunch is slapped into bleeding mediocrity by Marketing. Wherever the Marketing God presides any suggestion of an Idea is met head on by calls for market research to investigate the viability of the market for unique selling points and consider the penetration of the product into targeted demographics. All this is nothing more than a giant smokescreen of slippery bullshit to avoid at all costs the process of having an IDEA.
And it makes sense that Marketing would proliferate such excrement for if such a head on challenge was not undertaken against IDEAS then the fallacy and irrelevance of Marketing would be plain and palpable for all to see. If the idea was left to stand and be explored then Marketing could not justify the time and cost of its existence and the vacuous - idea-free-zone - individuals who call themselves Marketers.
The great inventions, ideas, products and progresses of humanity did not common about because Market research showed the way! They came about through someone taking a punt, running on instinct, hazarding a guess, exploring a possibility, boldly going where no one has gone before.
It is this blender of ingenuity, insight, instinct and ideas that both Creates needs and Satisfies them whilst Marketing vigorously but pointlessly masturbates in the corner blithely convincing everyone that its even better than the real thing. My ire, hatred and despair however has been tempered somewhat; not from outside haters like myself but from the termites within Marketing itself…
I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination. David Ogilvy - The Father of Advertising
And this…
Marketing is what you do when your product is no good Edwin Land - Founder of the Polaroid company
And then there is this - The Audience Is Always Right - provides a profound insight into new thinking about what Audiences are and How they engage….
“Today’s media world is thrilling, captivating and full of challenges for brands - a revolution in brands and people’s behaviour in fact. But as in all revolutions, it’s sometimes difficult to get a clear view of what’s going on. And so, dear readers, TBWA’s strategy department was looking for patterns and similarities from different discussions and has attempted to sum up the revolution in 135 slides. Our goal is to explore the different ways of tackling today’s communication challenges - and to show how successful brands are switching from brand-centric to audience-centric behaviour. Inspired by many different people and brands, it intends to spark a conversation about the need for Media Arts, and how it is ingrained with the theory of Disruption.”
How a Movie looks is a very important thing. The visual aesthetics of a movie profoundly shape the experience of watching it. Few would argue with this position.
Aesthetics, by definition, is the study of ways of seeing and of perceiving. When we consider the aesthetics of cinema we are considering how a movie looks and is perceived. To the filmmaker - concerned with making, building, constructing a film rather than just experiencing it - aesthetics are tangibly the techniques they employ to depict the world of their cinematic creation.
So far, this is all pretty obvious and straight forward. But something we must consider is this idea of ‘Technique’ and the choices at the filmmaker’s disposal - What are they? How are they used? What do they mean?
Any visual technique used by a filmmaker is simply a tool leveraged for an aesthetic story-telling purpose. Quick-cutting or long-takes, close-ups or wide shots, colour or black and white, dollys or pans, so on and so on… The effectiveness, impact and worth of any given technique a filmmaker employs is derived from its suitability to the context of the film. In simple terms, does the technique match the story?
Filmmaking is above all else a process of problem solving and the techniques employed are simply the solution to those problems - be they narrative, emotive, technical or creative. For example; PROBLEM - The audience need to feel a part of the action, that they share the danger the characters face. SOLUTION - Shoot hand-held and shaky, ducking and weaving the camera with the action
All this seems well and good and leaves open infinite possibilities for creative aesthetic solutions. Great films are made when directors find innovative, fresh and exciting aesthetics to solve creative problems.
But if we except this premise then we must face up to a distinct problem. If a single aesthetic choice becomes so dominant and common and ubiquitous across all genre’s of filmmaking, regardless of the creative problems posed by individual films, then it ceases to be grounded technique - it becomes stale, meaningless, banal, a default position rather than a creative choice.
In the 21st century I would attest that Shallow Focus and Rack Focus aesthetics have lost all meaning as useful creative problem solving techniques and instead have become banal, unimaginative staples of cinema. And it prompts us to ask loudly…. “What the hell happened to Deep Focus?”
Let me step back a bit from this verbose statement and provide some clarity on the trajectory that leads me to this point. In the early days of cinema film stocks were slow and so apertures had to be wide open in the hope of obtaining decent exposure. With wide open apertures you get very shallow depth of field - a short stretch of space where the subject is in focus that renders anything in the fore or back ground blurred.
In the 40’s companies such as Kodak and Agfa developed better chemical processes and faster film stocks. With faster film stocks apertures dont need to open so wide for exposure and thus depth of field can be extended. Deep-Focus cinema was born; an image aesthetic where subjects at varying focal-lengths from the camera can be equally sharp; both foreground and background in focus. Cinema changed dramatically as a new set of problem solving aesthetic techniques were opened up for filmmakers; new opportunities and possibilities for how a film could look. Shallow Focus and its offspring Rack Focus (where the lens is manipulated in-shot to shift focus from one subject to another) became not the staple of how films looked and worked visually but rather options of choice that a filmmaker may chose to use, or not use, depending on the needs and context of the film.
Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and the superb camera work of Gregg Toland, stands as the ultimate example of the power of deep-focus and spawned the host of new thinking about cinema aesthetics that was embodied by the French New Wave and scholarly journals such as Cahiers du Cinema.
But the cinematic party of aesthetic choice, possibility and variety where filmmakers could choose shallow or deep as situation demanded, seemed to be cut short as deep-focus became the victim of the Video and Digital Revolutions.
Let me explain…
Video technology - the ability to capture a moving image electronically rather than chemically - came along in the 70’s and 80’s. For the most part such technology was seen as having a great many benefits but one of them was Not visual fidelity. The technology still had many years to go (and an evolution from analogue to digital) before it may be considered visually equal. The simplistic result of this was that Video Cameras at this time were made, in large part, not to directly compete with film cameras for conservatively traditional cinema roles but to serve different purposes. As such they were largely small cameras with small sensors. There is of course a direct mathematical correlation between the size of the sensor (the imaging plane) and the depth of field rendered. Small sensor = deep depth of field. Large sensor = shallow depth of field. Video technology, by nature of both its technological limitations and cultural position within media industry contexts, was innately deep-focus.
What must remembered about cinema aesthetics is that they are deeply connected to cultural responses. Take for example the modern age of mobile phones and mass popular YouTube uploading. We have become so used to seeing nightly TV news filled with amateur footage that is shaky, pixelated and out of focus depicting immediate and current events in a veritae style that there is a prevailing cultural construct that directly associates such Shaky / Out of focus / Pixelated images with ‘Truth’ and ‘Actuality’. It’s for this reason that modern TV news proactively requests amateur footage from its viewers despite it being only a few years ago that airing such footage would have been considered beneath ‘Broadcast Quality Standards’. Similarly TV networks the world over have been known to compress and deliberately degrade images of natural disasters and war zones in order to make it seem more ‘authentic’.
This same cultural construct response was forced upon deep focus by the video revolution of the 70’s and 80’s. What was ingrained into the popular visual language was that ‘deep focus’ equated to video and so, in the minds of viewers, primarily to documentary, news reporting, amateur footage, cheap production and pornography. Conversely that ‘shallow focus’ equated to ‘film’ and high budget, narrative cinema, high-art.
This shift in the popular cultural ‘reading’ of moving image aesthetics and the separation of High and Low cinematic art on the basis of Deep or Shallow focus has been a blight and a curse on filmmaking ever since.
In the digital age, amid the famed ‘digital revolution’, we at last moved towards a parity of visual fidelity between celluloid and digital but have been simultaneously afflicted with a prevailing bogus desire to constrict the aesthetics of digital to the legacy hang-ups of film.
Sadly the prime concern of digital indie filmmakers over the past decade has not been the new aesthetic possibilities afforded them by digital technologies but rather an almost singular focus on the cost saving and pragmatic elements of digital. As such, the much lauded desire of digital filmmaking has been to, on one hand, shoot cheap but, on the other, have it look like ‘Film’.
Now, despite the thousands of website articles, posts, forum treatises and essays dedicated to the mission of how to get the ‘Film Look’ it is arguable that a useful definition with any clarity on exactly what constitutes the ‘Film look’ is near impossible to come by. Frame Rate, Progressive scan, Grain, Flicker, Weave, Dynamic Range, Gamma curve - these are all the traits often cited as the ‘film look’ but together they constitute such a broad palette of hazy and in-tangible possibilities that distilling them into a particular set of aesthetic traits is a highly ephemeral process.
May I suggest this…. The ‘film look’ is bullshit; a product of marketing representation and the digestible distillation of an association with a particular mode of viewing. The ‘film look’ is a cultural rather than aesthetic understanding; one drawn from our legacy of personal cinematic experiences in the movie theatre watching a projected image - Nostalgia not Aesthetics.. Thus, when it comes to making ‘films’ in the digital age for ourselves our base instincts are to want our films to evoke those same nostalgic memory associations we have with celluloid. This we translate as the aesthetic of film, the ‘film look’, but in truth it’s much more about cultural and personal association.
Through all this, the ramifications of this for digital indie filmmakers have been profound. In working with Digital Video but desiring a ‘film look’ - that is near impossible to quantify - their efforts were skewed and corrupted. For so many digital indie filmmakers over the past 15 years their functional definition of the ‘film look’ was primarily whatever aesthetic characteristics were the opposite of what was innate to small-format video. Most specifically Shallow Focus.
Because deep-focus is the default position of many small format digital cameras, owing largely to small sensors as imaging planes, the prevailing aesthetic desire of indie filmmakers was to invest their films with the opposite - to enforce shallow-focus as a way of connecting with a popular culture mindset that connects Shallow Focus with ‘high-budget cinema’ and Deep Focus with ‘low-budget’ video.
As a result we have a whole generation of filmmakers who measure their aesthetic mark by how shallow their focus can be and how often they can Rack-Focus their shots. They are a generation who have been obsessed with rack-focusing rather than staging to move the viewer around the cinematic space; using the camera lens to depict space in flat 2D blurry planes rather than a 3-diemnsion staging of space itself.
We’ve spent so much of the digital revolution fussing over how to make digital look like film that we’ve neglected the subtle art of arranging space itself, forgotten how to focus the eye Spatially rather than the more clumsy and overt mechanics of doing it Optically. Most importantly we’ve forgotten that the viewer is a sentient and intelligent being, more than capable of deciphering, analyzing, speculating on and articulating the visual information they take in.
Let me offer a verbose rebuke of Shallow Focus and Rack-Focus as a cienmatic default by way of being provocative and pushing the pendulum back to normalcy.
Shallow focus and Rack-Focus is lazy. A ham-fisted and overtly slothful technique with little impetus other than to lead your viewer around by the nose, to force them to look exactly where you want them to look, when you want them to look there. As a tool, like all other cinematic tools at the filmmakers disposal, it can and may be very useful. But as a staple and default way to depict moving images it is as articulate as a house brick.
Shallow focus and Rack Focus is the cinema equivalent of spoon-feeding the audience one small digestible and banal visual morsel at a time. Handing to them a deliberately unsophisticated and unchallenging image platter. It is the camera equivalent of writing only in capital letters and short sentences for fear your reader/viewer may not understand precisely and exactly what you want them to understand. “Look here”, “see this”, “turn now” - no distractions, no surprises, no accidentals, no confusion, no uncertainty, just the domineering dictation of a moving-image experience on pre-determined flat 2-dimensional planes. This is the essential internal logic of Shallow-Focus/Rack-Focus cinematography which, by nature of it’s elimination through blur of any distractions outside of a singular focus, is an acutely dictatorial aesthetic. An aesthetic that leaves nothing to the viewers analytical mind and doesn’t engage the viewer in a more complex visual contract. Rack-Focus refuses to allow the viewer to decipher and assemble meanings for themselves and is a condescending and patronizing way present a cinematic image.
That said, the problem is not Shallow and Rack Focus unto themselves as techniques but rather that they are not seen and used as deft Tools and problem solving Options. Rather they act as blithe and banal default methods fueled by a misguided desire for an association with nostalgic ‘high-art’.
Utilizing deeper focus allows for a complex play of light, space, distance, obstacles and subjects. The arrangement of the framed contents becomes paramount, the subjects proportions and relationships to each other the prime creative device. The construction of a cinematic space that is detailed and nuanced becomes the main canvas of the filmmaker. Shallow focus eliminates and takes these options away, it dissolves a great deal of the problem-solving and decision making process that is the art of the Director. In shallow focus the Director is not demanded to solve problems of space, is not compelled to ask questions of arrangement and position, is relieved of the requirement to convey proximity and relationships.
A post such as this may be very confronting for some indie filmmakers who have dedicated so much of their time to extolling the virtues of shallow depth-of-field (and yes I do blame DSLR’s) and to toiling in their colour-grading system to mimic film-stock emulsion and gamma curves. But for those more enlightened readers who feel compelled to think outside of banal convention and consider how else things might be done, I encourage you to read David Bordwells superb book ‘Figures Traced Light’ which explores in exquisite detail the lost art of Cinematic Staging and Deep-Focus.
Likewise the two links below present some interesting reading in regard to the contentious history of deep-focus and its connection to movements such as the New Wave and the idea of ‘reality’.
I have just completed a short video documentary entitled ‘Insight’. It brings together some of Australia’s leading cinema practitioners - from across directing, script editing, acting, producing and sound designing - to garner insights and perspectives on their artistic practice and industry perspective. You can see it below or filed in the ‘Education’ section of the site.
Last year I was interviewed for Moviemaker Magazine about my perspective on Film Schools and changing Technology. So of course I launched into detailed and deliberately provocative answers to the magazine interviewer’s questions; passionate and errudite articulations…. which of course was watered down to a spare few sentences in the actual article… So rather than let all that blather go to waste I have decided to post the interview here in its full form.
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1. How do you see existing film schools coping with changing technology?
To be frank, Very Poorly. The evolving nature of cinematic production, the structure of education institutions and the culture of Digital Native students, are all colliding in a set of disjointed agendas and imperatives that leave many film schools struggling for relevance.
Cinema production technologies, and the processes that stem from them, are in dramatic upheaval. After several decades of largely consistent modes of production and delivery, we now have a very different landscape for both making and experiencing cinema - one that is multi-platform and scalable rather than unified and singular.
These changes are much more than just new, fast and cheap software and cameras; but are most profoundly seen in the filmmaking process and structure itself. The long established divisions between pre-production, production and post-production have become, in many ways, arbitrary distinctions, almost irrelevant divisions. DOPs continue to shoot with virtual cameras after the set has been struck. Shots are re-lit in post-production. Colour Grading is as much a pre-production process of design as a post-production process of manipulation. A whole film may begin and end inside a computer, never employing a camera at all. The simple, and previously clear, distinctions about when different production roles begin and end has dissolved into a infinitely flexible, project by project, set of options rather than defined set of structures.
Its in this fundamentally different environment that we have a plethora of education institutions teaching filmmaking who are still deeply entrenched in how cinema has Been rather that what it Is, and what it will Become. We have Film Schools whose curriculum is built around structures, processes and systems of cinema assembly that are losing relevance everyday.
And into this we launch Digital Native students, students who do not remember a time before the Mouse and Keyboard and for whom digital rip, burn, mash, upload is engrained into their psyche. These students have laptops perpetually under their arm that are more powerful than the SGI systems of less than 10 years ago. When you speak of an offline process is it any wonder they simply look at you funny? Why would you offline when you can online HD on a laptop? The idea simply does not compute to them. And nor should it! The imperative for pre-existing and rigid structures for cinema production are simply lost on these Digital Native students who come from a fundamentally different mind set to their often Digital Immigrant teachers.
The result of this clash between changing production processes, the outdated perspectives of much film education in the 21st century and the internal logic of the digital culture of students, far too often manifests itself in very poor teaching pedagogy. Too often film schools, in an effort to cope with the techno-cultural onslaught, have supplanted the teaching of real skills and knowledge and craft of filmmaking, with software-specific brand loyalty.
Any institution that teaches software specific functions above, or worse, in place of core creative production processes is fundamentally dis-empowering their students and directly damaging the broader creative industry, making it slavishly adherent to corporate marketing directions rather than the needs and skill demands of production. Schools often fall this way in an effort simply to keep up with the technological change but sadly this leads to education institutions begining to appear more like technology trainers than Film Schools; creating software-users rather than Editors, camera operators rather than Cinematographers.
2. How do you believe film schools should be coping with changing technology in order to attract film students and provide the proper training in all fields the school aims to teach?
This is certainly no simple question and the answer has to be multifaceted. The first is that film schools need to let go of any attachment they have to traditional hierarchies of delivery related to technology.
For far too long cinematic educators, distributors, broadcasters and media-makers themselves have institutionalized a hierarchy of privilege in regard to the delivery of cinematic content - the cinema theatrical release at the top and a pyramidal chain down from there. This has drilled into being an absurd concept that the ultimate destination is projected large screen cinema and everything else is second rate. This maddening perspective ingrains compositional aesthetic choices around one mode despite the fact that the work itself may, and invariably will, ultimately be seen in many modes. Not to mention the fact that it is widely known that big studios treat theatrical release as simply part of the advertising campaign for DVD sales.
This hierarchy of perception must be let go of by the institutions that teach film making. The future of cinema is multi-platform delivery across an unprecedented diversity of delivery platforms - large and small. Thus we need to be instilling in the new generation of film makers the compositional, aesthetic and technical sophistication to be able to create moving image media that engages and exploits this environment and these opportunities rather than ignore or rally against them in an irrelevant air of quality perception. The future is not High Definition, the future is All Definition, where all frame sizes are equally acceptable and viable for both acquisition and delivery in concert with their contexts; from the theatre, to the home theatre, to the game console to the mobile phone.
In concert with this, the other major factor that is profoundly effecting filmmaker culture is the raw efficiency of production that not just allows, but in many ways demands, an holistic and integrated skill set in filmmakers themselves. This is not to say that every filmmaker has to be a expert in every part of filmmaking, there will always be specialists and cinema will always be a collaborative art, but the environment that young filmmakers land in the moment they pick up a camera in the digital age is one where self-sufficiency is the means to a career and the means to fulfilling creative vision.
Sitting by the phone waiting for the agent or studio to call to give you permission to make a film is not only a dying paradigm but a wholly undesirable one to filmmakers embedded in the idea of owning the means of production. In the 21st century owning your own fully professional camera and editing system is as simple as a credit card expense and the means to deliver to a mass global audience is a monthly internet connection cost. This environment has never existed before for filmmakers. Subsequently, a film school that isnt teaching students how to produce, fund, shoot, direct, edit, sound mix and, most importantly, Deliver their own self-devised projects, is one that is fundamentally failing their students.
Film schools can best prepare their students to take advantage of the opportunities the digital age offers by educating them to be well-rounded, holistically thinking and broadly skilled. They should have such a curriculum that endeavours to empower students to understand every aspect of filmmaking rather than the traditional specialization model of departments that function in a silo mentality. This kind of teaching simply creates filmmakers ready for a film making culture that is gone and ill-prepared for what is to come.
The core ideal we aim for at The International Film School Sydney is to create filmmakers for whom technology is transparent. This is not to say that everyone is an expert at everything, but rather that every student that we teach achieves a position where their conceptual understanding of technology is transparent to their creative vision; where What they want to make is never limited or hamstrung by a lack of technical understanding.
3. In what ways do you believe the industry has changed most since your film school was founded?
One school im invoved in is the International Film School Sydney. This is a very new school, a small start-up school only a few years old, so in many ways it was founded and developed to be as in-touch as possible with contemporary thinking about production and, in particular, creative technologies. And yet even in the short time the school has been open there have been significant shifts. Among the most significant to effect the way skills and processes are taught is the simple fact of choice. Whilst there have always been different types of cameras, different types of editing systems for cinema production, the truth is that they were remarkably unified and very consistent. Whilst there were choices between film stock or lenses there is now a far more open slather of options for how to both acquire and process an image than ever before. Every year delivers new recording formats, new camera types, new software tools.
The biggest challenge for a film school is obviously staying up to date and contemporary with technology which can be a major logistic and costly exercise. But beyond costs, the key challenge to the way the industry changed is the focus on workflow options. Even within the International Film School Sydney we have as part of our modest in-house facilities more than six different camera types and between them those cameras can generate more than a fifteen different recording formats. On top of this we have tape, hard drive and solid-state recording media, each with its own acquisition demands and an array of lenses, adapters, monitors and accessory options. And thats before we get into post where we have three different editing systems, three composition/fx tools, three audio production systems, four delivery and encoding tools, various options for colour correction and grading and a host of plug-ins and extensions. And of course within all these a host of different workflow process options; namely digital intermediates, proxy-editing and on-line/offline.
This kind of massive diversity (and the inherent flexibility that goes with it) is at the heart of the contemporary industry and so needs to be at the heart of how and what we teach. To be an effective filmmaker in this landscape means being empowered with the ability to make clear and informed choices about the right tool and process for the project.
4. What unique or otherwise tailored classes are offered by your film school in order to keep up with changes in film production and the technology that accompanies it?
We dont have specific classes as such to deal with technology changes and evolutions, rather we take an holistic approach of integrating the discussion, use and evaluation of technology in every class. The approach we take is that Cinema IS Technology, that it does not and cannot exist without technology. Subsequently there is no such thing as a non-technical filmmaker.
On a simple level we avoid at all costs becoming a technology training school. We aim to teach our students to be EDITORS not Final Cut Pro or Avid USERS; we teach them to be CINEMATOGRAPHERS not Sony or Panasonic CAMERA OPERATORS. We do this by ensuring that we are never teaching just one type or brand of technology, that students are constantly forced to take what they know and apply it in functional ways to a piece of equipment or software they have never used before. Our hope is that our students gain from this the ability to teach themselves which is far and away the most important skill of all.
This embedding of technology covers every facet of what we teach, not just the obvious camera and editing but right through to screenwriting and producing. At many other film schools there is a hard line in the sand between what is considered technical and non-technical, we make no such distinction. As result the first thing all students learn to use is Celtx, an open-source integrated screenwriting and pre-production system. A tool like Celtx goes far beyond just correct formatting of a screenplay to become a complete project management system - from script break down to scheduling. In teaching these dedicated Celtx courses on screenplay formatting, project management, script break-down, digital annotation and review, online collaboration and exchange systems that are built into Celtx, we immediately immerse our students in two crucial understandings about cinema production. The first is simply that idea that technology is not an add-on to cinema, it is what cinema IS at every level and that this technology is a tool that is hugely empowering. The second is that, by teaching our students about how to construct, breakdown and manage a project using a versatile digital tool, we are able to impress on them the power of pragmatism. A great idea is useless if it cant be realised so great cinema comes when great ideas meet effective pragmatism that allows the vision to be made into a tangible cinematic work.
These concepts that we are able to teach with Celtx right from the inception of the course empower students with an ongoing perspective of flexibility and integration in their relationship with technology. But starting with technology as an enabler to writing and producing they are positioned to view technology as a weapon not an obstacle.
Every filmmaker should consider themselves a Dramatist. Not a writer or story-teller or script analyst or any other useless term, but a Dramatist - someone who understands and can construct Drama - human engagement with experience, narrative and catharsis. Too often this is watered down into just ‘story’. A colleague of mine, an extensively experienced screenwriter and movie project developer, declares ad-nuseum that the filmmakers job is NOT AT ALL to tell a story but rather take the viewer on a journey through the story. The distinction I believe is profound.
What invariably arises out of such exertions and declarations is discussion of what Story is and how it is or should be structured? At this point ‘Aristotle’ rears his head - 3-act structure - various ‘methods’ - Hero’s journey and so on. Only a fool rejects these - 4000 years of performative works of drama cannot be so easily dismissed, let alone the past century of cinema - more dramatically satisfying then any other form that has gone before.
But once any artform develops a cannon of work people begin to view that body of work collectively and analytically and start to see patterns. And from those patterns they form conclusions and assumptions. Of itself, to this point, that?s a-ok. But the art of the dramatist can quickly fall in a hole when such patterns begin to be referred to as ‘rules’, formulas, set-in-stone-defy-at-your-peril parameters.
Am i the only one who wonders why so many of the so-called Gurus of screenwriting structure Do Not have impressive CV’s as produced screenwriters? With the glorious exception of William Goldman - it makes me wonder why, if these guys do know all the answers as to ‘how to write a screenplay that sells’, they’re doing a whole lot more preaching than practicing? Or do they just know that there’s a whole lot more money to be made from preaching than actually practicing? Or, more cynically, is the preaching a way to make up for a lack of talent? (ie “if i talk loud enough about Aristotle and dramatic arcs no one will notice my lack of actual screen credits…” (notice im not naming names as I dont want to be sued - these guys who shall remain nameless strike as the litigious type…)
Anyway, it was while musing on this idea that I struck upon an article in WIRED by Scott Brown entitled “Why Hollywood needs a new model for storytelling”. Satyrical though it is, it none the less prods at the ‘sub-industry’ of self-help that often plagues filmmaking.
“Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to mourn the death of Story. As you may have heard, it’s kaput?or, at the very least, terminally ill, wracked by videogames, wikis, recaps, talkbacks, YouTube, ADD, and the rise of a multiplatform, multipolar, mashup-media culture. Hollywood, vendor of Story in its most denatured form, is most at risk: The film industry is slowly but steadily being forced to part with quaint artifacts like the “hero’s journey,” Joseph Campbell’s so-called Monomyth. (Which is just so … well … mono.) Beginnings, middles, and ends are headed for the attic, next to the box marked VCR Rewinders/Beastmaster Franchise. And Tinseltown can kick this chestnut to the curb.”
If you want to understand story, you need to understand people, what makes us worry and fear. if you want to understand Aristotelian ideas then here’s a thought; read Aristotle! better from the horses mouth than from some bloated mis-attributing parody. Read Howard Suber’s book “the Power of Film” which will NOT tell you how to write a screenplay but will tell you a lot about the fundamentals of what makes a person/idea/event ‘dramatic’. In fact DO NOT read any book that even vaguely suggests that it will tell you HOW to write a screenplay. Instead read about ideas, conflicts, struggles and adventures; there is far more to be learned there then in another re-hashing of screenplay ‘rules’.
And better still, if you REALLY want to understand the ‘construction of experience’ that is the nuts and bolts of cinema, DONT ask a screenwriter…! Instead ask an Editor. Dont read Screenwriting books, read books on Editing. Start with Norman Hollyn’s superb ‘The Lean Forward Moment’ and work your way from there.
The screenwriter is simply the first writer on a movie. The Director then ‘re-writes’ with direction and the actors re-write their bits with performance but ultimately the king kong final-say ‘writer’ is the Editor. Most editor’s Ive ever known have a significantly more engrained and innate sense of the ‘cinematic’ and how to leverage dramatic action into emotional enaggement than most writers will ever comprehend. The art of the Dramatist is the art of Problem solving. Screenwriters only have to solve problems in a 2-dimensional way, it’s the Editor who has to wrangle, craft, shape and manipulate drama with 3-dimensional holistic density - not just as words and actions but also as timing, rhythm, pace, moments, glances and inflections, tones, colours, shapes and sounds.
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.
Sometime ago as part of research I was doing into trends in cinema production I was directed to a website called http://cinemetrics.lv/ which sort to collate raw data about the average length of shots through the history of cinema. Using a custom tool it allowed for a mathematical dataset to be compiled of how many cuts and how long those cuts were during the course of a feature film. What results is a very interesting set of graphs dealing with editing trends over the past century.
Before one even looks at the graphs it be expected that most would speculate that the hollywood/mtv editing aesthetic of ever shorter shots mashed together is the dominant discourse trend; the reliance on pure montage over spatial staging. And such speculation would be correct.
Of particular note is the divergence in the 60s and 70s between US and European films where continental filmmakers embraced the long take. This coincides with the impact of the French New Wave and the Cahiers critics who championed Auteur cinema and the ‘reality’ of spatial cinematic staging in long-take over overt montage of short takes. As we wind into the 80s and 90s we see the influence of Hollywood dominate and the graph lines for European and US cinema draw not only closer together but to decidedly shorter shot lengths.
So what if the future? Will shot lengths continue to be crunched into faster and faster cutting and in a chicken and egg scenario drive and be driven by viewer expectations of visual language? Or will the graph change again and steer back to longer takes and deeper staging?
Cinema is a techno cultural art and as such the art is inextricably tied to the technology; an advance in image acquisition changes the art and method of the acquiring.
I see two technology based connections here - one that may indicate the trend towards faster cutting from the 90s to now and the other sign posting a possible future change of direction back toward long take.
To see what technology may have contributed to a culture of shorter takes and emphasis on montage we have to look at what new filmmaking technologies arose during that period. Similarly to see where trends arise its prudent to look not at what established filmmakers were doing but rather at what young independent aspiring filmmakers were doing; its these who will shape future trends by the processes they engage in their infancy.
The obvious technology of the mid to late 90s that had profound impact on the thinking of filmmakers is of course DV. Low cost cameras shooting to cheap digital tape and able to be edited on a laptop. DV didn’t invent the indie filmmaker - 8 and 16mm had long since established the viability of non-studio filmmaking - but it did pry its doors open to the masses.
But like any format DV had a particular look and feel - the first was an overly smooth motion derived from interlaced sensors at 50i or 60i in opposition to the progressive image of film at 24. The second was that due to very small sensor sizes and low cost optics DV cameras invariably had very deep depth of field.
Despite the bang-for-buck quality of DV both these factors gave DV an aesthetic connection in look and feel to TV news and documentary rather than the narrative filmmaking aesthetic of film audiences had long been schooled in.
There is no doubt that DV was (and is) embraced, even the traditionally conservative broadcast sector utilized DV as a viable acquisition format. But the inherently deep depth of field of DV directly prompted the pursuit of what became known as the ‘film look’. The single most asked question by every DV filmmaker was (and is) how to achieve the ‘film look’ and the most obvious and specific means of doing this was (and is) to emulate shallow depth of field (by way of lens adapters, shallow staging, close-ups and various techniques mechanical or otherwise.
This overt emphasis on shallow focus had an instant association with the long established language of feature film. Because traditionally only expensive cameras shooting with large receptors (ie 35mm film cells) could produce shallow focus there was a perceived direct connection between production values and shallow depth of field. By proxy shallow DOF equals hi quality, deep DOF equals lo quality.
I see this blinkered perspective with my students, they are terrified of the video-look. Of course they can rarely actually quantify what the ‘video look’ is outside of the singularity of avoiding ‘deep focus’ t all costs. A decade and a half of DV has bread a conundrum - on one hand they are whole heartedly digital natives and by and large don’t really understand the impetus to use an archaic process of shooting on celluloid. However by the same token they are of course aspiring professional filmmakers and so seek proactively to have their work seen in that light. As such shallow focus, rack focusing, blurred backgrounds are the sure-fire ticket to that acceptance.
(This is of course in defiance of the glories of deep focus cinema of the 40s and 50s most notably Citizen Kane)
Of course student filmmakers from the outset of the DV era grow up to be the next generation of professional filmmakers. As such they carry with them the aesthetic impetus of their formative years. The technical mechanics of shallow focus images bias a particular cinema aesthetic and visual language. Greatly restricted and narrow bands of focus force the filmmaker to compose in layers rather than depth and such ‘washing line’ composition interspersed with occasional rack focus makes for a rather 2dimensional compositional form; a for that must then rely on cutting and montage to construct spatial relationships rather than deep focus staging.
The tenuous, though still rather compelling, argument I would subsequently wish to paint is that a generation of filmmakers rising out of the populous DV era have concertedly pushed (or been pushed) to favour montage by way of avoiding an aesthetic connection to the great mass of deep focus amateur DV content.
Of course this blaming of DV (or more particularly the desire to avoid visual aesthetics of DV) for the editing culture of the short take is not definitive. It exists as one contributing factor amid a host of elements. But it is one worth consideration of its unexpected and unintended impact on cinema composition and editing aesthetics.
So as to the future; will the trend plotted on the graph continue or is there a technological development that may push the pendulum back and have us see long-take staging return to the dominant cinema discourse?
I’d venture that one particular technology and cinematic construct may push cinema back toward long take; the virtual camera.
A construct of 3D environments, CGI and compositing the virtual camera is a metaphysical point in space that serves as the viewer perspective point over a computer genrated scene. Whilst obviously at home in animation the virtual camera is a regular construct in live action. Witness David Fincher’s Fight Club with single shots that traverse the city, Panic Room with cameras that move through walls and voyeuristically explore the house, Lord of the Rings which very often flies the viewer in single takes across vast distances and TV title sequences such as that from Carnivale that involve a single ‘shot’ moving in and out of tarot card images and Angles in America where a single shot traverses North America from San Francisco to New York.
By virtue of its non-physicality the virtual camera can function in filming a scene with infinite movement - through walls, into impossible spaces, over vast distances. The very nature of the virtual camera is to sustain the continuity of the image. Without a physical need to ‘cut’ to depict an event on the other side of a wall, for example, the virtual camera can simply ‘fly’ there.
I’d venture its possible that, as the virtual camera becomes a more common place mechanism in filmmaking we will see it employed more and more regularly as a standard shooting technique rather than a special effect.
There are firm precedents for this notion of specific technological advances delivering profound shifts in cinema aesthetics. In the 1940’s Kodak developed faster film stocks, this allowed cinematographers to shoot with a closed down aperture and subsequently with a deep depth of field. The deep focus, long-take cinema so expertly utilized in Citizen Kane is a direct result of this technical advance. We may speculate that the virtual camera may deliver a similar shift in staging techniques and a move away from quick cutting to longer takes.
We may also hope in a non technical mode that filmmakers simply get over their hang ups about the digital film look and embrace a greater diversity of compositional techniques that have been neglected, because cinema is going to get mighty dull if we stay the course with shallow DOF, short take, quick cut, master/shot/reverse montage coverage.
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