Note on Database and Narrative
Making a narrative tends to obscure the database origin of film editing: because elements are selected and ordered according to external criteria -- by which the content of each element advances (or retards) the story. There is much to say about narrative structures, which we'll get to later, but at this point the focus is on the concept of database navigation as central to the work of editing.
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Cinema Construction -- Top Down / Bottom Up: Summary
Top Down: The Script / The Plan
1. An idea
2: Organized into a series of events
3 A list of characters
4. Written as a 'treatment': an outline of the story in scenes
a) what is a scene?
5. Re-written as a script -- includes what happens and what is said in each scene
6. Story Board?
7. Shoot scenes
8. Editing: 1st assembly is cut to script
etc.
Example Hitcock's Marnie
Bottom Up: Research / Imagine a subject/
1. Make arrangements to shoot or collect as much as possible of the subject, building an archive
2. Transfer all material into a NLE system
3. View
4. Make selects
5. Make rough assembly of selects
6. Edit from assembly using database, story, psychological rules, or other methods
Examples:
Nick Broomfield & Joan Churchill Soldier Girls
Maysles Brothers films: e.g. Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens
Pennebaker films: e.g. War Room, Don't Look Back
Filmmaking generally combines both approaches, different degrees of each one.
Depending on the project, one approach takes precedence over the other
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Montage / Continuity / Freeze Frames
III Continuity / Discontinuity
Visual Perception: Scientific Background
Types of Eye Movements and Their Functions
[Reference: James J. Gibson The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception]
• Four types of eye movement
There are four basic types of eye movements: saccades, smooth pursuit movements, vergence movements, and vestibulo-ocular movements.
Saccades are rapid, ballistic movements of the eyes that abruptly change the point of fixation.
(Cinematic parallel: shot to shot editing)
Smooth pursuit movements are much slower tracking movements of the eyes designed to keep a moving stimulus on the fovea. Such movements are under voluntary control in the sense that the observer can choose whether or not to track a moving stimulus (Figure 20.5). (Saccades can also be voluntary, but are also made unconsciously.) Surprisingly, however, only highly trained observers can make a smooth pursuit movement in the absence of a moving target. Most people who try to move their eyes in a smooth fashion without a moving target simply make a saccade.
(Cinematic parallel: pans, tilts, tracking to follow moving target)
Vergence movements align the fovea of each eye with targets located at different distances from the observer. Unlike other types of eye movements in which the two eyes move in the same direction (conjugate eye movements), vergence movements are disconjugate (or disjunctive); they involve either a convergence or divergence of the lines of sight of each eye to see an object that is nearer or farther away.
(Cinematic parallel: focus shifts)
Vestibulo-ocular movements stabilize the eyes relative to the external world, thus compensating for head movements. These reflex responses prevent visual images from “slipping” on the surface of the retina as head position varies.
(Cinematic parallel: steadicam, gimbal, post stabilization)
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Shot-to-shot continuity
When creating a moving image work, one needs to consider whether a section is giving a sense of movement through time — going forward, so that each shot takes us to the next moment, as if we are there experiencing the events as they happen? We can describe this as giving a sense of continuous time.
Then we can also ask, does the sequence convey a sense of continuous space? Are we in the same location, even if individual shots were captured in completely different spaces?
- A limitation of being human is that perceptually we are tied down to our bodies. We can only experience what is in the reach of our senses. And our bodies are tied to continuous space and time. So there is a fundamental appeal to the devices and technologies that connect us to times and spaces beyond the limits of our bodies. But, once we are linked to another time and space, we sometimes want to feel as if we are there, tied down to our bodies elsewhere.
- And sometimes not.
Continuity: Creating a sense of continuous time and space through a number of shots.
Essential in fiction film, and also in documentary, especially cinema verité (as opposed to interview-driven docs, which use different techniques to produce a sense of reality . . . we'll discuss that later).
The concept of the scene -- a depiction of a period that is more or less continuous in space and time. It is contrasted with the concept of montage: consisting of images assembled to capture a state of mind or memory, to make a point or a comparison, or for many other reasons. Even in a fiction film or documentary, a montage sequence may include images from a variety of times, locations and sources, and often the connections between them are left to the viewer. Some filmmakers (e.g. Dziga Vertov) propose as montage the most effective form of cinema: others view cinema as fundamentally a story-telling medium. which sometimes requires a depiction of lived experience with a sense of continuous space and time
Five common techniques for conveying a sense of continuity between shots
• Eyeline
• Following character movement: changing camera positions and angles as a character moves from location to location
• Continuous conversation
• Continuing camera movement
• Audio continuity, especially dialogue, but also other sounds
Nick Broomfield & Joan Churchill Soldier Girls (1981)
• Dziga Vertov Man with a Movie Camera (1929) <SSD>
from montage to continuity to freeze frames --
what does each communicate / how does it work?
Also freeze frames and their effect
Alfred Hitchcock Marnie (1964) <>SSD>
Conventional classi cinema editing for continuity
. • Wong Kar Wei Fallen Angels (1997) <SSD>
Sound determines time -- from continuous to fragmented
Montage
Rocky training montages <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFfZ9rb46I8>
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Documentaries
• The September Issue dir R J Cutler (2009) <SSD>-- intro montage + scenes
• Cutie and the Boxer Zachery Heinzerling (2015) X alternating between real time scenes and montage to convey past moments
• Foreign Parts (2010) dir Verena Paravel & J.P. Sniadecki X Willets Point, Queens -- Portrait of a location
continuing audio gives the viewer a sense that the adjacent scenes are happening simultaneously
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