Note on Database and Narrative
Cinema Construction -- Top Down / Bottom Up: Summary
Top Down: The Script / The Plan
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/
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
• Eyeline
• Audio continuity, especially dialogue, but also other sounds
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFfZ9rb46I8>
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Documentaries
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