Author: Post

Watching Raiders just for the “Staging”

/ Post

Raiders

Stephen Soderbergh (Sex Lies and Videotape, Ocean’s 11, 12, 13, Magic Mike) has posted a little essay and a B&W version of Raiders of the Lost Ark for studying what he’s calling “staging.”

So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order?

Freeze frame in iMovie 10

/ Post

Freeze

Sometimes it’s handy to use a freeze-frame as a cutaway — i.e., with the audio continuing during the video freeze:

  1. Scrub to your freeze-point.
  2. Modify > Add Freeze Frame
  3. Lift the resulting clip up and out of the time-line and snap to the beginning of the cut.
  4. Adjust the length of the freeze as it fits your needs.

iMovie 10

/ Post

iMovie 2013

(If you’re used to the older iMovie, Apple has a support doc explaining where the interface of iMovie 10 has moved some features from iMovie 2011.)

Basic organizing advice:

  1. Make a new “Event” for each film you make. New Events have a default name of the date, but you should change it right away to whatever your film is about.
  2. Once you have an Event, you can
    1. import media – i.e., clips – to it and
    2. make a new Movie in it. (Both Movies and Trailers are kinds of “Projects,” which is probably why Apple doesn’t just call “Projects” “Movies.”)

Werner Herzog on a career in film

/ Post

Good stuff.

The best advice I can offer to those heading into the world of film is not to wait for the system to finance your projects and for others to decide your fate. If you can’t afford to make a million-dollar film, raise $10,000 and produce it yourself. That’s all you need to make a feature film these days. Beware of useless, bottom-rung secretarial jobs in film-production companies. Instead, so long as you are able-bodied, head out to where the real world is. 

(If you don’t know Herzog, you might go find Fitzcarraldo and Burden of Dreams.)

 

Final exam 2014

/ Post

Understanding Film this year had three goals:

  1. to expand your taste, so that you became an audience for a wider range of films than the blockbusters at Regal Brunswick 10;
  2. to expand your awareness of what goes on in films, so that you see more in what you watch; and
  3. to give you some experience in making films that you could not have made before taking the course.

Write an essay in three sections (2+ ¶s each?) in which you show that you met these three goals. Use lots of specifics, examples, etc., as support in each. In the final section, be sure to refer specifically to your last film (in addition to your other films, if you wish). If you do not have a final film, refer to the other other films you made during the year. In either case, in all answers, throw around as much jargon and film terminology as you can.

Make it look like an essay — name, course, date, double-spaced. Email essay — as an attachment AND copy’n’pasted into the email itself.