Many are pretty tacky, but some could be handy for stylizing clips or whole films. Upload, apply enhancer, download, slam back into iMovie.

I wonder how this teacher would do grades in Understanding Film? (Besides the smiley faces.)

Produced for $160,000. Worldwide gross: $20.7 million.

Class discussion of Paprika reminded me of

and

and Anita Sarkeesian’s great web site Feminist Frequency.

Assembled by Refocused Media. (Nice find, Nick F.)

More at Steadishots.

The opening clip, from Kill Bill, is astonishing — here’s how it was done.

Tell me here. And thank you.

David Mamet, big shot playwriter/screenwriter/director/all-round obnoxious guy, wrote a famous memo to a bunch of screenwriters that included the following (typically, ALL-CAPS, because he’s an in-your-face kind of guy):

THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN’T, I WOULDN’T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA.

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EVERY SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. THAT MEANS: THE MAIN CHARACTER MUST HAVE A SIMPLE, STRAIGHTFORWARD, PRESSING NEED WHICH IMPELS HIM OR HER TO SHOW UP IN THE SCENE.

THIS NEED IS WHY THEY CAME. IT IS WHAT THE SCENE IS ABOUT. THEIR ATTEMPT TO GET THIS NEED MET WILL LEAD, AT THE END OF THE SCENE,TO FAILURE – THIS IS HOW THE SCENE IS OVER. IT, THIS FAILURE, WILL, THEN, OF NECESSITY, PROPEL US INTO THE NEXT SCENE.

ALL THESE ATTEMPTS, TAKEN TOGETHER, WILL, OVER THE COURSE OF THE EPISODE, CONSTITUTE THE PLOT.

This is true of documentaries as well. (Full memo is here.)

Related: Kurt Vonnegut on plots-people-like:

An interesting part of this interview at Bygone Bureau was that the Beasts of the Southern Wild VFX people used the opposite of an anti-shake algorithm — they mapped handheld shake that they liked onto clips that weren’t shakey enough:

It was all shot handheld. No tripods. The whole thing is intentionally jerky. We would actually capture a bunch of that jerky motion, and use it to shake shots that were too smooth. Using the computer, you can track objects in a shot, just like we did with sandwich box in the hot tub, and use that data to control the steadiness of another shot. So, a lot of the work I did was actually making the movie shakier.

The Vimeo clip shows 90 seconds from each one. The tracking shot from  Anna Karenina is pretty astonishing. (How did they get rid of the other dancers during the lift?)