Reading Movies

This week we’re moving from audio to video. We’ve been looking at related aspects – photography, sound, design – all along, but now we’re going to look at cinematic camerawork, and how it all comes together.

For starters, watch this …

Wow, so much information packed into that short little piece! We will do a simple exercise with it in the assignments below, but before that, I wanted to share some more from Tony Zhou’s filmmaking series, Every Frame a Painting. It is such an excellent learning resource, I’ve learned a lot myself from watching those videos. Here are some others that are especially worth your consideration:

Assignments:

• Read Roger Ebert’s How the Read a Movie to get some basics of film analysis.
• Using the MovieClips channel on YouTube, examine a scene from any favorite film or movie you would like to watch for exactly one minute using a timer. Before viewing the scene, take a guess as to how many edits you will see in the course of a minute and write that number down. As the film plays, keep a count of the camera shot/angle changes. If what the viewer sees changes, count it. If there is a cut, it counts. If there is a camera movement change, count it. What I want you to become aware of is exactly how much editing happens in the films we watch. As described in How Does an Editor Think and Feel, edits are so natural to the viewer that we aren’t consciously aware of them. Write a brief report about what clip you watched, what was your guess on the number of edits and how many edits you actually counted. How well did you guess? Submit this report to Canvas.
• Create and edit your own video using video editing software. If you have never tried this before, I recommend using CapCut. https://www.capcut.com/  (You may use other software, it’s your choice).
  • Splice several video clips together. You can upload recorded video clips from your phone and upload them or you can use CapCut to capture video from your computer screen.
  • Add a music sound track, audio narration, or both.
  • Save your video and share it to the Canvas assignment. You can export and download a video or you can directly link to it.
• Write a weekly summary of your video making activity, post to Canvas.