Monday, April 04, 2011
USEFUL CLIPS ABOUT FILM MAKING
Above and below, some short clips about film making. I wish what Hitchcock was saying here (above) could be tattooed on the arm of every comedy animation writer: technique trumps content. The way something is said is even more important than what is said. That's why animation scripts (when they're needed at all) need to be short. The artist performers need time to create great scenes without the necessity of always rushing ahead to the next plot point.
There really was such a thing as "The Lubitsch Touch." You see it in films like "Shop Around the Corner" and "Trouble in Paradise." I've never heard it explained adequately. but Wilder nails part of it in this (above) clip.
Here (above) Scorsese makes the same point that Hitchcock makes above. What's usually needed is story, not plot.
No surprise here (above). That a film should end with us wanting to see more is obvious, but I would amend the advice to say that a scene (I'm using live action definitions here), sometimes even a shot, should end with us wanting to see more. I wish more was written about setting up shots and scenes with this in mind.
Also I feel silly for saying this, but how do you like Polanski's white shirt and grey jacket? A really good quality white shirt, when it's thick and new and super white and nicely tailored, is a glorious thing to behold.
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20 comments:
Excellent advice from great film-makers.
The Roman one especially interests me, because I never thought that movies nowadays explain too much. Maybe I should keep that in mind when I see a movie now.
I don't have much interest in a film-making career, but cinema technique is something I really thirst knowledge for. I can't seem to find any decent books on the subject, though. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough.
Two of these guys are still with us. After they're gone...what?
I can't imagine listening to what Darren Aronofsky has to say.
well.... I'm just being dramatic....
In the Billy Wilder clip, does an audience member say "Lubrick", instead of Lubitsch. Just a funny flub; can't quite get my head around a combination of Kubrick and Lubitsch
Technique AND content should bothbe top-notch anyway. High overall standards trump specific priorities.
Zoran just wrote this comment on the Coal Black post. I'll post it here too, just so the comment gets seen.
Zoran: Okay - I'm finished school now, so here at long last is my tirade, as promised: The great missing link in the exquisite dance between music and animation is: 40s drawing meets 70s music. What do the two have in common? Two things: CONSTRUCTION and EXAGGERATION. For a brief period in the history of recorded music -roughly between the advent of 16-track recording and the rise of digital gear - rock'n'roll exploited it's unique position at the crossroads between art, technology and a badly shaken-up society with a restless, frustrated youth to create a kind of caricatured aural sculpture that doubled as flip social comment. Surreal content merged with hyperreal form, silly and serious became one and you could do pretty much anything with a record and get it released - especially if you were signed with, say, Island or Warner Bros. or Zappa's Straight/Bizarre Records. Bob Ezrin, Ken Scott, Richard Perry, Tony Visconti, Frank Zappa, Todd Rundgren, Brian Eno, Chris Thomas.....this is just to name a few of the people who made this possible. I will post some examples, but since I'm starting to make a salient point, I'll give myself some time to think more about it and do something else in the meantime....
Ben: The best film book I know about is "Film Grammar," written by a guy from the University of Uruguay. It's technical, and only useful for people who actually make films, but it delivers the goods. I wish the author had written a follow-up book to keep it current. I like John Alton's book about noir lighting, but it's more than half a century old now.
The best format for a film book would be an ebook where readers could see clips of the films as well as text. It never occurred to me til now, but I wonder if there are any good ebooks on this subject.
Zoran: Sorry to give a short answer to such a long and thoughtful comment. I don't recognize some of the names you mentioned, so I need to do my homework. You ought to write an ebook (or an epamphlet) on the subject.
The best analysis of "The Lubitsch Touch" was in Herman Weinberg's classic book of the same title.
That was a great selection of videos, Eddie! You picked some of my favourites! Here are some others I like:
PT Anderson on digital video vs. film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7npmu9Ge_OY&feature=related
Sydney Lumet on digital video vs. film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrIs2BXwwq0
Film analyses:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJdonxKZSF0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdfCTAqO9pw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvtuiEmHXCc
My mind is drawing a blank right now, I know there's other ones I return to over and over again but not now.
Great clips, reminds me of what "Drive-In Movie Critic" (and my hero) Joe Bob Briggs used to dismiss as "too much plot getting in the way of the story."
Even "exploitation" movies of the 60s - 80s, which are supposed to be all the fun of movies without any of the thinking, could frequently have overwrought plots getting in the way of the blood, breasts and beasts.
To be fair this was often a way of padding time in lieu of budget for those components, but hey, nudity is always relatively inexpensive.
Nice clips Eddie. I love listening to great film makes talk about what they love in there field of work.
I know one of my pet peeves with a lot of films is dialog. Though some film makers are great with dialog (like Tarantino), most of the time I feel like shouting at the screen and telling the actors to shut there noise holes. I feel like to many characters nowadays are telling us how they feel instead of showing us.
I've always believed that if you can replace a line of dialog with a facial expression, do it. Films (cartoons, comics, and theater) are primarily a VISUAL medium after all.
Hey Eddie, I thought you might get a kick out of these 2 articles about films from cracked.com. Watch out for language.
http://www.cracked.com/article_18664_5-annoying-trends-that-make-every-movie-look-same.html
http://www.cracked.com/article_19093_8-actors-who-look-exactly-same-every-movie-poster.html
A very nice white shirt indeed.
Jorge, Slash: It mike take me a day, but I'll look into these links. Thanks!
Some beautiful clips worth watching again. Sometimes you need a reminder of basic things. I saw two movies last night that were all plot and no story - a long night.
Thanks for sharing them with us.
Eddie, I looked for that book on Film Grammar by the Uruguayan guy, but couldn't find it. Thanks for the reccomendation, anyway. I'm definitely gonna look up the John Alton book on noir lighting.
Bleeser: The John Alton has limited usefulness for non-professionals. You'd need a large, empty room and a lot of expensive lighting equipment to try the tricks that he talks about. What he does convey, even to someone who peruses the book only, is the type of mentality that's needed to do first rate work. That's certainly worth a trip to the library.
Film Grammar is a great book about camera placement, but if you want to learn that you should first buy the crummiest, cheapest possible off-brand home digital movie camera and make some home movies. Get some friends to be actors and shoot them exactly the way they were shot in your favorite real movie scenes. If your friends won't help, buy a cheap tripod and shoot yourself. The films you make this way will look worse than horrible, but you'll learn a lot, and it'll prepare you for more complicated work.
If you don't want to make films, but just want to read about them...Aaaaargh!....you're doomed. There are no really good general film books. It's something you have to learn by doing.
Kali: Well. you have to have the jacket to go with it. Now I want to sell my kids into slavery so I can get a nice grey jacket.
The best book on filmmaking, in my opinion, is the 5 C's of Cinematography, which I read from my school library a few years ago. It's really excellent, REALLY excellent.
Jorge: I finally got around to watching those links, and I'm glad I did. The Psycho analysis was really interesting, and Lumet on digital was illuminating. I think Lucas jumped the gun with digital projection, but he was only a few years off. Right around the corner it'll be as good as film, and loosen the strangle hold that distributors have on the film industry.
Thanks for posting these.
Slash: Thanks for the Cracked links. They were right on. Cracked has an interesting site. I've gotta bookmark that.
Regarding the points I was making about music:
*For the purposes of making sense, I'm narrowing my aim in terms of making a point as compared to what I said earlier - for now, anyway....
Alright, take this song for an example.
Is the total sound of that recording PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE in reality? I would say no. The bass is pushed all the way out front and it sounds not just like it's thumping -as it would in a live environment, but THROBBING, like it's trying to break free of the recording - impossible in a real space, where there is no EQ, thus no set limit to how quiet or loud any sound might become. Meanwhile, the guitar sound is thin, sharp and SMALL within the Sound Space -the "screen" of the sound, in film terms- yet we can still hear it, CLEARLY. This is ONLY possible with multitrack recording, which allows you to circumvent the issue of one sound overwhelming another and canceling it out. Once you've done this, you can now PLAY WITH THE PROPORTIONS of sound in ways that you couldn't within the limitations of real - time, one-room recording and/or crude mixing technology, which is all that classic film and cartoon makers had to work with.
More later....
....continued from earlier...
My basic point is that the two crafts are so analogous that I have a hard time understanding why they have never had the chance to work together, one enhancing the entertainment value of the other. There's a reason it's called sound DESIGN - it's essentially the aural equivalent of illustrative design, only working with frequencies and waves of sound instead of lines. Also note that the terms TONE and COLOUR apply to both crafts!
Here's another one. Again, even without doing much, the instruments just sound WACKY in this one. I hear a bass guitar that sounds like an electric tuba, a spider clog dancing on a tin roof for precussion, voices.....well, how to describe them, really? Could Eno REALLY be the only guy who ever figured out how to turn instruments into cartoon animals just with sound processing and mixing? Mind you, I have a very high sensitivity to sound....but to me that song sounds cartoonier than a Spike Jones record. Nothing wrong with Spike Jones, of course - he gets the instruments to do the wackiest things they can, but they still just sound like.....instruments. It's like if every Looney Tune were exactly the same in terms of gags and story structures, but all the drawings were just stick figures. Why eat everything raw when there's so many great ways to cook it? If sounds and pictures can both be manipulated in crazy ways, why just do 50% of what is potentially possible. Tone, colour, shape.....there's a lot more there....
*Just for comparison's sake, this is the equivalent of what animation looks like when cartoonists are forced to work with dumbed-down software in the coldest, flattest, least imaginative and most unnecessarily LOUD way possible to satisfy their overhead. In both cases, digital technology plus executive idiocy equals flat, formless crap. (Not a bad song, though, I must say....)
*Also, it's no accident that the single cartoonist who has come closest to doing exactly what I have in mind when I describe such possibilities is John K. Given more time and money he would probably have done it already. The big difference lies in my interest in bringing art-rock aesthetics into cartoon music versus his aversion to seemingly everything that directly followed the breakup of The Beatles. Then again, we're both Zappa fans. But I find his records get really ugly sounding right about the mid-seventies.....okay, enough of this. I need a walk. Please Gawd, let me be finished talking already....
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