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by anigbrowl
4294 days ago
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for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are This is a massive problem, both with less experienced directors and even some famous ones. It's important to establish the geography of a scene because if you don't the audience will be constantly distracted during action sequences - Michael Bay's Transformers films are particularly egregious offenders in this regard, despite having massive budgets an thus access to the best skills that money can buy. In the 3 I've seen so far, I end up getting completely lost during the obligatory climactic battle between the good and bad robots after about 3-4 minutesand the only way to get through it is to sit back in numb passivity (which I suspect may be intentional givent he semi-propagandistic nature of these films, but that's another story). It doesn't help that the geography of many scenes is wholly imaginary, as many scenes are not shot in a contiguous physical location but may involve trick positioning within the same location, two wholly different locations, or apparently contiguous events that are shot at completely different times. Furthermore, there's a rule of thumb called 'the 180 rule' which holds that there's an imaginary line of interest between the primary character in a scene and the object of his/her scrutiny, and that editing continuity demands you pick one side of that line and keep the cameras within that 180-degree side of an imaginary circle - otherwise the audience (and indeed the editors) get confused about who is looking at what and which way they are positioning themselves within the scene. One can break this rule like any other but it needs to be done deliberately and in a way that signals a shift of focus to the audience. Keeping track of all this during the often-chaotic environment of production is a lot harder than you might imagine. Almost all films, even vary large-budget ones, have at least one shot where the image has to be flipped from left to right to correct a camera positioning error - it's better that Brad Pitt's wristwatch seem to momentarily be on the wrong arm than that the positional grammar be broken by a poorly-chosen angle. |
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A simple scene for it is the start of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, the beginning when they find the planes in the desert. Watch the flow of the camera moves and the cuts. Notice how he uses the fence to establish geography and directions. The rhythm of the plane inspection edits. It's all absolutely perfect.
I'm really happy Soderbergh is doing this. He's one of the very best at editing and this kind of staging construction. He's not quite Spielberg, but even Soderbergh's "bad" films are very well put together. We're lucky he's sharing this stuff with us, how he sees things. Not something that's been able to happen so easily in the past.