Film Production--Making the Movie

The ProcessPreproduction

Research, Scriptwriting, Storyboards, Shooting Scripts, Funding, Locations, Auditions

Production Capturing images & sounds; working with actors--lighting,

sets, costumes, movement, music, sound effects

Post-productionEditing, motion graphics, color correction, sound mix, score, Foley, etc

Distribution and MarketingFilm festivals, Markets, Theatrical, Online, DIY, Transmedia

The ProcessPreproduction

Research, Scriptwriting, Storyboards, Shooting Scripts, Funding, Locations, Auditions

Production Capturing images & sounds; working with actors--lighting,

sets, costumes, movement, music, sound effects

Post-productionEditing, motion graphics, color correction, sound mix, score, Foley, etc

Distribution and MarketingFilm festivals, Markets, Theatrical, Online, DIY, Transmedia

Transmedia

“Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated

entertainment experience.” Henry Jenkins

» Hope is Missing -- a social media driven ARG

“Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated

entertainment experience.” Henry Jenkins

» Hope is Missing -- a social media driven ARG

Film Style

Ways that a film uses filmmaking techniques:

• Mise-en-scene

• Cinematography

• Editing (Montage)

• Sound

Film Movements

• Films that are produced within a particular period and/or nation and that share significant traits of style and form.

• Filmmakers who operate within a common production structure and who share certain assumptions about filmmaking.

Eadweard Muybridge 1878

• Stanford, governor of CA, wanted to see if all four hooves of horse came off the ground at same time. EM set up series of cameras with trip wires across the track.

Women in Motion

• Muybridge studied the body (particularly the woman’s body) in motion… Was it science? Was it art? Something else?

Early Cinema Names1893-1903

• Etienne-Jules Marey--camera, projector parts• George Eastman--celluloid• Thomas Edison/Dickson--kinetoscope, Black Maria• Lumiere brothers--Project onto screen• George Melies--magician, first special effects

D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation

• Crosscutting (last minute rescues)

• Close-ups• Directing emotions,

more subtly• Appealing to politics

Classical Hollywood Cinema1908-1927

• Motion Picture Patents Co. (MPPC), Edison monopoly

• Independents in CA by 20s--Famous Players Lasky (Paramount), MGM, Fox, Warner Bros, Universal

• Development of continuity system

Continuity system

• Eyeline Matches

• Shot/Reverse shot

• Axis-of-action (180 degree rule)

• Match on action

• Establishing shots

Ex: Record a conversation at table

German Expressionism1919-1926

Emphasis on mise-en- scene--distorted shapes, heavy makeup, exaggerated movements.

“The film image must become graphic art.” Hermann Warm, designer of “Caligari” “Film must be drawings brought to life.”

Kracauer--symbolic power

• “The revolutionary meaning of the story reveals itself unmistakably at the end, with the disclosure of the psychiatrist as Caligari: reason overpowers unreasonable power, insane authority is symbolically abolished.” Siegfried Kracauer, 1947

French Impressionism & Surrealism1918-1930

Emphasis on internal psychology, dreams, flashbacks, emotion.

Point of view shots, distorted images, new lenses, cameras on roller skates--mobile frames.

Surrealist Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel--anti-narrative, anti-rational. (“Un Chien Andalou,” 1928)

Soviet Montage1924-1930

Vertov, Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein

“Of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important.” Lenin 1922

Emphasis on editing and action

Eisenstein’s intelectual montage--juxtaposing images to create a concept--often a revolutionary “collision” between a “collective hero”--the proletariat--and the enemy--the bourgeoisie

Watch “Strike”

Eisenstein--Montage

• “Conflicts within the form, with the shot…as well as between colliding shots or montage”:

• 1.Graphic conflict• 2. Conflict of planes• 3. Conflict of volumes• 4. Spatial conflict• 5. Light conflict, tempo conflict, etc… Dialectical thinking=synthesis from conflict

(thesis +antithesis=synthesis) Sergei Eisenstin, 1929

Bazin--realism

• “Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love.” Andre Bazin 1967

Narrative structure--Aristotelian

• "A chain of events linked by cause and effect and occurring in time and space.”

Protagonist/Antagonist--conflicting goals and motivations

CHC--Cause/effect structure with closure?

Bordwell-- Forms of Cinematic MeaningStory and Plot

• Referential--constructed world of film• Explicit--abstract, thematic meaning, stated• Implicit--thematic meaning, not stated overtly• Symptomatic--meaning unknown to filmmaker

Other terms to know:• Diegesis; Extra-diegesis (Look them up…)

Film Form

The sum of all the parts of the film, shaped by patterns:

• Repetition and Variation

• Story Lines

• Character Traits

Ferdinand de Saussure (1907)Linguistics and Meaning

Sign=Signifier + SignifiedRelationship is learned or arbitrary

• Signifier--Form that the sign takes• Signified--Concept it represents

Ex: Stop signSignifier=?Signified=?

C.S. Peirce (1894)-- Semiotics--How signs denote objects

• Iconic--Signifier has resemblance to object it represents. E.g. photograph, portrait, sound effects on radio

• Indexical--Factual connection to object, indicator. E.g. Smoke indicates fire, shadow indicates presence, film=?.

• Symbolic--Abstract relation to signified. E.g. Stop sign, language, burkas

Walter Benjamin Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

• “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”

• “…that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”

• “The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition.” Photos break this ritual.

• “Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman.”

Walter Benjamin Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

• “Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art.”

• “Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial--and literary--means the effects which the public seeks in the film.” See Duchamp

• ““I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” Duhamel

• “A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it…In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art…. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”

Walter Benjamin Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction

• All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war..”

• “Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technical resources while maintaining the property system….”

• “…through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.”