No title available
if i look back, i am lost
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
One Nice Bug Per Day
wallacepolsom
No title available
Peter Solarz
pixel skylines
Kiana Khansmith
⁂
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Not today Justin
No title available
blake kathryn
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Xuebing Du
occasionally subtle
★
trying on a metaphor
Cosimo Galluzzi
seen from Lithuania
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from Brazil
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Singapore
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from Spain
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Indonesia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Netherlands
seen from Netherlands
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seen from United States
@thirdsomething-blog
I love reading up on Hitchcock’s technique, he was such a diligent craftsman.
Today I learned he would often employ what he called a constructionist - a term I have never heard anyone else use in the film industry. This was a person solely responsible for the construction of a story - the story...
Tony Zhou’s ‘Every Frame a Painting’ episode on Orson Welles’ F for Fake.
It’s a great lesson in structuring narrative for moving images. It’s best watched twice - once on YouTube, and secondly with Tony’s own editing annotations.
I’m tempted to try a similar annotation to unpick the editing decisions I make in my own video essays.
Fiction and nonfiction share two essential elements—imagination and emotion—and that’s where the use of reenactments in documentaries betrays the filmmaker. The essence of imagination is seeing what isn’t there—getting an idea on the basis of another idea—and the reenactment is, for the most part, a short-circuiting of imagination. In “The Jinx,” whatever chill might be aroused by the notion of plastic bags filled with Morris Black’s body parts floating in a bay is dispelled by the actual vision of some other plastic bags, procured and filled and tossed on Jarecki’s behalf and filmed by Jarecki... Such reenactments are insults to the audience—they assume that audiences can’t imagine anything like what the filmmaker is getting at—and they reflect the filmmaker’s own sense of impotence to create, by the assemblage of nonfiction material, an idea of what he has in mind. It’s a lack of confidence not just in the assembled material but in his own creative power.
Richard Brody in The New Yorker
I really needed to read this today.
"It's the big element, isn't it, of our medium? The manipulation of time, the perception of time, the control of time?"
A superbly executed video essay about Richard Linklater and the use of time in cinema.
I am currently working on a video essay for Fusion about the history of the time. Film is so woven with time, it's a great opportunity to weave lots of layers into the story and use the medium itself to convey a lot the ideas.
“A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability.”
Albert Einstein
Bananas, Sardines and Sharks: the high cost of cheap convenience.
This is my latest video essay, about the history of the banana industry. Narratively and visually it's a step up for me in sophistication. It's a study in irony, while also striving to detonate ideas visually.
Unlike previous films, I storyboarded this one before I wrote the script; the impact on the visual fluency is noticeable.
"I think cinema is perhaps now where music was before musical notation - writing music as a sequence of marks on paper - was invented. Music had been a crucial part of human culture for thousands of years, but there had been no way to write it down. Its perpetuation depended on an oral culture, the way literature's did in Homeric days. But when modern musical notation was invented, in the 11th century, it opened up the underlying mathematics of music, and made that mathematics emotionally accessible. You could easily manipulate the musical structure on parchment and it would produce startlingly sophisticated emotional effects when it was played. And this in turn opened up the concept of the polyphony - multiple musical lines playing at the same time...Complex and emotional changes of key became possible across the tonal spectrum. And that unleashed all the music of the late 18th and the 19th centuries... I like to think cinema is stumbling around in the "pre-notation" phase of its history...Whether we will ever be able to write anything like cinematic notation, I don't know. But it's interesting to think about."
Film editor Walter Murch in conversation with Michael Ondaatje
So much factual stuff on television and film is so insistently literal, like doomy Arvo Pärt music over pictures of bad things that have happened. And they think that's emotion. But those are cliches that actually make you feel strangely unemotional.
Adam Curtis in conversation with Jon Ronson on Vice.
OK, ignore the before and after split screen, it's not relevant.
This is the first 30 seconds of the iconic television history series The World At War.
Many years ago, as I was training to be a journalist, our lecturer Adrian Monck showed us this sequence without the narration. He then instructed us to write our own 30 second voice-over.
We all came back with scripts crammed with facts and detail, written entirely without thought for the pictures.
Then he played the clip, with Neal Ascherson's poetic yet economical script, read with power by Lawrence Olivier.
For me it was a watershed moment, in understanding the relationship between words and pictures.
"A filmmaker isn't supposed to say things; his job is to show them"
François Truffaut in conversation with Alfred Hitchcock
RadioLab: 'Rippin' the Rainbow a New One' (Ep 10.13 "Colors")
You would assume that pictures are the best way to visualise something. Well, here's an example where audio does it better than images ever could. In this except from an episode about colours, RadioLab investigates whether different animals see rainbows differently. The answer is yes, and to visualise this, they very cleverly transpose light waves into audio waves, through the use of a choir.
Not only does this make colours 'visible' in sound, it also does what video or still images could never do: represent colours which are not visible to the human eye!
A good guide to using rhythm in editing for nonfiction by Dr. Kurt Lancaster; comparing a poetic cinematic documentary against a standard TV documentary.
"We feel a sense of danger, not though his words, but through the rhytmnic tension created in the cut."
"The beauty of image and movement, the rhythm and the effects - everything must subordinated to the purpose."
Alfred Hitchcock
Any real technique is going to be based on things within your control. Anything that is not within your control is not a real technique…Keep giving yourself over to the simple task.
David Mamet - On Directing Film
Illusions by Animal Productions
This is one of the most perfect forms of the video essay I have seen. A bold visual concept, explored through images. The enchanting tone of Bingo O'Malley whispering poetry in your ear dances with the pictures.
Best of all, it's one of eight.
My latest video essay for delve.tv went online last week.
This one was hard work, but I'm happy with it. I feel that narratively and visually this is the most sophisticated film I have made. It makes a complex point but through the structure and imagery of the story, rather than through an explanative script.
The big inspirations for this were Citizen Kane and The Grand Budapest Hotel strangely enough.
And a True Detective themed poster frame because, well, why not.
