Collected Data
"It’s useful to think of a genre as a category having a core and a periphery."
Because I’m interested in how the storytelling strategies of popular cinema, the heist film is a natural thing for me to consider. Refreshing the genre may involve not just adjusting the story world—giving men’s roles to women—but also considering ways of handling two other dimensions of narrative: plot structure and cinematic narration. I argue in Reinventing that Hollywood filmmaking uses a sort of variorum principle, a pressure to explore as many narrative devices as possible within the constraints of tradition. For this reason, the prospect of Ocean’s Eight prodded me to think about how convention and innovation work in the caper movie. It’s also a good excuse to go back and watch some skilful cinema.
One last big job: How heist movies tell their stories
"We don't really know where this technology or where the art of VR is going"
It's simply a matter of time, however, before the technology will catch up to whatever storytelling needs filmmakers have or can imagine, according to Robert Stromberg, an Oscar-winning American special effects artist, art director, designer and filmmaker whose credits include Maleficent, Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean and Alice in Wonderland.
VR is not simply a film, or a videogame, said Stromberg, who also directed a VR experience that accompanied Ridley Scott's The Martian."It's this new thing and a form of entertainment at the level of Hollywood's biggest films," he said. "It's a new way for people to experience anything they want to experience and also a new way to tell stories. It's this sort of frontier, this brand-new world on its own."
Virtual reality: Future of filmmaking or cinema's latest gimmick?
Why does VR have to be a storytelling medium?
"Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling went off to the publisher this afternoon."
It’s the only study I know of how narrative techniques emerged and developed in a single era. No wonder it took five years. I watched over 600 films. I trawled through books and trade papers for hints about what the producers, directors, and writers thought they were doing. And because a lot of techniques weren’t unique to film (e.g., flashbacks, first-person voice-over, etc.), I wound up reading forgotten plays and neglected novels, while listening to hours of old-time radio.
Oof! Out!
"What is remarkable about it is not the production values - it is actually a rather dull piece of work - but a process that involved AI at every stage."
Eclipse will not win any awards for creative film-making, and its director won't be snapped up to make a Hollywood blockbuster. But AI is advancing every day - and a decade from now, actors may find a computer sitting in the director's chair shouting: "Cut!"
'Cut!' - the AI director
"No one has even come close to mastering the medium, but it’s clear that holding on to the traditional rules of storytelling is a surefire way to make disappointing VR."
The best VR at the event were the pieces where the filmmaker created a world, and you experience the story from within it. The emotion evoked from the landscape and the characters in the world is the story. It’s not about watching a series of events; it’s about viscerally responding to the energy, the vibe, the spirit of a space.
Yes, everyone recognizes that this sounds like some trippy shit.
How Traditional Storytelling Is Ruining Virtual Reality Film
"This is simply perfect artistry. With Dimitri Tiomkin’s symbolic score, perpetuating the omnipresent theme of duality, and William H. Ziegler’s masterful editing, Strangers on a Train is easily one of the top exhibits in the genre’s history."
Cinephilia and Beyond;
Even though a lot of film scholars over the years considered the movie at least to a degree inferior to Hitchcock’s landmark films such as Vertigo or Rear Window, this captivating story of two people meeting on a train and conversing about the execution of a perfect murder has forever remained a much desired topic of analysis and debate among film enthusiasts all over the world. What distinguishes Strangers on a Train from similar films, even within Hitchcock’s own canon, is the fascinating idea at the center of it–the motif of doubles, the inner battle of good and evil in all human beings–as well as impressive technical virtuosity we grew accustomed to when talking about the works of the British highly commercial artist. The suspense is so powerful it can be felt though the screen, the acting is great, mostly thanks to Hitchcock’s old friend from Rope Farley Granger and his antagonistic counterpart Robert Walker, the script… oh, the script. If acquiring the rights to Highsmith’s novel was a walk in the park—by purposely leaving out his name from the negotiation process, Hitchcock managed to get the rights for a meagre 7,500 dollars–the process of finding the right screenwriter and producing a satisfactory script was nothing less than a hike over the Himalayas.
'STRANGERS ON A TRAIN': A TECHNICALLY PERFECT PSYCHOLOGICAL CAROUSEL AS ONE OF HITCHCOCK'S BEST
"If you’re going to kneecap a creator’s ability to tell a story, you’re going to reduce the quality of the story along with it."
Where the camera is positioned, how it moves within the scene, what type of lens is being used, the way your eyes are being guided around the frame or used to form bridges across cuts, composition, lighting… These are the foundations of movie making. The basic elements of the language of cinema itself. What I don’t understand is why creators would want to abandon huge pieces of this language and thus greatly diminish their storytelling capability. What is there to gain in this scenario? It’s like asking someone to convey a complex topic using only the vocabulary they had in the third grade.
Why I don’t believe in “cinematic” VR
"You can argue that for fast-cut scenes it’s better to adopt a brute-force simplicity of composition, favoring the center."
Mad Max: Fury Road seems to me a superbly directed film in its chosen style, but we can find alternatives. What about fast cutting that tries, as a part of an action scene’s kinetic drive, to shuttle or bounce the viewer’s attention more widely across the frame? This option wouldn’t be helter-skelter in the Bay manner; it’s calculated, and engenders its own pictorial excitement.
Off-center: MAD MAX’s headroom
"We demonstrate that our method can synthesize visually believable performances with applications in emotion transition, performance correction, and timing control."
From Disney Research;
We present a method to continuously blend between multiple facial performances of an actor, which can contain different facial expressions or emotional states…a seamless facial blending approach that provides the director full control to interpolate timing, facial expression, and local appearance, in order to generate novel performances after filming.
FaceDirector: Continuous Control of Facial Performance in Video
"I want to beg filmmakers (young ones especially) to try something else."
"Films are very good at stirring up emotion but you have to be careful about which emotion you’re stirring up."
Inevitably, there is a coarsening of the message there because of trying to adapt to all these different sensibilities and different ways of thinking on the different continents of the globe. But very often it’s simply lazy filmmaking. It’s hard to make it the other way because of the uncertainty of it all, because it’s risky. I find it much more interesting to make things this way precisely because it does involve the audience in the film. And really the last creative act of any film is viewing by the audience. The audience are really the ones who are creating the film, it doesn’t really exist on the screen, it exists in a kind of penumbra between the audience and the screen, the interaction of those two things. And exactly what you’re saying allows that interaction to take place. Otherwise, the audience is just blasted by the things coming from the screen, and they just have to sit there and take it.
‘WATCHING FEATURE MOTION PICTURES IN THEATERS IS BARELY A HUNDRED YEARS OLD, AND I’VE BEEN WORKING IN FILMS FOR HALF THAT TIME’
Watch: "Cutting the Edge: Freedom in Framing"
A few thoughts;
While the author acknowledges that mixing aspect ratio’s predates digital, they under play how old of an idea it is. Cinematographer Robert Richardson was experimenting with this in the early 90’s. Long before even digital editing was the norm.
How many films today mix aspect ratios as a reality of having limited access to the IMAX format? IMAX is very expensive. Most American films that shoot IMAX only do so for select scenes.
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