Chapter 2 of Moving Pictures talks about how to watch a movie and the cinematic language in movies. The basic building blocks in cinema are shots. Shots are one continuous capture of a span of action by a camera. Shots could last a few seconds, minutes, or even longer. The shot is everything happening in the frame from the moment the director first says action to when they say cut. All different kinds of shots are what create a movie and how we see the movie as an audience.
Watching a movie is like reading a sentence. Changing from shot to shot should be seamless. Its almost like a conjunction in a sentence. There are words to connect sentences like they never stopped. The cinematic language is created by these shots using camera placement and transitions, colors, lighting and many others.
One of the ways a director can create some cinematic language is by composition and this is the one I like the most. Kubrick does really well in all of his movies. Composition is the arrangement of people, objects, and setting within the frame. We do this all the time without even noticing. When we take pictures on or phones, we are composing an image to how we like it. In movies this can be used to amplify and add some suspense to a scene.
No comments:
Post a Comment