Basic Film Terms

1. Basic Film Terms

2. Auteur French for "author". Used by critics to indicate the figure, usually the director, who stamped a film with his/her own "personality".

3. Frame • Dividing line between the edges of the screen image and the enclosing darkness of the theater • Single photo of film

4. Types of Shots • Cinematic shots are defined by the amount of subject matter within the frame • Shots can vary in duration • Shots vary in time from subliminal (a few frames) to quick (less than a second) to “average” (more than a second but less than a minute) to lengthy (more than a minute)

5. Establishing Shot (or Extreme Long Shot) • Shot taken from a great distance, almost always an exterior shot, shows much of locale • ELS Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom

6. Long Shot (LS) • (A relative term) A shot taken from a sufficient distance to show a landscape, a building, or a large crowd Austin Powers and the Spy Who Shagged Me

7. Medium Shot (MS) • (Also relative) a shot between a long shot and a close-up that might show two people in full figure or several people from the waist up The Talented Mr. Ripley

8. Close-Up (CU) • A shot of a small object or face that fills the screen • Adds importance to object photographed Under Pressure

9. Extreme Close-Up (ECU) • A shot of a small object or part of a face that fills the screen Rocky Horror Picture Show The Saint In London

10. Over the Shoulder Shot • Usually contains two figures, one with his/her back to the camera, and the other facing the camera Hollow Man Cast Away

11. Types of Angles • The angle is determined by where the camera is placed not the subject matter • Angles can serve as commentary on the subject matter

12. Bird’s Eye View • Camera is placed directly overhead • Extremely disorienting • Viewer is godlike Beverly Hills Girl Scouts

13. High Angle (h/a) • Camera looks down at what is being photographed • Takes away power of subject, makes it insignificant • Gives a general overview Without Limits

14. Low Angle (l/a) • Camera is located below subject matter • Increases height and powerof subject The Patriot

15. Oblique Angle • Lateral tilt of the camera sothat figures appear to befalling out of the frame • Suggests tensionand transition • Sometimes used asthe point of viewof a drunk The Matrix

16. Point of View (POV) • A shot taken from the vantage point a particular character, or what a character sees

17. “Eye-Level” • Roughly 5 to 6 feet off the ground, the way an actual observer might view a scene • Most common

18. Camera Movement

19. Pan • The camera moves horizontally on a fixed base.

20. Tilt • The camera points up or down from a fixed base

21. Tracking (dolly) shot • The camera moves through space on a wheeled truck (or dolly), but stays in the same plane

22. Boom • The camera moves up or down through space

23. Zoom • Not a camera movement, but a shift in the focal length of the camera lens to give the impression that the camera is getting closer to or farther from an object

24. Getting from Scene to Scene

25. Editing The joining together of clips of film into a single filmstrip. The cut is a simple edit but there are many other possible ways to transition from one shot to another.

26. Editing Editing is both technique (or method) and art. Shots have two values: (1) what is within the shot; (2) situating a shot in relation to the other shots in the film. The director determines what’s within the shot, while the editor determines shot situation.

27. Editing: Shot Situation • Viewers interpret shots in relation to surrounding shots. The meaning of one shot affects the meaning of the other, and their combined meaning affects how we see the following shots and so on. This is juxtaposition.

28. Editing Effects Editing accomplishes various effects • helps to tell a story • provokes ideas or feelings • calls attention to itself as an element of cinematic form

29. Transition The shot is defined by editing, but editing also works to join shots together. There are many ways of effecting that transition, some more evident than others. In the analytical tradition, editing serves to establish space and lead the viewer to the most salient aspects of a scene.

30. Transition Styles • In the classical continuitystyle, editing techniques avoid drawing attention to themselves. In a constructivist tradition such as Soviet Montage cinema, there is no such false modesty. Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera, for example, celebrates the power of the cinema to create a new reality out of disparate fragments.

31. Lev Kuleshov Kuleshov was a Soviet film theorist who argued in the 1920s that editing a film is like constructing a building. Brick-by-brick (shot-by-shot) the building (film) is erected.

32. The Kuleshov Effect Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of an expressionless face was alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl, an old woman's coffin). This is known as montage. The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on the actor’s face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire or grief respectively.

33. Kuleshov Effect Actually the footage of the actor was the same shot repeated over and over again. His expression never changed! Kuleshove reported that the audience "raved about the acting.... the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same."

34. Kuleshov Effect: Implications The implication is that viewers bring their own emotional reactions to sequences of images, and then moreover attribute those reactions to the actor, investing his impassive face with their own feelings. Two sequential shots need not have any actual relationship at all to one another for this effect to take place in the viewer’s mind.

35. Continuity in Editing System The purpose of continuity editing is to smooth over the inherent discontinuity of the editing process and to establish a logical coherence between shots. The editor/editing strives to remain invisible. This is very unlike Soviet Montage, which strives to bring attention to itself.

36. Continuity in Editing System In most films, logical coherence is achieved by cutting to continuity, which emphasizes smooth transition of time and space, a continuity of physical and spatial action. However, some films incorporate cutting to continuity into a more complex classical cutting technique, one which also tries to show psychological continuity of shots, which seeks to combine continuity and montage.

37. Cutting Film for Continuity The most fundamental tool of the shot is the cut. It is the technique of joining together two shots. The most common types of cuts in film editing follow.

38. Cheat Cut In the continuity editing system, a cut which purports to show continuous time and space from shot to shot but which actually mismatches the position of figures or objects in the scene. In the following sequence from Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minelli, 1944) the editing sacrifices actual physical space for dramatic space.

39. Cheat Cut As we can see in the first shot, there is a wall behind the telephone.

40. Cheat Cut

41. Cheat Cut However, that wall magically disappears in the third shot in order to show both the telephone and the family seated around the dining table (an important element in the film) from an angle that would had been impossible in an actual room.

42. Dissolve A gradual transition in which the end of one scene is superimposed over the beginning of a new one.

43. Fade-out/Fade in • A scene gradually goes dark or a new one gradually emerges from darkness

44. Wipe • An optical effect in which one shot appears to push appears to push the preceding one from the screen.

45. Iris • An optical effect in which one shot appears to emerge from a shape on the screen.

46. Seven Rules for Editing In his book, On Film Editing, Edward Dmytryk stipulates seven rules of cutting: • Rule 1: Never make a cut without a positive reason. • Rule 2: When undecided about the exact frame to cut on, cut long rather than short • Rule 3: Whenever possible cut 'in movement' • Rule 4: The 'fresh' is preferable to the 'stale' • Rule 5: All scenes should begin and end with continuing action • Rule 6: Cut for proper values rather than proper 'matches' • Rule 7: Substance first—then form

47. Criteria for Editing There are six main criteria for evaluating a cut or deciding where to cut. They are (in order of importance, most important first): • Emotion — Does the cut reflect what the editor believes the audience should be feeling at that moment? • Story — Does the cut advance the story? • Rhythm — Does the cut occur at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and 'right'? • Eye-trace — Does the cut pay respect to the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame? • Two-dimensional place of the screen — Does the cut respect the 180 degree rule? • Three-dimensional space of action — Is the cut true to the physical/spatial relationships within the diegesis?