Daily Blog 1/19/18

Today's class began with a review of the editing format, Eyeline match. We reminded ourselves what it means and the editing steps of how it works:

Character looking at something

Shot of that thing

Character Reacting

Then, we discussed shortly how it contributes to film and looked in our groups at what the other classes put in the slide show from last week as their examples. After this short conversation, we then went on to a new discussion about editing choices. Mr. Rivers wrote on the board three purposes:

Narrative Purpose

Thematic Purpose

Practical Purpose

Mr. Rivers has us go into groups and discuss amongst ourselves what we think they mean among film. My group decided that:

Narrative tells the story

Thematic purpose tells the theme or the overall purpose

Practical purpose tells the common sense and purpose of the story                         

After our group discussion, Mr. Rivers brought it back to the class and we all decided:

Narrative - Story, characters, plot/conflict

Thematic - The overall message, themes, tone, style, genre

Practical - To preserve continuity (make sure everything makes sense)

After we established this idea we quickly moved on to the Glossary of Cuts. Which is a list of the different kinds of cuts seen in film. The list goes as follows:

- Cutting on action (cutting while there is movement on-screen)

- Cutaway (cutting to an insert shot and then back)

- Cross-cutting (back and forth between locations, ex: phone call)

- Jump cuts (disjointed edits in the same shot or action)

- Match cut (cut from one shot to a similar shot by either matching the action or composition)

We then watched a video that explains what they mean and showed examples of the cuts in popular films. Mr. Rivers describes how he understands it is a lot of info to fathom at once and does not expect us to get it right away, but hopes that overtime we can learn to add them into our own editing. Then we went on to view scenes from psycho, and count how many shots make up the sequence. To finish off class, we re evaluated the Editing choices in the clip from psycho as follows:
Narrative - Story, characters, plot/conflict-#’s hidden killer
Thematic - The overall message, themes, tone (chaotic - back and forth), style, genre
Practical - To preserve continuity (make sure everything makes sense) hiding the actresses’ body, it adds up, we are hiding stab wounds.

After looking through my notes from class, I thought about how often these cuts happen in film and we don’t realize it. In just about everything we watch, youtube videos, netflix series, movies, etc. all have these different shots in them. From now on, I am going to be more aware of these different shots. Whether or not I will actually remember what they are called is one thing, but I will actually notice them.