Brows of Height

[rinue]

Chris and I are back at work on the musical, and we've settled on a concept and outline and characters... which means the current step is I have to write all of it down, even though I know we'll probably change a lot of it as we write the songs and then again as we cast it (which is years off, musicals take on average 10 years, it's worse even than movies, which average 7). The book is feeling like "Company" crossed with "Assassins" at the moment, and I'm pretty sure Chris has seen neither, and I'm also pretty sure that when it's finished if I say "see, it's just like those musicals" everybody will tell me no it isn't. This is the lesson I have learned from Wes Anderson making Fantastic Mr. Fox, and from the co-writer of Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" having the Who's recording team stare at him blankly when he talked about how obviously he'd referenced "My Generation." We just don't hear it, mate.

==

Work on the movie edit continues, although as I've said (at least verbally) the process feels like it better fits the older term "montage." I'm not polishing or reordering an already thought-through whole; I'm building something up from scraps of takes grabbed on different days with different technical challenges. I think I've made it to page 4 of the screenplay, and I've hit 9 minutes. The "10 minute film" is shaping up to be more like 20.

I don't think it will feel slow, but I don't think I can tighten it much either. It's not quite a silent movie - there is minimal dialog - but it's informed by the techniques of silent film, analogous to Fritz Lang's M. I'm counting on the way I sequence images to do the heavy lifting of storytelling. (Most of the audio is non-synch atmopsheric stuff like footsteps that will be foleyed in later. I wrote the movie knowing we didn't have a sound crew.) Complicating matters further, we've created a new visual grammar for magic, which means I have to teach you how to watch the film as you're watching the film. So the editing of a given moment goes:

- I am showing you that a thing causes a thing.
- Did you get it? Here, I am showing it to you again.
- Okay, now that you can predict how it is going to go I will show it to you a third time but extend it another step.

It won't feel slow. It will feel like it's giving you just enough time to catch up. But each moment is significantly stretched.

==

Ciro and I went to see the Boston Modern Orchestra Project this evening, always a great pleasure. I was delighted by Diana Voyer's nouveau-pastorale The Infinite Forest, but the highlight for me was Troubadors by John Corigliano, who you might recognize as the score composer for Altered States and The Red Violin. Both composers were in the audience.

==

After dinner, Dad pulled out Roy's WWII and Korea medals and patches and explained what they all were. Not sure why he decided to do that today in particular, but it was interesting.

Comments

[sabotabby]

That editing process sounds fascinating. I'm trying to take more notice of editing in the films I watch, largely so that I can explainify to the kids why their films don't make any sense, but good editing is so often invisible.

[rinue]

I feel like editing is something I internalized naturally, kind of the same way you know what harmonies feel right in music even before you formally study music theory. You're also a prisoner of what footage you have to work with - if the camera work crosses the line a lot and doesn't give you a sense of spacial orientation, editing won't fix that.

Possibly your kids would benefit from an exercize in classic continuity, like staging a gunfight, or a sequence that takes place in a hall or on a train platform - something where it's continually important to know where along a straight line every person is and how far apart from each other they are.

Or they might try to play with point of view - just asking and answering the question "how do I use images to show what the main character in the scene is paying attention to, when he or she doesn't want to let the other characters know but the audience needs to know."

Most "editing" problems are really camera coverage problems. You want to make sure, when you have multiple angles of a scene, that it's possible to tell how they relate, which usually means you want them all to be within 180 degrees of each other (so cut the space in half, and keep all the camera placements on one side of that line), or when you know you're going to cross that line, you use a camera move or a piece of the scenery to indicate that you're moving to establish a new "line." (The screen is a flat plane.) Within your 180 degrees of camera freedom, you ideally want a variety of shot sizes, but you also want each shot to be at least 20 degrees apart in angle (i.e. clearly from a different angle) or on exactly the same angle (like a closeup and a wide shot from the same tripod placement, but you've changed lenses.) You don't want a situation where the viewer can't tell whether this is an angle they've already seen or not (we're all doing this subconsciously, and when we ask ourselves "hmm is this back to the same angle" we notice we're doing it, which pulls us out of the moment).

The main editing trick I learned as an adult (which solves a very different probem than what you're describing) is that what makes an edit "invisible" is that your eyes don't have to change place, or don't have to track in a direction they didn't expect.

So, like, if you're cutting on a movement (often a good idea) as someone stands up from a chair, and you want to go from a medium shot to a wide shot, don't get too hung up on whether their knees are the same amount bent at the second you move from one shot to another shot. Nobody's looking at that. What makes the cut feel "smooth" is that the motion feels like the same motion. If you are lucky enough to be able to "match" on the rising movement so that your eye continues along the same track from image to image, the edit will feel invisible.

Or in a conversation where you're cutting back and forth between two people who we "know" are sitting across from each other, you expect to have your eye bounce back and forth to the left and right of frame. Person one is on the left, person two is on the right, even if I'm looking at each of them straight on: person one's closeup is crowded to the left of frame, person two's closeup is crowded toward the right of frame. If when I cut back to person two, instead they are also on the right of frame - what's going on? Am I implying that person two is now the same as person one, metaphorically? (If you want to show two things are connected, cut back and forth between them while they occupy roughly the same place in the frame.)

And I'd say the other key important thing is: a viewer's eye always goes to either the brightest spot in the image, or to the thing that's moving. Almost any time I'm frustrated like "why on earth didn't people catch that x was happening here," it's because when I cut to that information-giving shot (say, the one with the clue in it that solves the mystery), the thing I needed them to notice wasn't moving and wasn't the brightest spot.

Sometimes you can fix that by messing around with vignetting or something in post production. Sometimes you can fix that by using a trick of making sure the previous shot leaves the viewer's eye right where it needs to be. But this doesn't always work. You want somebody to notice something subtle, it needs to be in the spotlight, whether that means it's shiny or that all the lines of the image are pointing to it or that it fills the whole frame or that the camera uses a move to pull you there.

[sabotabby]

Great minds, etc; I've done a chase scene activity based around the 180 rule, and a "film a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors" assignment. I've also tried a cutting-to-the-beat assignment, but they seem to either grok that or they don't.