I recently finished reading ‘In the Blink of an Eye’, the book on film editing written by legendary editor Walter Murch. In the book Walter Murch describes his belief that film editing, and cuts specifically function in the same way that a person blinks, that a person will blink as a way of separating, distinguishing or ‘cutting’ thoughts and information. Murch says that people do this subconsciously and intuitively, that when listening to someone, they will blink at the point where they have processed the information. Murch compares this to the way that people watch movies, that they intuitively apply the same process when watching a film. The point that someone blinks while listening to someone during a conversation, is the same point at which they will intuitively and subconsciously feel that a cut should take place if that same conversation was to be put on film.

It is an extremely interesting idea and it made me think about this concept in relation to the aspect of film that I am looking to investigate in this studio: a black screen.

If a blink of an eye is a cut in a movie, then what is a black screen? Does a black screen mean that I have shut my eyes, or that I am asleep or could it even signify death? When I think of the experiments that I do, abrupt cuts mid-action), the way that the unexpected cut seems to rip the audience out of the moment seems to indicate a sort of death. Much like a popular theory regarding the ending of The Sopranos, where the black screen at the end signifies a death that “you never see coming”, the cut to black in my experiments as well as in Haneke’s Code Unknown seems to mimic the experience of an abrupt death. Furthermore, the abrupt change from black screen to image feels almost like a rebirth, but not in a way that would happen naturally and realistically, where you are first blinded by white light and then slowly acquainted with your surroundings, instead it becomes like a sort of gasp for life, a second breath that gives the image a fresh sense of vitality.

I am interested in investigating black screens. More specifically, transitions to black, whether that be a fade to black or a straight, abrupt cut to black. I want to gain a perspective on what a black screen can mean, whether it can be the end of a movie, the end of a character or even just a transition. My interest came from watching a movie, “Code Unknown”, where it was essentially a bunch of separate story lines, all done in single takes that were separated by an abrupt cut to black. It was a really interesting concept as it completely changed how you would view the scenes compared to if they were just edited conventionally.

The cuts to black were usually placed right in the middle of the action, often at the emotional height of the scene, and it felt so much more impactful than if it had happened once the intensity of the scene had died down and it had used a fade instead. It also seemed to accentuate the beginning and ending of each scene, it gave it a sense of finiteness and life. That every new scene you were watching had a time limit, it had a distinct sense of beginning and end, and after watching the movie for a while, the expectation that came along with knowing that a scene was going to cut to black changed how you perceived what was coming next. The surprise factor of the concept faded away and you began to concentrate on these very self-contained moments, bookended by cuts to black.

So what I was thinking of doing was to follow the same concept, to film a bunch of seemingly disconnected scenes, and to see how a separation by a cut to black would change how the scenes are viewed, as well as their relation to each other. They may not even have a story to it, there won’t be any driving motivation to launch a narrative, but instead scenes that have been distilled into moments.

For subject matter I have decided to, instead of having a straight story, to instead pick a theme, and to have every scene fit into that theme. The theme I have chosen is family. The shots can be anything that will capture the feel of family, or home. This can be my mother cooking, a family gathering, or even my parents sitting around watching TV.

Although I am taking the concept from ‘Code Unknown’, I want the tone to be completely different. The subject matter will be very warm, and comforting, which is in large contrast to the very bleak and depressing subject matter in Haneke’s films. I think that despite how the black screen seemed to deliberately distance the character’s lives from one another in ‘Code Unknown’, the unavoidable distance also felt like a way to really make you pay attention to the relation of one scene to the next – and this strangely felt like some sort of unifier. It seemed to fit into the theme of family well, as it is a very large and universal idea, something so big that you needed something like a cut to black to really pay attention to the small moments.

In class we did an unusual writing exercise where we wrote down a lot of different things that interested us. It was very strange at first because I increasingly began to wonder why I was doing this, why were we writing things that seemed non-consequential, daily actions that interested us? How could a door opening, a window closing, chopping an apple with a knife be interesting?

Then I started to think about it in a different way. I remembered my favourite film, ‘In the Mood for Love’, and the famous slow motion sequences set to moody violin. What I noticed about these sequences, about what was actually happening during these moments, were that they were extremely ordinary moments.

I came to the realisation that the most cinematic moments in the film were also the most ordinary moments – walking into a room, down a staircase, waiting for noodles, eating noodles. Why did Wong Kar Wai find these moments so interesting? I really don’t know why but they work somehow. Maybe it was a way of balancing the tone of a scene – during the films most heavy and emotional content, Wong Kar Wai shows a large amount of restraint, the most emotional moment of the film isn’t lathered with sensuous camera moves and slow motion, it is a static shot that succeeds a musical moment to create a deep, lonely silence. Both moments feel just as cinematic as the other, it didn’t matter what was actually going on in the scene.

I had to change my definition of what being ‘cinematic’ meant. The man driving a car around for an hour and a half in ‘A Taste of Cherry’ is just as cinematic as the Normandy Beach landing in ‘Saving Private Ryan’, as is a door opening, a window closing or chopping an apple with a knife.

Recently I have been re-watching The Sopranos, and it has gotten me very interested in the idea of episodic writing. On a side note, I was very surprised by the show on a visual scale. For some reason I had always thought of television, especially back then when long form dramas were starting to become really big – as a medium where the creators place all their efforts into the writing of the show – leaving the visual aspects almost as an afterthought, that it was only until more recently that shows started to pay a lot more attention to the visuals. However, when I watched The Sopranos, I really did see a distinct visual style. David Chase happens to be a full blown cinephile, and it comes out in the decisions that he makes both as a show runner in general and when he actually directs an episode. Although sometimes overbearing, it is nice to see a show care enough to shoot close-ups in extreme angles, to vignette frames or freeze the frame.

What I was really taken aback by was, of course, the writing. Pretty much every episode from a writing standpoint felt very strong, and it got me to think about what the writing process is like for a long form TV show. It was interesting to me because I started to think about the differences between shows (and writing) that focus heavily on either plot or character/story. To me, although there is a healthy balance of plot and character, The Sopranos really does feel like a show that focuses more on character. I had not realised this the first time that I had watched The Sopranos when I was very young, and I find it very interesting that the show was so immensely popular given that, not in any bad way whatsoever, not that much actually happens in terms of plot.

It’s interesting because usually these shows end up gaining a very specific audience, one that is more dedicated to the show and would push away a casual viewer. I had finished watching Mad Men not too long before this, and that was a show that, unsurprisingly given Matthew Wiener’s involvement with The Sopranos, was very heavy on character as opposed to plot. When I hear things about Mad Men, it always seems like the type of show that has a more specific dedicated fan base, and one that people sometimes can’t get into because ‘nothing happens’ in the show.

What I am trying to say, and what is really so interesting to me about The Sopranos and it’s reception is that, essentially it is a character driven show that takes a lot of risks – something that should result in a tailored and niche audience. But that’s obviously not that case, it’s one of the most popular shows of all time. So what is David Chase’s secret? How did he get people to tune in every week, how does he get the casual average TV watcher to sit down and watch a 20 minute, highly stylised dream sequence that asks more questions than it does provide answers? Maybe I’m trying too hard to find an answer to something that really is simple, because as David Chase said – “I just wanted to make something entertaining”.

Last week we did the expertise exercise. My group and I had chosen to use and play around with a dolly track. I had never used a dolly track before, so this was completely new to me. It was exciting, but it made me realise how much I had to learn about the filmmaking process. The exercises that we tried out were very fun and turned out pretty well. One of the exercises that we did was a lateral tracking shot of three subjects. It was interesting to see the different ways that this could be done – either the straight forward way of literally tracking laterally, or by moving the dolly track further back from the subject to instead try panning across and imitating the dolly movement. We found that the first method of actually moving the camera along the dolly was much better and smoother.

Another exercise that we did was a dolly move that went forwards. At first it was just a simple start from Point A and finish at Point B which was closer to the subject, but we later thought that it would be more interesting and make more sense to have a second subject move towards the first subject along with the camera. When we changed the exercise to this it made the exercise more dynamic and it also made focusing easier, as we only had to set the focal length once and did not require a focus puller for it.

Lastly, we did a simpler, static shot exercise that focused on lighting. This one was very interesting to me as gaining a high proficiency with learning how to light a scene with purpose is something that I strive for.

Overall I found the expertise exercise to be very rewarding, feeling as if there was something gained out of the scenes that we shot, even if they were on a very small scale.

Recently I watched Yi Yi by Edward Yang, and I thought that it was relevant to the camera exercises that we had been learning this week as one of the things that stuck out most to me in the film were the frame compositions and the lack of close ups.

The whole movie is filmed in a very simple, peaceful and unobtrusive manner. Edward Yang a lot of the time seems to set his camera down somewhere and let the scene play out. However, I don’t think this makes the film or the image boring at all. When watching a scene from the film, it felt as if Edward Yang had carefully framed the image beforehand, and worked the blocking of his actors to move and breathe within this very simple and quiet frame. To me, it came off as a very simple way to film. However, the whole movie is not just static shots. There are several instances where Edward Yang will move the camera, however, the movements themselves are very simple and do not draw attention to themselves. Most of the time they were very small pans or slow lateral tracking shots.

The overall very simple aesthetic of the movements and framing made the camera feel very omnipresent, almost like a third person narrator. It always kept its distance and acted a lot more as an observer than an intruding force. This was further extended as I realised that by the end of the film, to my memory, there were very few close ups throughout the three hour running time. I thought this was very peculiar and interesting as it is rare for a film to stray away from using close ups, but again I began to think about the camera as an observer, as something that tried to give the audience as large and even of a perspective of all the numerous characters in the film as possible.

I did like and connect to the style, but I wanted to know why it worked in this film, when for almost any other film this slow, simple and distancing visual style would make it feel very dry. That’s when I realised that the style and form of the film was in line with the content of the film. The film has a very broad and even, despite following the lives of an average family in Taipei, epic story, with numerous characters. With all these numerous characters I felt that Edward Yang made a large effort to have the audience connect of feel a sense of empathy for each and every one of them, and that’s why it was important to present them as honestly as possible, the good and the bad, to show all parts of them, and a very fitting way of doing this would be to show who they are, present them in a frame, and to just let them live and breathe in that space, along with other characters, other people that come into their lives.

From the first two weeks of classes, I had learned about the basics of recording audio and the basics of framing and composing a shot. The practical exercise of recording audio made me realise that I really know nothing about recording audio. I began to understand just how much depth and complexity there was to recording even basic audio. I also became more aware of deliberate soundscapes after watching a scene from “In the Line of Fire”, where I began to notice how every sound in the scene was exaggerated and carefully considered. It made me begin to think about planning out how the audio, and the style of the audio should be during pre-production. It also made me aware that I should be making a lot of pre-meditated decisions about how I am going to have various audio set-ups during pre-production, and to understand the location that I will be filming at and how to accompany an audio set up for the situation.

I also had a practical exercise with the Sony EX-3. I was not there for the first lesson, so I did not shoot any of the scenes from that class. I was, however, at the second class where we went through the footage that was shot on that day and analysed it. We went through aspects of the footage such as white balance, exposure and composition. I found I learned the most by understand why certain shots were underexposed or overexposed, as that is something that I don’t have a great understanding of. I also found the white balance exercise interesting, as again, I don’t have a strong understanding of how to have a correct white balance, and I thought that it was very helpful to have a practical way to correcting white balance (using a piece of paper or something that is white).

I chose this studio because it seemed like it would be a very practical, hands-on studio. This really appealed to me because I feel as if I am lacking in understanding a lot of the technical aspects of filmmaking. Something else that was really important was not only the learning of technique, but the application and thought that went with it, the ability to learn how to be able to make the form support the content, or even the other way around.

To be more specific, one of my desires would include to just in general gain a strong proficiency with more professional cameras. I have a small amount of experience in handling cameras, however they are often for personal and home use, which can be limiting. My desire to want to become proficient in being able to use more versatile, complex cameras comes from a desire to want to understand lighting. I think that the advantages of using a more complicated camera comes out mostly when it is matched with an understanding of cinematography and lighting, so I feel as if I would get the most use out of learning about cameras if I become very proficient in learning about lighting and cinematography in general.

I would also like to learn about other aspects in filmmaking that I would probably not push myself to  learn outside of the classroom such as audio, as it is a very hard thing to understand well and I think that I would learn about this aspect of filmmaking a lot better and with more motivation if I had some form of guidance to go with it.

I am not sure if this is something that is specific to this course but I would really like to gain some sort of experience with directing actors. This is something that I think is fundamental to filmmaking and something which can only really be learned by doing. I hope that by having some experience with directing actors that I would improve my communication skills and know how to better express what I want in something that I create.