

“I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging” - tmflannery
http://extension765.com/sdr/18-raiders

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anigbrowl
_for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where
you are_

This is a massive problem, both with less experienced directors and even some
famous ones. It's important to establish the geography of a scene because if
you don't the audience will be constantly distracted during action sequences -
Michael Bay's _Transformers_ films are particularly egregious offenders in
this regard, despite having massive budgets an thus access to the best skills
that money can buy. In the 3 I've seen so far, I end up getting completely
lost during the obligatory climactic battle between the good and bad robots
after about 3-4 minutesand the only way to get through it is to sit back in
numb passivity (which I suspect may be intentional givent he semi-
propagandistic nature of these films, but that's another story).

It doesn't help that the geography of many scenes is wholly imaginary, as many
scenes are not shot in a contiguous physical location but may involve trick
positioning within the same location, two wholly different locations, or
apparently contiguous events that are shot at completely different times.
Furthermore, there's a rule of thumb called 'the 180 rule' which holds that
there's an imaginary line of interest between the primary character in a scene
and the object of his/her scrutiny, and that editing continuity demands you
pick one side of that line and keep the cameras within that 180-degree side of
an imaginary circle - otherwise the audience (and indeed the editors) get
confused about who is looking at what and which way they are positioning
themselves within the scene. One can break this rule like any other but it
needs to be done deliberately and in a way that signals a shift of focus to
the audience.

Keeping track of all this during the often-chaotic environment of production
is a lot harder than you might imagine. Almost all films, even vary large-
budget ones, have at least one shot where the image has to be flipped from
left to right to correct a camera positioning error - it's better that Brad
Pitt's wristwatch seem to momentarily be on the wrong arm than that the
positional grammar be broken by a poorly-chosen angle.

~~~
julian37
For people (not just film students) interested in this sort of thing, I
recommend "The Grammar of the Film Language" by Daniel Arijon. A fantastic
book that's fundamentally changed the way I see movies.

[http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Film-Language-Daniel-
Arijon/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Film-Language-Daniel-
Arijon/dp/187950507X)

~~~
anigbrowl
Seconded. It is the only book I've seen that takes a truly systematic
approach. It seems to have fallen out of favor due to the 1970s-era line
drawings involving increasingly naked people which some people find sexist or
just weird.

Two other books worth mentioning are _The Visual Story_ by Bruce Block and _If
it 's Purple Someone's Gonna Die_ by Patti Bellatoni. The first one is about
shapes and the second one is about color.

You can pick up all 3 for under $100 and you will get more out of it than most
people do from spending many thou$and$ on film school.

------
waterlesscloud
Soderbergh has a couple other re-cuts on his site, too. One intermixes the two
PSYCHOs, the original and the shot-for-shot remake.

The other is a radical re-cut of HEAVEN'S GATE. I've watched a couple hundred
movies this year, but it's that HEAVEN'S GATE edit I keep coming back to in my
head. I'm not really sure why (which is probably why). He somehow found the
movie lurking inside the sprawling version that was released.

[http://extension765.com/sdr/16-heavens-gate-the-butchers-
cut](http://extension765.com/sdr/16-heavens-gate-the-butchers-cut)

------
jere
I watched a few minutes and was really impressed. I don't feel like I have the
time to watch all of it, but I totally would have if this was an assignment in
a film class (I remember watching a single film 5 times in a row or one scene
30 times).

I made a short film in college and it's terribly embarrassing as an artifact,
but I just rewatched it without sound and it's quite awesome that way. :)

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rdtsc
Hehe, once you start noticing staging, lighting and framing, looking for
shadows of the boom mic shadow from above, you won't be able to stop easily.
You'll be enjoying a movie and all of the sudden instead of just watching the
movie you are explicitly noticing editing cuts and camera positioning and
thinking about it.

------
jdnier
So how were any of you able to watch this? ("Sorry Because of it's privacy
settings, this video cannot be played here.")

~~~
lgas
For me it says "The server refused the connection." where the video should be.

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macintux
This really needs a more descriptive title.

[http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/raider-of-the-
lost...](http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/raider-of-the-lost-ark-
steven-soderbergh/) is an interesting look at a few of the highlights.

~~~
dang
A hard one for titles. We gave it a try by picking a sentence from the
article.

~~~
hammock
Who is we?

~~~
th0br0
dang is one of the HN mods

