Today’s seminar was another editing class. I didn’t think through enough to the editing stage when I was shooting my sequences, just testing whether the type of shot could work in a different scenario then in the scene in Girls, so I didn’t have much to do on the editing side.
Instead, I thought I’d use this blog post to further develop ideas for short film projects.
After speaking with Robin and listening to his thoughts (previous post), I had a think about the amount of small decisions made with every shot and cut that make up a scene – every slight difference makes a change to the overall product. I then had the thought that what if I made a film that only consisted of one continuous shot, or the feeling of it being a continuous shot, like Birdman? How would it feel different to the same scene but with multiple cuts? When we see a movie we don’t often consciously notice things like cuts and camera placement and movements, but these things contribute to a great amount of our overall experience of a film.
Youtube: The Seamless Look of ‘Birdman’ (DP Emmanuel Lubezki, Colourist Steve Scott)
In the above video, it’s evident that it takes a lot of work to create the illusion of a continuous shot – every movement has to seamlessly transition into the next. In a typical scene, audiences are usually subconsciously aware of the conventional cuts, however it’s very difficult to convince an audience that there are in fact no cuts throughout the whole film or scene.
I learnt that to create a seemingly cutless scene, cuts were placed when the camera was moving, during pans. In the middle of one pan, there would be a cut to the middle of another pan, so the action is continuous, and it looks like the camera is constantly moving. Lighting and colour was also integral to this illusion; hence the importance of the Colourist for matching each of the shadows and colour palettes in the shots.
I looked at the following articles, which are both worth a read on the insane amount of work that went into creating each shot:
1. http://nofilmschool.com/2014/11/how-birdman-was-made-to-look-like-film-shot-in-one-take
2. https://www.nyfa.edu/student-resources/best-cinematography-look-birdman/
Editing and the combination of separate shots to create a scene is something I’m interested to learn more about, as it’s something that’s mostly overlooked in favour of studying a film’s mise en scene or camera movement. However, the choices regarding where and how cuts are made is actually a very integral part of the final product of a scene, and is something I would need to think about in my own future works.
