Video Entry #3 - Framing

In our lesson this week, we didn't do any practical. We did the whole lesson of theory. It was quite a bit to take in but I knew a little about it. So, we talked about:

Rule of Thirds

This grid is display to give help to showing where the points of interest need to be. For example, in the image above, it is the bee. The inter-sectional points around the middle square are what our eyes are drawn to and it makes for a more natural viewing. The example given in class was this image:

It can also be used to place the eyeline on the point of interest making him the focus and his focus the secondary focus.

180 Degree Rule

The 180 degree rule is where the cameras must stay in the arc around the actors or person's otherwise if you go on the opposite side without letting the viewer know by a camera shift. This makes again for a more natural viewing of the subject.

The Golden Ratio

This is something to keep in mind whilst filming. It makes an image appear better. I find it hard to explain this as Peter did but I think a photo would explain it better;

The focus is all relative and good, to put in a terrible way.

Matching Eyelines & Matching Cuts

Peter mentioned that whilst filming, we should have the eyelines of all the people we interview should have the same eyelines. So when switching between shots, it feels natural. Same with the cuts.

Natural Transitions

We were told that to make our film better, we could use natural transitions. Natural transitions are when you don't cut to something and take the viewer out of what they were just watching. For example, say you had a shot of a woman entering a building and then panning up the building to the sky and then panning down to reveal the woman and friends coming out of the building. That's a natural transition. 

Dramatic Arc/Curve and Aristotle

 Aristotle was the first to say that a story has a beginning, middle and end, which coincides by using the dramatic arc. The dramatic arc is shown below:

Replacing exposition, climax and denouement with beginning, middle and end respectively. Most films seem to follow this dramatic arc in terms of story telling. However going against can be well done but it is difficult. Eugene Scribe was the first to ask, "why do we have to follow this outline?". So films like Memento have followed Scribe in his way of thinking. 

I don't what dramatic arc our documentary will take. We are still talking and researching about ideas we can do. We talked about maybe interviewing an arts, medical and psychology professor to give us their definition of what a mouth is to them. Hopefully giving us new perspectives that we can feature in our documentary. We also talked about the primal and essential extinct our mouths are used for. For example eating. It was also brought up about, maybe non-essential but our mouths are used to show love, compassion and used in sex. So again, it could interesting to talk to someone who knows a lot about sex, i.e. a sex psychologist or maybe a porn star, to see what their opinion is on the mouth.

In our groups, we also have to present on a practitioner of documentary. Peter has pushed us away from doing practitioners such as Louis Theroux and Michael Moore and asked us to find someone not on the suggested practitioners. George has given us the idea of German documentary maker, Werner Herzog. He seems interesting and I would like to do the presentation on him. Although we will have to meet up and discuss it further.