4 ms·

“I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging”

100 points by tmflannery 12y ago

macintux 12y ago
This really needs a more descriptive title. http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/raider-of-the-lost-ark-steven-soderbergh/ http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/raider-of-the-lost... is an interesting look at a few of the highlights.
- dang 12y ago
  A hard one for titles. We gave it a try by picking a sentence from the article.
  - hammock 12y ago
    Who is we?
    - th0br0 12y ago
      dang is one of the HN mods
  - raldi 12y ago
    I think you did fine; if anyone disagrees, they should post an alternate suggestion in reply.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- macintux 12y ago
  "Then he swapped out the famous John Williams score for moody Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross music from The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." (taken from the Grantland article I linked elsewhere)
anigbrowl 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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/187950507X http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Film-Language-Daniel-Arijon/dp...
rdtsc 12y ago
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.
jere 12y ago
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. :)
jdnier 12y ago
So how were any of you able to watch this? ("Sorry Because of it's privacy settings, this video cannot be played here.")
- lgas 12y ago
  For me it says "The server refused the connection." where the video should be.
waterlesscloud 12y ago
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

100 points by tmflannery 12y ago

This really needs a more descriptive title. http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/raider-of-the-lost-ark-steven-soderbergh/ http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/raider-of-the-lost... is an interesting look at a few of the highlights.

dang 12y ago
A hard one for titles. We gave it a try by picking a sentence from the article.
- hammock 12y ago
  Who is we?
  - th0br0 12y ago
    dang is one of the HN mods
- raldi 12y ago
  I think you did fine; if anyone disagrees, they should post an alternate suggestion in reply.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

macintux 12y ago
"Then he swapped out the famous John Williams score for moody Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross music from The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." (taken from the Grantland article I linked elsewhere)

anigbrowl 12y ago

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 12y ago
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/187950507X http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Film-Language-Daniel-Arijon/dp...

rdtsc 12y ago

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.

jere 12y ago

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. :)

jdnier 12y ago

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

lgas 12y ago
For me it says "The server refused the connection." where the video should be.

waterlesscloud 12y ago

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