The following three films are the students’ response to the following brief:
Film the following scene in three different ways:
1) Static Long Take
2) A Moving Long Take
3) Montage
The scene: Character A passes something to Character B which produced tension between them, leading to their separation.
Static Long Take
Moving Long Take
Montage
Comedy Montage
What’s most remarkable about this sequence, especially the first, static, shot, is how Thabit frames his shot. He told us he set out visual markers at the edge of his frame to fix the shot: the ‘do not park’ handpainted notice on the left hand and the fire alarm bell at the top. Picking a sign prohibiting something to mark off the edge of your shot is especially cunning I think: the ‘here’ you can’t park in as actually offscreen.
But it’s Thabit’s choice of balance in his shot that’s most effective: Orson Welles in Touch of Evil (and you should watch it Thabit!) chose to put ceilings in his interior shots, where studios usually left the roofs off, so as to fit in huge overhead lights. The result is that lots of the interior scenes in the film are claustrophobic – and a number of charcters do literally end up trapped in their scenes.
This shot has the same effect – of compressing the action into a small box, a frame-within-aframe; it focuses our attention, makes us ‘lean in’, as the action is in long shot, and enables us to feel that the two characters are maybe under similar pressure, of the weight of the building in their shoulders.
Tony Zhou in his Youtube channel Every Frame a Painting, cuts up shots and frames into quarters and halves – showing how some directors use balance in their compositions. His great example is from Drive. Check it out, as they say..