reading movies!??!

We had to read Roger Ebert’s How to Read a Movie to, well, learn how to read a movie! For the most part, my main takeaway from this article is how the placement of things can sometimes have an impact on the feel of a movie. For example, if someone is standing on the left side while someone else stands on the right side, viewers will feel more inclined to think that the one on the left side is the villain and the one on the right is the hero. Right is positive, left is negative! Right means the future, left means the past!

As he puts it in the article, “movement to the right seems more favorable; to the left, less so.” He also mentions dominance in this, so things in the background are less dominant than things in the front. Things moving are more dominant than things that are still. Many of the things he talks about aren’t done on purpose, they usually happen naturally!

For the videos, I watched Examples of Editing Techniques first. This video showed various of examples I could use in the future for editing. There were things like jump cuts, slide transitions, slow motion- all things that were once very popular. Editing these things are a lot easier now, as some editing applications will do this entirely for you, and more!

The second video I watched was about Camera Angles and Techniques. This video was really useful in my opinion. It went through and showed the many types of camera angles and techniques used to amplify a scene. For example, it explained angles and why they are used, like how a dutch angle can be used to make something feel uneasy. It talked about shot size, for example, explaining how a long shot/extreme long shot can be used to show how small a person looks compared to the scene.