You may be watching --but are you seeing?

When you watch a movie or television show, do you generally stop and think about the strategies and choices that have resulted in what you see on the screen? As I mentioned in my last blog, most filmic media have traditionally worked hard to render these strategies invisible--to encourage us to *not* pay attention to the conditions of their production.

Whether it is a nonfiction form such as a documentary or television news report, a talk show, a sporting event, or a fictional or dramatic form such as a feature film, TV drama, soap opera or sitcom—most cinema and TV pulls us in to the content (i.e., the story, or narrative) and implicitly asks us to suspend disbelief about, or to not question, the constructedness of its form and structure.

One of the best ways to understand the way a film or television program is constructed is to learn the traditional "grammar" of (or rules for generating) television and film. While there has been an accepted, traditional "grammar" or rulebook of feature film-making techniques that developed during the first half of the 20th century in Hollywood, and which has had a huge impact on visual language all over the world, we can also study the alternative systems and grammars of film "language" that have developed in different times and places and which provide us with new and refreshing ways to think using moving images.

Film production of Apache Gold (1963): note the camera apparatus on the railroad tracks

Students in my film criticism classes often complain that learning to analyze a film's constructedness — by “deconstructing” the plot, for example, or even moreso by examining the camera angles, camera movement, composition of the frame, lighting, sound, use of color, and editing strategies — “ruins” watching TV or film for them for a while! And I sympathize. I do remember this myself, when I took my first film classes. I remember watching and analyzing classical Hollywood films in class and dissecting them (just like we dissected pigs in Biology 101). And it felt just as clinical--a disruption of that pleasant experience of the "whole" by being forced to see all of the inner clockwork and taking the puzzle apart into tiny pieces.

We learned about the standard single-camera Hollywood filming style, a style that dictates a particularly disjointed way of filming scenes that leads to the story sequence being re-created only later, in the editing booth during post-production, when all the puzzle pieces are put together.

And in contrast, we learned about the very different three-camera studio style for filming most studio-based TV shows, from news to sitcoms to variety shows, that originated with theatrically-based live television in the 1940s-1950s, and which involves editing not of film (or video) but switching between the feed coming from the cameras as the action is happening—and then recording that “pre-edited” camera feed, a very different process than the Hollywood filming process.

A television studio

A broadcasting master control booth

So had you ever considered how different the production conditions are for movies (and some dramatic TV series) than they are for most television studio comedies? (and in the past decade, how different again the “rules” and aesthetics are for reality TV shows?) I know that I had never even noticed a difference before I began to study media, since I had never even been on a tour of a broadcast studio to understand the contrasting modes of production. Understanding these differences is an important component of media literacy.

But I do have a vivid memory of going to the movie theater after my first week of grad school at UNC Chapel Hill, where I was taking classes in both television studio production as well as film criticism, and I was learning all the ins and outs of how both films and TV shows were put together.

My friends and I went to the theater to see a new film, David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, a psychological thriller in which Jeremy Irons played twin gynecologists. And all I could think of when I watched each scene of the film was: "Oh, look at the camera dollying in this scene! Hey — did you notice the low camera angles there? Wow, I wonder how they got that lighting just perfect in that scene?" And of course, "OMG, how in the world can the same actor be on the screen talking to himself (his twin) at the same time — I can’t imagine how they did that!"

For a while after that, during every movie or TV program I watched, I analyzed the plot structure, the characters, the camera angles — marveling at the artistry of the composition, the cleverness of the way the sound enhanced our emotional experience, and the power of the editing to create rhythm or to move the story through time.

• Flashbacks? How are we the viewers to know that the story is suddenly moving back in time? What semiotic devices did the director use to signal to us that “this is a flashback”?
• I became entranced by camera angles, noticing when we (the viewers through the camera) were seeing scenes through a character’s first person point of view as opposed to the fly-on-the-wall omniscient camera.
• I began to notice the way that perceived camera proximity — long shots, medium shots, close ups, extreme close ups — brought us viewers into zones of intimacy or pulled us back into more formal distance from the action.
• I noticed how important lighting was for creating dramatic effect and for guiding our eyes to what the director wanted us to see.

In doing all this, I began to understand the “rules” of what I learned was called Classical Hollywood Narrative Style. The clip below is just a few minutes of a terrific documentary on the history of cinematography called Visions of Light:





However, I also noticed when filmmakers *broke* the rules—as in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), when the main character would turn his gaze directly into the camera and speak to us, the viewers, breaking out of the self-contained story world that is supposed to be unaware of a camera filming it.

Throughout the 1980s-1990s, these rules were being broken more and more often. It had started with music videos, and the birth of MTV in 1981 displayed the innovative camera styles of music videos — very fast-paced, in-your-face editing, jump cuts, and the use of hand-held cameras with shakiness, poor composition, or graininess that would never have been acceptable in classical Hollywood, and which signified amateur video or home movies rather than professional film standards. Film critic Roger Ebert credited Richard Lester's 1964 Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night with pioneering this style for musical sequences and providing the "grammar" for the next generation of music videos, and later, the modern style we know today:

It was clear from the outset that "A Hard Day's Night" was in a different category from the rock musicals that had starred Elvis and his imitators. It was smart, it was irreverent, it didn't take itself seriously, and it was shot and edited by Richard Lester in an electrifying black-and-white, semi-documentary style that seemed to follow the boys during a day in their lives. ...Movies were tamer in 1964. Big Hollywood productions used crews of 100 people and Mitchell cameras the size of motorcycles. Directors used the traditional grammar of master shot, alternating closeups, insert shots, re-establishing shots, dissolves and fades. Actors were placed in careful compositions. ....Lester did not invent the techniques used in "A Hard Day's Night," but he brought them together into a grammar so persuasive that he influenced many other films. Today when we watch TV and see quick cutting, hand-held cameras, interviews conducted on the run with moving targets, quickly intercut snatches of dialogue, music under documentary action and all the other trademarks of the modern style, we are looking at the children of "A Hard Day's Night."

Soon, these radical styles began to make their way into mainstream film and television. Films like The Blair Witch Project (1999), like its more recent cousin, Cloverfield (2008), brought this amateur home video aesthetic to the big screen in startling new ways, while TV dramatic series like Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999) were filmed using hand-held 16 mm cameras on location (not in a studio) to signify a degree of documentary realism rarely seen in police detective dramas. Homicide was also innovative in its use of jump-cut editing and a stuttering triple repetition of the same camera shot during critical moments in the narrative.






Generally, every kind of filmic or motion media production involves four basic phases:

1. Development: conceiving, planning, and arranging financing for the project
2. Pre-production: assembling the people and resources needed, from building the sets and casting the actors (for staged pieces) to setting up appointments for interviews and making travel arrangements (for documentaries)
3. Production (generally the filming or principal photography phase): the shooting and all the things behind the scenes that need to happen to be able to film or shoot each day’s work: lighting, camerawork, costumes, make-up
4. Post-Production: taking all the footage, editing it into the final product, and including effects such as special visual effects, soundtracks, titles, voiceover narrations, and so on

At another level, there are three main aspects of any industry to consider, from the concept and design to getting the product in the hands of the consumer. These include:

• Production: everything discussed above—the development, creation and packaging of the product
• Distribution: the marketing (advertising and promotion) of the product and the actual physical or digital movement of the product from its site of production to a site where it can be purchased by consumers
• Sales (or Exhibition): the actual purchase and consumption of the product by the public, whether it be at the box office in a movie theater, through a computer, via satellite television, or on a rented DVD.