Jamie is also our lecturer for our seminar. In today’s seminar we will be introduced broad themes on this unit and expectations. We will also look especially at the question of screen style and form and why it is important.

For this unit, our aims:

1. To complement our work on the parallel video unit through discussion of screen style.
2. To introduce us to the importance of software in the video production workflow.
3. To introduce dominant and alternative ways to order/edit material and use other software applications.
4. To teach us the technical skills of how to use the software.

The softwares we’ll be learning throughout this degree are:

• Avid
• Premier Pro
• Final Cut (this year)

Content refers to:

• Themes
• Genre
• Characters / participants
• Plot / format
• Location

Soft Style lighting:

• ‘A soft, flat frontal light works to eliminate the wrinkles that may be more apparent with side lighting… it would be counter-productive to use this technique on a man’ (Keating, 2010, pp. 36-7)

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Whereas, this is more classical, realism, pictorialism, and glamour.

Image above is Marlene Dietrich, the lighting has shown how much lighting can change the appearance of the subject.

Soft lighting, is often use for the subject so the audience can feel sympathetic.

Hard lighting

This is more hard lighting, as we can see the wrinkles and jawline more on the actor’s face.

Hard lighting / high key lighting often use on male or masculine subject, to focus more on expression.

It can signifies evil, strength and power.

Expressionism… reacted against realism and turned toward extreme distortion to express an inner emotional reality rather than surface appearances’ (Bordwell & Thompson, 1994, p.109)

Expressivists – who create expressive effects at the cost of glamour and clarity.

‘Making things strange, unexpected therefore puzzling and arresting’ (callow, 2007, p.363)

One-point perspective is a way of crafting cinematic shots with near-perfect symmetry. The composition of these shots draws the viewer’s eye to a specific focal point within the frame, absorbing them into the dimension of the shot and manipulating the experience by telling them exactly where to look. It also elicits an emotional response, typically of uneasiness or dread.

Foreground (FG), Mid-ground (MG), and Background (BG) can easily be separated. With the support of how the line of the framing is set.

Image System

Image system ‘refers to the use of recurrent images and compositions in a film to add layers of meaning to a narrative’ (Mercado, 2013, p. 21)

‘Image systems can be very subtle, repeating shot compositions, colors, and imagery in ways that are not easy to notice at first but are nonetheless internalised’ (ibid)

They can be too subtle. ‘to create an image system you must first identify the core ideas of your story, its main themes and motifs… once design an image system that supports your core ideas. (ibid)

FORM FOLLOWS FUNTION!