8
Genre Editing Styles I
► Expectations Posed by Genre
It’s all about sex. Or laughter. Or tears. It’s about your life and your friends’ lives. It’s about genre. And, for the film doctor, his genre patients take many forms.
A surprise that confronts editors who have flourished in a particular genre is the hesitation of producers to hire them for films in other genres. Until an editor has proven himself in comedy, for instance, it may be difficult for him to land an assignment in that genre. This is a classic Catch-22. Without experience the editor may not get the job, yet how will he gain the knowledge if he has never worked in that genre? This chapter helps to supply that knowledge.
Conventions
An important first step in understanding genre resides in grasping its various conventions. These conventions are the standards that differentiate one genre from another. They exist in every fiction genre from comedy and thriller to nonfiction such as documentary, educational, and today’s popular reality programming. Conventions make specific demands on the editor as they relate to his craft, particularly with regard to pace and rhythm. An action film, for instance, requires a faster pace than most suspense films, yet in both cases timing is essential.
Coming to a genre is a bit like an adolescent’s search for identity. Within the genre reside needs and issues that an audience expects to participate in and, ultimately, discover resolutions for. Editors and directors are often attracted to particular genres because those forms resonate with their inner needs, conflicts, or memories. A horror film director developed an affinity for the genre because his parents used to take him to horror movies as a child, well before most psychologists suggest exposing children to images of gore and violence. An action-adventure director lived much of his life roaming the African wilderness and wrangling lions and other wild beasts. A thriller director suffered an abusive home life at the hands of an unpredictable and alcoholic father. In each of the genres these individuals found inspiration in a different aspect of the human psyche.
From the thriller director’s background, his edginess and dark outlook informed the victim-turned-victor mentality of the thriller genre. The action director’s experiences in the wild inclined him toward fast-paced action and death-defying stunts. The horror director’s nightmares created a proclivity for jump scares and vividly made-up monsters. Often the director aligns himself with an editor of similar disposition, one who resonates with his vision. Comedy editor Bruce Green often cuts Garry Marshall’s films, such as Runaway Bride (1999) and Princess Diaries (2001). Jon Poll, another top comedy editor, frequently works with director Jay Roach on such films as Meet the Parents (2000), Goldmember (2002), and Dinner for Schmucks (2010). On the other hand, Conrad Buff, with his command of action, suspense, and visual effects, told me that he avoids comedies.1 His skills have helped create such exciting films as Titanic (1997), King Arthur (2004), and Training Day (2001).
This is not to say that an editor must work in only one genre. For some that would limit their possibilities to such an extent that they would rarely work. But it is important to find within oneself the meaning of that genre along with the genre’s practical requirements and the style of a particular director. Jim Jarmusch, for instance, often employs wide master shots to tell his personal, character-driven stories, whereas Oliver Stone prefers constant cutting with a variety of angles to drive home his active style.
Crossing Genres
Although a mixture of genres, such as horror with comedy, used to be considered bad form, today cross-genre comprises a large portion of film scripts. The Scary Movie franchise successfully blended comedy and horror to preposterous and prosperous effect. Jackie Chan’s Rush Hour (1998) skillfully combined martial arts action with comedy. Slumdog Millionaire (2008) merged dramatic suspense, action, romance, and a Bollywood dance sequence to create a deeply compelling movie. Avatar (2009), upon its initial release, was billed in the movie guide for the Regency Theatres chain as “action/adventure, suspense/thriller, sci-fi/fantasy.” While cross-genre stories are permissible and may someday predominate, it is important to understand the differentiation between the genres as well as the audience’s expectations for each.
Doctor’s Note
Though blending genres has become common, the occurrence is not unprecedented and goes back to the classic horror comedy Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).
If film can be viewed as modern myth-making, then genre can be seen as conforming to myth cycles that ancient storytellers associated with the trickster, the hero, the lover, and so on. Today we sometimes speak in terms of formulas with regard to films that adhere to certain conventions or structures. The criticism, however, that a film is formulaic is a damning one. The challenge for modern filmmakers lies in abiding by the tenets and expectations of a genre without falling into its clichés. In the best genre films, the underlying formula remains hidden, projecting its shadow as on the cave walls in Plato’s The Symposium.
Viewed anthropologically, it is easy to see film as enacting the rituals of particular myth cycles. While some view myth as an explanation for ritual, isn’t it more likely that ritual is the driving force that has carried these stories down through the ages? Perhaps even more than Carl Jung’s collective unconscious, ritual and its associated iconography have propagated archetypes throughout time and culture. Each generation discovers a way to make these archetypes relevant to its current experiences of life, love, and loss. The way that recent generations have managed this is through motion pictures. And these movies constantly evolve to carry forth, in form and content, classic messages for a current culture.
The Ritual Object
In viewing film genre we discover that each genre carries with it particular ritual objects. Anyone who questions film’s reliance on ritual objects need look no further than the wedding ring in romantic comedies, the blood in vampire films, and the laser in science fiction. Who can think of a western without calling to mind the horse, the whip, the six-shooter, the sheriff’s badge, the hat, and even the great outdoors, all significant icons of that genre? The editor who neglects to attend to these factors risks losing the totems’ inherent power. The frequent midnight showings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) decades after its initial release are a testament to cinema’s mythic influence and the power of ritual objects as the audience re-enacts moments from the film using rice, newspapers, rubber gloves, lights, and so on.
For this reason insert shots exist. Insert shots allow the audience to focus for a moment on a significant object within a larger field of view. Often the film doctor discovers that an important moment loses significance because the object of concern—a gun, a watch, a gemstone, a photograph—was not given its due. Either the object was not revealed at all, revealed too late, or revealed in an angle that negated its significance, such as a wide shot.
One of the most common requests that appears on editors’ and film doctors’ shot lists when they request reshoots or pickups are insert shots. First-time directors are particularly prone to leaving out these essential items.
Case Study
In an indie film where the set had wrapped and the budget didn’t allow for reshoots, I resorted to blowing up the film frame to center on a syringe that would play a significant role later in the movie. It had only appeared in a loose medium shot and was unlikely to be noticed by the viewer.
The only danger of this tactic is that enlarging the image increases the film grain or video noise, so the editor must act judiciously. Fortunately, with today’s excellent, fine-grain film stocks and ultra high-definition video cameras, this maneuver works significantly better than before.
Expectations
A traditional view of a doctor is one who must also cure himself. Many doctors come to their specialty because they or someone they feel close to was impacted by an ailment that specialty seeks to cure. When viewed in this way, one begins to see the deeper meaning of an audience’s expectations and the motivations of filmmakers who explore those genres. In fact, expectation fuels a significant portion of an audience’s enjoyment and participation in the film experience. Audiences who attend comedies are prepared to laugh. Audiences who attend horror films expect to be scared. Conversely, films that fail to fulfill these expectations—a comedy in which people are viciously murdered and frightening events occur, or a horror film where most of the action is on an even keel—disappoint their audience. With this approach to genre, we are reminded to dig deeper, to elaborate, and to consider all possibilities. A comedy writer friend used to insist that a good comedic premise has to be “sliced and diced in every possible way” in order to create a successful script. The writer has to consider the premise and its repercussions from every conceivable angle. His prescription? At least two laughs per page.
As with other aspects of editing, an understanding of story—which in the case of genre includes the underlying myth cycle—helps inform the editorial decision-making process. The following sections investigate the common myth cycles as well as editorial approaches associated with various genres. Remember, editing is not just about cutting the film but about developing an approach to the dailies. This entails advancing the story and delivering the actors’ emotions. Thinking like an editor involves developing a point of view on the footage and then using that to fuel the edits.
► The Western Rides Into the Sunset
Watching how ritual objects play out in the course of a film adds clues to the story’s significance. Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado (1985) begins with a dynamic homage to the many elements that make up the western genre. When the movie opens inside a dimly lit shed, the camera dollies past various icons of the genre: a wood-burning stove, a leather saddle, a whip, a pair of boots, a Winchester rifle. On the soundtrack we hear the faint crackling of embers, a horse’s whinny, a hawk’s cry. The serenity is interrupted by the sudden explosion of gunshots and bullet holes bursting through the walls. A rapid exchange of gunfire ensues, and finally a body tears through the roof, collapsing dead on the dirt floor. Quiet again prevails. At that point the shed’s surviving occupant draws open the door and the camera leaves the dark claustrophobic surroundings, launching out into a vast frontier extending across the wide screen. In this short opening scene the director has reignited what had become a dormant genre with a barrage of iconographic images, sounds, and action.
At one time, the Western held the preeminent position among genres. The film museum in Lone Pine, California, is a testament to the hundreds of films that were shot in the adjacent Alabama Hills, incorporating nearly every western star from Hopalong Cassidy to John Wayne. The museum houses much of the classic iconography, including lavishly ornate saddles, boots, and gun belts. In one corner, however, sits a display for a film of a quite different genre: Iron Man (2008). Ironically, Iron Man’s genre came to supplant the old western. With the rise of the science-fiction film, the frontier left the valleys and hilltops of regions such as Death Valley and the Alabama Hills and migrated to what Star Trek describes as “the final frontier”: outer space.
Case Study
My father, producer Frank P. Rosenberg (King of the Khyber Rifles, Madigan, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud), produced one of the last significant early westerns. He once pointed out that, unlike many westerns that featured the Midwest, his film, One-Eyed Jacks (1961), actually took place in the West, on the coast of Monterey, California. The film starred and was directed by Marlon Brando. He had replaced a director who would eventually make one of the greatest science-fiction films of all time—2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
► Science Fiction and Fantasy
With Star Wars (1977), audiences bid farewell to the Western’s domination of film genre. In this science-fiction classic, Luke Skywalker returns to find his homestead set ablaze by the Imperial Stormtroopers on the planet Tatooine. This propels him on a daring and unforeseen adventure to find a missing girl, Princess Leia, a trek similar to Ethan Edwards’s in John Ford’s classic western The Searchers (1956). Here, Ethan, played by John Wayne, returns to find his brother’s homestead ablaze following a Comanche Indian attack. This leads him on a great adventure to find a missing girl. Though the two films share a similar impetus for the hero’s journey, their prevailing iconography has changed. Guns became light sabers, horses became spaceships, and the great outdoors became the endless universe.
Doctor’s Note
Throughout most cultures the hero’s journey is reflected in stages of initiation. Heeding the call to adventure, the reluctant initiate leaves the comforts of home, encounters guides and helpers along the way, endures ordeals, and finally claims his place in the world. Having undergone an essential transformation, he eventually returns home to share his hard-won reward or wisdom. For further investigation, see the works of Carl Jung, Arnold van Gennep, and Joseph Campbell.
Similar journeys occur in fantasy films, such as the The Lord of the Rings trilogy. One of the differences between science fiction and fantasy derives from science fiction’s use of imaginary elements based on scientifically plausible events. Fantasy generally defies the laws of nature, displaying impossible feats in a make-believe world that may include real-life elements, such as school children, weddings, and castles. In science fiction, a genre that began in the early nineteenth century with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, storytellers deal with technology’s impact on humanity, and as creatures of technology, our impact on one another. At times technological innovation helps us; at other times it threatens to destroy us.
Visual Effects
Lifting an audience into orbit or beyond requires the use of visual effects. These photographic and digital tricks help form the magic of cinema. The art of special effects began as an accident perpetrated by a stage magician, Georges Méliès, with a movie camera. A master of illusion, Méliès stumbled upon what became known as the stop effect while filming traffic in Paris. His camera jammed. When he finally got it working again, the traffic had changed. Later, when he projected the footage, he was startled to find that a bus suddenly transformed into a hearse! This delightful mistake resonated with his magician’s sensibility. From that day on, he used this trick to make actors appear and disappear by stopping the camera long enough for the actor to enter or exit the frame, then turning it back on. Through similar techniques he performed transformations, double exposures, and superimpositions. He even invented the dissolve by rewinding the film a couple feet and then re-photographing over it.
Case Study
As a boy I used to perform magic shows for birthday parties. Occasionally I’d partner with a charming kid with a great sense of humor, Larry Wilson. As an adult Larry went on to perform popular magic shows on stage, and I went on to edit feature films. The lessons I’d learned about sleight of hand, concealment, and timing helped inform my editing choices later on.
Like all early films, most of Méliès’s movies unfolded as if on a stage without the advantage of camera movement or editing. A short while after Méliès’s discoveries, another filmmaker, Edwin S. Porter, incorporated these other essential qualities. He also tried masking out part of the frame in-camera and then double-exposing it with another image to create the first matte composite. In The Great Train Robbery (1903), a film billed as an accurate portrayal of real-life holdups, the train station contains a large window looking out on a moving train. The window is actually a matte (see Figure 7.2 in Chapter 7).
Along with matte photography, Edwin S. Porter brought the concept of narrative editing to American film (see Chapter 7). Porter knitted together scene after scene, each related to the other by their proximity to one another, to advance the narrative. By intercutting a scene of the escaping robbers with the discovery of the bound station operator by his daughter in The Great Train Robbery, Porter performed an even more sophisticated trick—bending time itself.
According to Arthur Knight in The Liveliest Art,
the technique that Porter had hit upon in assembling this unpretentious little Western provided the key to the whole art of film editing, the joining together of bits of film shot in different places and at different times to form a single, unified narrative—a principle that Méliès, with his theater background, was never able to grasp.2
Edwin S. Porter’s use of editing eventually influenced such great filmmakers as D. W. Griffith. With The Birth of a Nation (1915), Griffith became the father of the feature film, expanding upon Porter’s work by freely using in-scene cutting and extending standard running times from minutes to hours. As with today’s films, Griffith incorporated wide shots, 2-shots, close-ups, insert shots, and so on, within the same scene.
Doctor’s Note
In Méliès’s time, movies were not rented but sold like cloth, by the foot. Anyone who possessed a print of a film could easily make a duplicate negative and generate endless copies to sell for his own profit. This became known as pirating.
Over 100 years later, the discoveries of Porter and Méliès still influence the magic of cinema. Visual effects have evolved from the early camera and animation effects of Méliès’s 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) to the stunning computer-generated visuals of the recent Star Trek, Star Wars, and Harry Potter features. Where A Trip to the Moon—a short film best remembered for its striking image of a bullet-shaped space capsule lodged in the eye of the moon—accomplished its goal through in-camera photographic tricks, the evolution to bluescreen compositing and the rise of the optical printer spawned generations of science-fiction and fantasy movies. Included among these were the popular B-movies of the 1950s, which, for the most part, appear cheesy when compared to the CGI, motion capture, and greenscreen compositing of today’s films, such as Life of Pi (2012; Figure 8.1). Each year these effects gain greater sophistication as more massive computer memory and faster processors power increasingly complex software.
Case Study
In a rare step backward, Stanley Kubrick, in his 1968 science-fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, chose to rely upon in-camera effects rather than bluescreen compositing and opticals to create a realistic and timeless look. To accomplish his goal, Kubrick used practical, in-camera effects, avoiding the degradation that results from creating multiple film generations of an image. Kubrick’s effects included front- and rear-screen projection, mattes, miniatures, and photographic movement that utilized the laws of physics. By rotating the camera and the set at the same rate, he was able to make his actors walk upside down in space. By mounting projectors inside his oversized miniature spaceships, he was able to project images of astronauts’ activity through the capsule’s windows. To make a pen float in the weightlessness of space, he secured the object to a large glass plate that rotated slowly in front of the lens. And to make actors float in space, he hung them above the camera to block the view of the suspension cables. Today the digital medium has turned every effect’s pass into a first generation, thus removing the graininess and distortion that used to result as a film progressed from one visual effect pass to another.
Visual effects artists, like Academy Award–winner Michael Fink (The Golden Compass, Life of Pi, Blade Runner), create or complete entire scenes that could not otherwise be photographed. This medium that was once confined to creating rocket ships and alien landscapes has grown to encompass all genres of filmmaking. With the ability to animate characters and objects photorealistically, visual effects have permeated genres that had never been associated with them. According to Fink, the 2013 bio-drama Dallas Buyers Club contained nearly 200 visual effects in order to transform its Louisiana location into the Texas landscape of the story, replete with pump jacks, trailers, and so on.3 The family musical Mamma Mia! (2008) contained 900 visual effects.
Visual effects have gained popularity through their ability to reduce costs, maintain schedules, and enhance production value. With evolving technology, filmmakers are gaining greater tools to tell a story. Relatively inexpensive and accessible software, like Adobe’s After Effects, puts visual effects in the hands of more filmmakers than ever before. Editors versed in these programs have the ability to mock up and composite images to promote the story. Visual effects houses, with their teams of animators, designers, modelers, riggers, and others, create believable worlds and characters. As Fink, quoting NASA/JPL computer artist James Blinn, points out, “It doesn’t have to be real, it just has to look real.”4
Computer-Generated Images
For an editor working in the science-fiction or fantasy genre, it is important to have an understanding of current visual effects techniques. Part of the joy of working within this medium derives from the malleability of visual effects. Richard Pearson, one of the editors of Iron Man 2 (2010), loved science fiction as a kid. He likens the versatility of visual effects to the concept that “you get just a lump of clay [to play with].” And he then imagines, “What if Iron Man did this… ?”5
Optical Printer
The standard tool for creating motion picture effects before the introduction of digital manipulation was the optical printer. It was basically a projector that was joined to a camera, allowing for the introduction of effects when re-photographing a film image. Its uses ranged from creating dissolves and wipes to compositing various elements into a scene by combining multiple passes on these elements.
Compositing
One of the most common and effective visual effects involves compositing. In simple terms, it involves placing a foreground object, like a spaceship, over a background plate, like a star field. To accomplish this, the foreground object is usually photographed against a green or bluescreen. The computer knows to replace all of the green or blue area with the star field.
In the past, an editor had to imagine how these elements would fit together and then wait to see them married onto film by an effects house. But by using nonlinear editing equipment, the editor can mock up a composite by placing the background greenscreen and foreground objects on separate tracks in the timeline, then applying a keying effect, such as Ultimatte. Today, new camera designs have taken this one step further. Some cameras, such as Simulcam, allow real-time compositing during filming so the director can view digital characters, designed on Autodesk’s MotionBuilder, performing within live environments.
Where compositing flourished in the celluloid film realm, it now relies heavily on digital technology. This has made possible other approaches, such as the method used in Gravity (2013). Here the actress (Sandra Bullock), seated inside a rotating gimbal device, was surrounded by gigantic LED screens depicting the images that her character was witnessing, such as the space station, earth, or sun. The screens had the added benefit of adding directional lighting on Bullock’s face. Later these screens and the surrounding apparatus were rotoscoped out, leaving only her face. This was composited with a CG space suit along with the immediate CG environment and background images at full resolution (Figure 8.2). In a film environment this would have been impossible since rotoscoping in film is highly time consuming and costly. In the CG environment, rotoscoping a large portion of a feature film becomes feasible.
CGI
Computer-generated images. This term refers to objects that are digitally created in 2D or 3D, such as the tiger in Life of Pi (2012; see Figure 8.1), the polar bear in Golden Compass (2007), or Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).
Plate
A plate is the action background that joins with foreground characters or objects, either in the CG realm—such as the digitally created dinosaurs performing in front of live action sets in Jurassic Park (1993)—or as live production backgrounds as in rear-screen projection.
Motion Capture
Another prominent technique, motion capture, or mo-cap, exceeds anything that has been achieved in the optical-effect realm. Through the use of reflective markers the actor’s body movements are sampled into a computer and become the framework for a CG skin. In some cases the hand gestures are modeled separately on a computer, due to the complexity of tracking hand movement. They are then reattached later.
In performance capture the actor’s facial expressions are retrieved, again through the use of markers, and placed into the computer. The voice is also recorded at that time. Echoing the insights of Lev Kuleshov, James Cameron’s collaborator on Avatar, Jon Landau, pointed out in Cinefex magazine:
Our goal in using performance capture was not to replace the actor with our computer-animated character, but to preserve the actor… . A great actor withholds information. Dustin Hoffman can sit there and do nothing in All the President’s Men, and you are riveted. But no animator would ever animate a character to just sit there and do nothing.6
Through performance capture the director’s attention shifts from a concern about various camera angles to a preoccupation with performance. Once the best performance is captured into the system the editor and director can choose to turn it into whatever shot they like—wide, medium, close-up, and so on.
One of the main contributors to the development of performance capture is Demian “Dman” Gordon (The Matrix Reloaded, Watchmen, and Alice in Wonderland). He contends that, while entirely computer-generated movies have increased in recent years,
digital actors will never replace real ones. Certain dangerous or generic action can be replaced or augmented, such as background action, or stunts, or crowd generation, but you will always need actors. Motion capture will always be an actor’s medium. [On the other hand] there will definitely be more and more movies that are entirely computer generated, where some or all facets of the film occur in postproduction.7
The Star Wars prequel Rogue One (2016) accomplished the haunting achievement of bringing a deceased actor back from the dead through photorealistic visual effects—and permission from his estate. Peter Cushing, who played the Death Star commander Grand Moff Tarkin and died in the first Star Wars movie before actually passing away in 1994, reappears in the prequel thanks to sophisticated motion capture and a digital re-creation of Cushing’s face. A young Princess Leia also makes an appearance in Rogue One but, as USA Today’s Kelly Lawler noted, Leia’s computer-generated appearance was “so jarring as to take the audience completely out of the film at its most emotional moment,”8 a response that is antithetical to the goal of most filmmakers.
While a computer-generated actor may look identical, a convincing performance proves harder to achieve. Visual effects artists speak of “crossing the uncanny valley” that divides the plausible from the unrealistic. So far, some of the strongest performances have come from CGI animals, where the subtlety of human emotion is not a challenge, such as the tiger in Life of Pi or the bear in The Revenant (2015).
The Uncanny Valley
As far back as 1843 the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard explored the idea of art and reality in his book Either/Or. He suggested that classic art forms were those that most closely reflected reality through a unity of form and content. Today motion pictures and video games approach this goal.
The uncanny valley is a term coined by a Japanese robotics professor in 1977 to describe the revulsion felt by audiences viewing human replicas that are close but not exact. The term is still used today. Though a still frame may appear acceptable, the action involved in the character’s performance often breaks the sense of reality.
Doctor’s Note
Using a camera array known as Lightstage, combined with 3D printing, an effects team created the first completely accurate bust of President Barack Obama to join the procession of presidential busts in the White House.
Motion Capture
Abbreviated as mo-cap, this term applies to “a variety of technologies that are used to digitize the motion of real-world objects,” according to motion capture supervisor Demian “Dman” Gordon.9 The process usually employs reflective markers placed across the body or face. As the subject moves before the lights mounted on mo-cap cameras, the markers glow, pinpointing every movement. Recent developments replace markers with intensely bright LEDs that fire in phase with the motion capture camera. These dots are captured and stored into the computer, creating a moving skeleton on which skin, clothing, fur, and other textures can be placed. Another method involves wireless full-body suits capable of responding to movement and direction through the use of accelerometers, eliminating the need for markers.
On feature films the editor plays a significant role in the motion capture process. In most cases, Gordon points out,
the capture sessions are filmed with a traditional film camera simultaneously alongside the motion capture efforts. This reference video is often cut together to make a rough edit that guides the delivery of the motion capture process and provides an EDL with shot-specific timecode and shots that will be ordered for delivery from the motion capture team. In this case the editor informs everything about the delivery of the motion capture data, and the editor’s EDL becomes a bible for data delivery that everyone involved follows.10
Visual Effects as Film Doctor
Visual effects can solve many ailments. “In almost every movie I’ve done there’s some shot [where they say,] ‘Mike, can you fix this?’ ” notes Michael Fink. Astute directors in many genres employ visual effects supervisors before the first day of production in anticipation of challenges that await them. On Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), because of its tight deadlines, script pages were being written as the crew was shooting. This laid the path to continuity mismatches that the director, Richard Donner, anticipated as inevitable.
Fink, the film’s visual effects supervisor, met the challenge when it came to an 800-frame Steadicam shot where the two main characters, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover), pull up in their patrol car with a third officer in the back seat. Unfortunately, storywise, the third cop should not have been in the scene. His appearance presented the director and editor with an obvious continuity problem. “We had to get rid of the guy and get rid of the guy’s shadow [as he exited the vehicle],” Fink recalls. “Also, he opened the car door and we had to keep the car door closed.”
Through careful frame by frame manipulation, the third character was removed from the scene. “You couldn’t tell he was ever there,” says Fink. At another point in the film, Mel Gibson’s character showed up on a boat. As the story played out “we realized he couldn’t be on the boat.” Again, through meticulous effects work, the actor was removed from the scene.
As a challenge to emerging mediums, from television to video games, Hollywood has sought to engage audiences’ attention with innovative formats including widescreen CinemaScope, three-camera Cinerama, 3D, multichannel surround sound, and even Smell-o-Vision. 3D, a format that comes in and out of vogue, drew audiences to theaters in the early 1950s when these films were known as “depthies” and the competition with television threatened attendance. 3D has regained favor to the point that well-respected filmmakers have declared that no film should ever again be made in conventional 2D. Nonlinear equipment companies, such as Avid, now produce specialized systems designed to handle 3D movies. Lately, however, film students, who are often a good gauge of trends, report that they are tired of 3D; they don’t enjoy wearing the glasses—some even remove them during the screening—and they long for better stories over novel effects. They await the next trend—VR (virtual reality) or holographic movies perhaps?
VR
Virtual reality (VR) works by immersing the viewer into a scene through specially designed goggles and headphones, letting him or her interact with the objects and characters within the field of vision. In most cases the viewer can change his or her view by looking up or down, left or right—as much as 360 degrees. Through special gloves or paddles some viewers can navigate through space and pick up objects. Unlike motion picture editing, straight cuts in a VR story can be disruptive. To solve this, editors introduce bright flashes or quick dips to black—blinks—to help transition the viewer. A challenge that awaits VR creators resides in moving from simple stories to complex plots, which involve extensive editing.
Motion picture sound has followed along with innovations in picture quality and size. Early sound was monaural, confined to one track. A later innovation created stereophonic sound, employing two audio channels. Dolby, originally a noise-reduction process designed to remove hiss and other distracting distortions from the soundtrack, pioneered an encoded matrix capable of playing multiple channels. Today these analog processes have evolved into digital, with the latest Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 surround sound creating a 3D aural experience with 12 discrete channels. Other digital sound systems include SDDS and DTS. (See Chapter 18.)
3D
Any stereoscope projection system that produces a three-dimensional effect for the audience is known as “3D.” Utilizing the manner in which humans perceive depth through the comparison between information perceived by two eyes, 3D processes use multiple cameras or single cameras with double lenses, offset to mimic the different angle from which two eyes perceive objects. During exhibition this double image was originally recreated by running two interlocked projectors running the same images simultaneously and later by printing the two offset images onto a single filmstrip. Special lenses, originally red and blue but later employing polarized light, isolated the separate images for each eye.
Tech Note
Dolby’s 7.1 surround sound, which debuted in Toy Story 3 (2010), consists of eight separate channels: left, center, right, low-frequency effects (LFE), left surround, right surround, back surround left, and back surround right. The last two channels are an addition to the previous 5.1 standard. This configuration makes it possible to pan the sound 360 degrees around the theater. Combined with 3D photography this further contributes to the immersive experience.
RX
Examine your favorite genres and determine the iconography that is specific to each one.