Monday, June 04, 2007

Under The Hood - 'The Language Of Film'

I am about to launch a new, ongoing series of posts here at film ick under the blanket title Under the Hood. Initially, I was going to call the series The Language of Film but soon realised that, actually, not all of the subjects I'll want to cover be seen as dealing with film in that way - but they can all be seen as comparing a film to a motor car, in one way or another. And each will have only one label at the bottom - 'under the hood' - which you can click upon to call them all up together.

But that's the last you'll hear of the car comparison, explicitly. I'm not about to turn it into a torturous metaphor.

My first post is going to deal with zoom lenses, I believe, and I'm working on that one right now. Future topics will include jump cuts, reverse angles, camera movement, the three dimensional space inside the cinema auditorium, aspect ratios, non-diegetic music, story structure and plenty more. If you have any suggestions for other topics, please drop them in the comments below. I'll possibly even deal with them quite quickly.

Hopefully each post will be thought provoking - and you can help with that. As ever, you'll be able to post comments, argument and debate of your own.

Eventually, however, I should have built up a very varied range of general topics to serve as easy-reach reference material for more topical posts, such as my pieces on Paul W. S Anderson on The Dark Knight in IMAX recently. And hopefully I'll be able to keep things interesting too.

3 comments:

Sledge said...

Fantastic !
I'm very much looking forward to this. I know NOTHING and want to learn.

Anonymous said...

Very nice. Change comes with knowledge and cinema-going needs to be understood before things will change for the better. This is a small step, but hopefully more people will understand what makes watching and understanding movies better than the theaters and studios are trying to tell you you should know. THE SCREEN SHOULD MOVE OUT FROM CENTER, NOT UP AND DOWN FROM TOP AND BOTTOM REGAL CINEMAS!
So, if you would, please explain anamorphic and why it's different and how they're paying for an anamorphic film and not even seeing it in anamorphic because the theater wouldn't even buy the correct projector!
(And they want to start digital projection? Yeah...only in the cities)
Keep it up, thanks for doing this.
-ltar

Harmen said...

Cool, finally i too can now understand what the difference between aspect ratio's means. Here's hoping that this series gets a lot of attention.