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Film Grammar
In film, film grammar is defined as follows: # A frame is a single still image. It is analogous to a letter. # A shot is a single continuous recording made by a camera. It is analogous to a word. # A scene is a series of related shots. It is analogous to a sentence. The study of transitions between scenes is described in film punctuation. # A sequence is a series of scenes which together tell a major part of an entire story, such as that contained in a complete movie. It is analogous to a paragraph. The term ''film grammar'' is best understood as a creative metaphor, since the elements of film grammar described above do not stand in any strict relation of analogy to the components of grammar as understood by philology or modern linguistics. D. W. Griffith has been called the father of film grammar. Griffith was a key figure in establishing the set of codes that have become the universal backbone of film language. He was particularly influential in popularizing "cross-cutting"& ...
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Film
A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound and, more rarely, other sensory stimulations. The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, and to the art form that is the result of it. Recording and transmission of film The moving images of a film are created by photography, photographing actual scenes with a movie camera, motion-picture camera, by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques, by means of computer-generated imagery, CGI and computer animation, or by a combination of some or all of these techniques, and other visual effects. Before the introduction of digital production, series of still imag ...
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Narrative
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional ( fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc.). Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb ''narrare'' (to tell), which is derived from the adjective ''gnarus'' (knowing or skilled). Narration (i.e., the process of presenting a narrative) is a rhetorical mode of discourse, broadly defined (and paralleling argumentation, description, and exposition), is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode in which a narrator communicates directly to an audience. The school of literary criticism known as Russian formalism has applied methods that are more often used to analyse narrative fiction, to non-f ...
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Lillian Gish
Lillian Diana Gish (October 14, 1893February 27, 1993) was an American actress, director, and screenwriter. Her film-acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912, in silent film shorts, to 1987. Gish was called the "First Lady of American Cinema", and is credited with pioneering fundamental film performance techniques. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Gish as the 17th greatest female movie star of classic Hollywood cinema. Gish was a prominent film star from 1912 into the 1920s, being particularly associated with the films of director D. W. Griffith. This included her leading role in the highest-grossing film of the silent era, Griffith's ''The Birth of a Nation'' (1915). Her other major films and performances from the silent era are: '' Intolerance'' (1916), ''Broken Blossoms'' (1919), ''Way Down East'' (1920), '' Orphans of the Storm'' (1921), '' La Bohème'' (1926), and '' The Wind'' (1928). At the dawn of the sound era, she returned to the stage and appeared in fil ...
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Billy Bitzer
Gottfried Wilhelm Bitzer (April 21, 1872 – April 29, 1944) was an American cinematographer, notable for his close association and pioneering work with D. W. Griffith. Biography Prior to his career as a cameraman, working as a motion picture projectionist, Bitzer developed early cinematic technologies for the American Mutoscope Company, eventually to become the Biograph Company. He admired and learned the art of motion picture photography from Kinetoscope inventor W. K. L. Dickson, who directed the early Biograph shorts on which Bitzer cut his teeth. Bitzer achieved success in 1896 when his film of William McKinley being notified of the presidential nomination of his party was exhibited on the Biograph Company’s first program. Until 1903, Bitzer was employed by Biograph primarily as a documentary photographer, and from 1903 onward primarily as the photographer of narrative films, as these gained popularity. In 1908 Bitzer entered into his first collaboration with Griffith. Th ...
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Close-up
A close-up or closeup in filmmaking, television production, photography, still photography, and the comic strip medium is a type of shot (filmmaking), shot that tightly film frame, frames a person or object. Close-ups are one of the standard shots used regularly with medium and long shots (cinematic techniques). Close-ups display the most detail, but they do not include the broader scene. Moving toward or away from a close-up is a common type of zooming (filmmaking), zooming. A close up is taken from head to neck, giving the viewer a detailed view of the subject's face. History Most early filmmakers, such as Thomas Edison, Auguste and Louis Lumière and Georges Méliès, tended not to use close-ups and preferred to frame their subjects in long shots, similar to the stage. Film historians disagree as to the filmmaker who first used a close-up. One of the best claims is for George Albert Smith (film pioneer), George Albert Smith in Hove, who used medium close-ups in films as earl ...
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Point Of View Shot
A point of view shot (also known as POV shot, first-person shot or a subjective camera) is a short film scene that shows what a character (the subject) is looking at (represented through the camera). It is usually established by being positioned between a shot of a character looking at something, and a shot showing the character's reaction (see shot reverse shot). The technique of POV is one of the foundations of film editing. Subjectives A POV shot need not be the strict point-of-view of an actual single character in a film. Sometimes the point-of-view shot is taken over the shoulder of the character (third person), who remains visible on the screen. Sometimes a POV shot is "shared" ("dual" or "triple"), i.e. it represents the joint POV of two (or more) characters. Point-of-view, or simply p.o.v., camera angles record the scene from a particular player's viewpoint. The point-of-view is an objective angle, but since it falls between the objective and subjective angle, it sho ...
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Continuity Editing
Continuity editing is the process, in film and video creation, of combining more-or-less related shots, or different components cut from a single shot, into a sequence to direct the viewer's attention to a pre-existing consistency of story across both time and physical location. Often used in feature films, continuity editing, or "cutting to continuity", can be contrasted with approaches such as montage, with which the editor aims to generate, in the mind of the viewer, new associations among the various shots that can then be of entirely different subjects, or at least of subjects less closely related than would be required for the continuity approach. When discussed in reference to classical Hollywood cinema, it may also be referred to as classical continuity. Common techniques of continuity editing Continuity editing can be divided into two categories: temporal continuity and spatial continuity. Within each category, specific techniques will work against a sense of continuity ...
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Classical Hollywood Cinema
Classical Hollywood cinema is a term used in film criticism to describe both a narrative and visual style of filmmaking which became characteristic of American cinema between the 1910s (rapidly after World War I) and the 1960s. It eventually became the most powerful and pervasive style of filmmaking worldwide. Similar or associated terms include classical Hollywood narrative, the Golden Age of Hollywood, Old Hollywood, and classical continuity. For centuries, the only visual standard of narrative storytelling art was the theatre. Since the first narrative films in the mid-late 1890s, filmmakers have sought to capture the power of live theatre on the cinema screen. Most of these filmmakers started as directors on the late 19th-century stage, and likewise most film actors had roots in vaudeville (e.g. The Marx Brothers) or theatrical melodramas. Visually, early narrative films had adapted little from the stage, and their narratives had adapted very little from vaudeville and m ...
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Suspense
Suspense is a state of mental uncertainty, anxiety, being Decision-making, undecided, or being Doubt, doubtful. In a Drama, dramatic work, suspense is the anticipation of the wikt:outcome, outcome of a plot (narrative), plot or of the solution to an uncertainty, puzzle, or Mystery fiction, mystery, particularly as it affects a character for whom one has sympathy. However, suspense is not exclusive to fiction. In drama In literature, films, television, and plays, suspense is a major device for securing and maintaining interest. It may be of several major types: in one, the outcome is uncertain and the suspense resides in the question of ''who, what, or how''; in another, the outcome is inevitable from foregoing events, and the suspense resides in the audience's anxious or frightened anticipation in the question of ''when''. Readers feel suspense when they are deeply curious about ''what'' will happen next, or when they know what is likely to happen but don’t know ''how'' i ...
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Film Editing
Film editing is both a creative and a technical part of the post-production process of filmmaking. The term is derived from the traditional process of working with film which increasingly involves the use of digital technology. The film editor works with raw footage, selecting shots and combining them into sequences which create a finished motion picture. Film editing is described as an art or skill, the only art that is unique to cinema, separating filmmaking from other art forms that preceded it, although there are close parallels to the editing process in other art forms such as poetry and novel writing. Film editing is often referred to as the "invisible art" because when it is well-practiced, the viewer can become so engaged that they are not aware of the editor's work. On its most fundamental level, film editing is the art, technique and practice of assembling shots into a coherent sequence. The job of an editor is not simply to mechanically put pieces of a film to ...
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Cross-cutting
Cross-cutting is an editing technique most often used in films to establish action occurring at the same time, and often in the same place. In a cross-cut, the camera will cut away from one action to another action, which can suggest the simultaneity of these two actions but this is not always the case. Cross-cutting can also be used for characters in a film with the same goals but different ways of achieving them. Suspense may be added by cross-cutting. It is built through the expectations that it creates and in the hopes that it will be explained with time. Cross-cutting also forms parallels; it illustrates a narrative action that happens in several places at approximately the same time. For instance, in D. W. Griffith's ''A Corner in Wheat'' (1909), the film cross-cuts between the activities of rich businessmen and poor people waiting in line for bread. This creates a sharp dichotomy between the two actions, and encourages the viewer to compare the two shots. Often, this contra ...
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Paragraph
A paragraph () is a self-contained unit of discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. Though not required by the orthographic conventions of any language with a writing system, paragraphs are a conventional means of organizing extended segments of prose. History The oldest classical British and Latin writing had little or no space between words and could be written in boustrophedon (alternating directions). Over time, text direction (left to right) became standardized. Word dividers and terminal punctuation became common. The first way to divide sentences into groups was the original ', similar to an underscore at the beginning of the new group. The Greek ' evolved into the pilcrow (¶), which in English manuscripts in the Middle Ages can be seen inserted inline between sentences. Ancient manuscripts also divided sentences into paragraphs with line breaks (newline) followed by an initial at the beginning of the next paragraph. An initial is an oversized ca ...
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