Author: Liam

When we made “The Library of Burned Books” we part-funded it with donations from people around the world using Indiegogo (our pitch page – including Al’s amazing comedy video – is still online) and so once the film was finished, we were obliged to follow through on all the things we promised people in return for their support.

Al adapted the stunning poster he designed as a prop for the film, and turned it into an image we printed onto the DVD. Then we ordered in some lovely recycled card cases, and hand-stamped the lot of them with our artwork. Finally, Al and his girlfriend Rachel hand-crafted little booklets (made from books we saved from the furnace) to insert into some of the cases for our extra-special donors.

It feels really good to put some hand-crafted love into the packaging of the film. Thanks again to everyone who helped us make the film!

I’m heading to the Berlinale with a few other film school colleagues, from LFS and around the world. The main focus of the week for us will be a 5-day course on distribution and marketing strategies called Making Waves. I’m really looking forward to going to Berlin again – such a great city! And to combine it with the Berlinale is going to be excellent.

Link: Making Waves website, Berlinale website

This is one of my favourite images from behind the scenes of Like Spinning Plates: clips of Kevin (Toby Liszt) hanging above an edit bin waiting to be spliced into the conformed print by the film’s editor, Fateme Ahmadi. 35mm film is magical.

This morning we start fundraising for The Library of Burned Books. I’m producing, and I’m pleased to be working on such a good, solid script, and with a director who has a great eye for fantastic images.

The Library of Burned Books is a short film that combines live action with animation to tell the story of a young girl who sees through the lies of a cruel adult world. We’re shooting in late October in London, and we’re raising funds through IndieGogo.

I’ve done a credit sequence for the directorial debut of friend and colleague Phil Whelans, Clowntime is Over, which takes its title from an Elvis Costello song. Phil plays a role in my latest LFS film, Like Spinning Plates, which takes its title from a Radiohead song.

The film, described by Phil as “a new genre: sadstick” concerns itself with the last days of an aged stand-up comedian and is a poignant blend of slapstick and tragedy. Ralph H. Levene stars as Maurice Barley, and the film is due to hit the festival circuit any time now.

A few days ago I finished editing a promo for fellow LFS student, Jonathan Tomlin. It’s a little teaser to give potential funders an idea of what the finished film could be. He’s currently seeking funds through Kickstarter, so please follow the link to have a look at his work, and my creative contribution to his cause.

Link: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/121989931/coda?ref=live

Last week, Mr Gray sent me a photocopy from the New Scientist about a paper from Cornell University that analyses attention span and cutting rhythm in Hollywood movies. Their methods involved analysing cuts and shot length, and comparing them to biological rhythms of human attention span. Essentially what they have achieved is an mechanical version of film editor Walter Murch’s “blink of an eye” theory. He suggests that thoughts and blinking are connected (we blink when we “cut” in our minds from one thought to the next) and by being aware of where one blinks while watching rushes (and also by watching when good actors in the movies blink) you can tell when a cut will feel “right” emotionally.

Some of the sources reporting on this story lazily conclude:

The researchers concluded that over the next few decades film makers may take more care to follow the 1/f law to try to boost audience engagement.

This is almost the exact opposite of what the authors of the paper really conclude:

In no way do we claim that there is any intention on the part of filmmakers to develop a 1/f film style, even if they knew what that might be. Instead, we claim that, as explorations and crafting of film have proceeded for at least 70 years, film narrative has fallen naturally into 1/f shot structure as the myriad of other considerations in filmmaking have played against each other in shaping film form. Good storytelling is the balancing of constraints at multiple scales of presentation. Thus, we view 1/f film form as an emergent, self-organizing structure (Gilden, 2001; Van Orden et al., 2003), not as an intentional one.

It seems to me that the underlying assumption of the paper is, however, that shots in a movie can only carry one idea and need to be cut once that idea has been communicated. This is not a satisfactory way to understand the achievement of films that make use of sequence shots. Many high-grossing Hollywood movies of the “classical” period made much use of long shots with complex camera movements. This style leads – and holds – the viewer’s attention without fast cutting, and in some cases without cutting at all. An extreme example is Hitchcock’s Rope which is intended to be one long sequence shot with no cuts. A better example, because its style was emulated for commercial and artistic reasons, is the following shot from Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm

Between 2:44 and 6:01 of this shot there are no cuts whatsoever. That’s ONE SHOT that lasts 3 minutes and 27 seconds. The Man with a Golden Arm was a commercially successful film which paved the way for Hollywood movies to explore the subject of drug addiction. It would also not fit the cutting model proposed by Cornell’s scientists at all. Why, then, was something so antithetical to natural human attention span so successful?

Well, put simply, cutting isn’t the only way to direct a viewer’s attention. As for why it was used, and why this style has fallen out of use, attention span is only half the story. In this period of film history the studio system was at its height. Camera crews worked together regularly in the same sound stages, and it was easy and – as Preminger proved – cheap to shoot movies using this extended take sequence shot style. An added artistic advantage is that it allowed actors time and space to create subtle, nuanced performances. Furthermore, this style allows the viewer time to investigate the space within the frame, picking up on small details.

It is notable that the films that fit most closely with the attention span formula of the Cornell team are action films. Certainly when you’re planning to cut very quickly, you seldom have time for more than one idea per frame. As Mr Gray noted in biro on the bottom of the photocopied article:

[Is it] that modern films have less to look at, that their compositions and choice of inclusions have grown simpler due to a simplifying market?

It is worth noting that the film the Cornell scientists observed to adhere most rigidly to the 1/f shot sequence structure was The Phantom Menace.

Links:
The New Scientist: Cine-Maths grabs our fickle attention
Attention and the Evolution of the Hollywood Film

It’s funny how humdrum everyday employment manages to eat up so much mental bandwidth. I’ve had almost no brainwaves worth blogging in months. Dull, dull, dull. But now the becalmed feeling is GONE. The day job finished over a week ago, and since then we’ve shot a music video and I’m about 70% through editing it. Fantastic! It is so good to be master of my own schedule again, even if it’s just for a few weeks.