Wednesday 30 September 2015

In the blink of an eye

I found this book a few weeks back after discovering some of Walter Murch's talks/interviews on YouTube.


The book is based on a transcript of one of those talks and is an insight into the work of an experienced film editor (although he is also a renowned sound editor). What anyone could imagine to be a dry subject is transformed by Murch's experience and comfortably informed style. The insights into the editing of Coppola's Apocalypse Now are worth the read in themselves. The purely mechanical methods of editing physical film stock were common place until (and still after) The English Patient was the first digitally edited film to win an Oscar for Best Editing (edited by Murch on Avid).  

The real value though is found in his meditations on the art of film editing and why it should work at all. Why does the human eye (and mind) accept the spectacle of chop cuts between disparate images in film that are impossible in our day to day experience? This question turns out to be the titular premise and I found it a revelation.

We're also given a valuable insight into Murch's priorities when editing. Sometimes referred to as "the rule of 6", they are

  • Emotion
  • Story
  • Rhythm
  • Eye Trace
  • The Two Dimensional Plane and;
  • The Three Dimensional Space
He expects that you should be able to satisfy all conditions... most of the time ... but if you have to give something up, it should be from the bottom up.

It strikes me that he believes that, while striving for perfection, the technical should suffer before the experience. The emotion carries the story which holds the rhythm and so it goes on.

Frankly, I'm very new to all of the concepts in this book (in terms of the moving image at least) and I'd like to hear any views on Murch's  theories.

One for the money...

What's this blog about?

I've just enrolled on the BA 3D Computer Animation course at Swansea College of Art (UWTSD). The first year includes a module called Performance & Audio/Visual Techniques and requires this blog as a record of our investigations and thoughts around the subject.

Having received some initial input, an introduction to the module from Dave Morgan this morning, I wanted to get this blog going with some of the subjects he covered.

Don't quote me, I'm investigating!

Cameras: The very basics (in no particular order)

In order to build an understanding of the use of virtual cameras in 3D applications (such as Maya), we need a foundation in the physical world.

First up; That tricky f-stop

The aperture is the opening of the lens that allows light to enter and be captured either on film or (for our purpose) by the camera's digital sensor. The larger the opening the more light is allowed through. The f-number (or f-stop) is derived from the ratio of the lens's focal length to the diameter of the aperture. The f-stop is inversely proportional to the aperture size so...

smaller f-stop value, larger aperture, more light...

larger f-stop value, smaller aperture, less light...

Got it?


Image from: http://photounleashed.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Photography.pdf

So what does that do for the images we manage to capture?

This really hairy guy makes good use of a Kermit model to demonstrate the effect of varying the lens's f-stop value.


The effect can also be seen in this series of images:
Image from: https://jchan1996.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/50mm_f1.jpg

Q. What is the effect? A. A variation in the depth of field

The smaller the f-stop value, the shorter the depth of field

The larger the f-stop value, the longer the depth of field.

Q. What is this depth of field thing?
Q. If less light is allowed through a small aperture, aren't my photos going to be darker?

Good questions. I shall investigate further.... next time....