Mise-en-scene, Montage, and the Unique Language of Film
"Mise-en-scène refers to the visual design of a film. A narrative film’s visual elements can include lighting, set décor, costume design, props, blocking, spatial relationships, scene composition - Mise-en-scène is how these visual elements work together to tell the story. Every visual element designed for narrative film is considered mise-en-scène. Even non-narrative films, such as documentaries, can be said to have a certain degree of mise-en-scène. This arrangement and design expresses aspects of the characters, themes, and story that are necessarily in dialogue."
(Michael McVey, Skiffleboom.com)
Fig.1 James McTeigue (2006). "V for Vendetta"
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale
"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases 'I feel' and 'I am feeling'. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the 'feeling' expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.
At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life."
(Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar, May 2006)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Tension & Release: What are the functions of rhythm in film?
"All of the tools, the choreographic processes, and the editor's sources of intuitive knowledge about editing a film's rhythm are used by editors in service of fulfilling rhythm's purposes in film. The question in this chapter is: What are the functions of rhythm in film? The following discussion suggests that the functions of rhythm are to create cycles of tension and release and to synchronize the spectator's physical, emotional, and cognitive fluctuations with the rhythms of the film."
(Karen Pearlman, 05 March 2008, The Art of the Guillotine)
Karen Pearlman, 2009. 'Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit'. Focal Press.
Fig.1 Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho shower scene; Fig.2 CHAPTER 3: Timing, Pacing, and Trajectory Phrasing; Fig.3 CHAPTER 4: Tension, Release, and Synchronization; Fig.4. A podcast of Karen Pearlman.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage
"PhotoSketch is an internet-based programme that can take [a] rough, labelled sketch ... and automatically turn it into the naff montage... Seems unbelievable but—as the video shows—it works.
According to authors, their software can take any rough sketch, with the shape of each element labelled with its name, find images corresponding to each drawn element, judge which are a better match to the shapes, and then seamlessly merge it all into one single image."
(Jesus Diaz, 5 Oct 5 2009, Gizmodo)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Parody Through Recurring Motifs Of Suspense And Clichés Of Plot
Media Art Net
A collage of Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, filmed directly from the television set. The constantly recurring motifs of suspense and clichés of plot make it possible to move seamlessly among scenes from different films with different protagonists: uneasy sleep, getting up, listening at the door, turning on the lights, being startled, etc.
In the montage, the movements and gestures of the actresses ? stars like Lana Turner, Tippi Hedren, and Grace Kelly? seem choreographed and planned for each other. The sound track (Dirk Schäfer) supports this effect with connecting passages of sound that imitate the stereotypes of the genre. The treatment concentrates the dramatic shift from the familiar to the eerie and shows how women become the victims of the voyeuristic glance of film.
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
