Impulse

Enough with the tech­ni­cal, on to aes­thet­ics!
Artists com­pose images using the ele­ments of light, color, geom­e­try, per­spec­tive, depth of field, and frame place­ment. This is true of all visual arts includ­ing still pho­tog­ra­phy and video / film. Video and film have one addi­tional, unique ele­ment: time. It seems obvi­ous: movies, move; pic­tures don’t, how­ever, I’m find­ing it’s really much more sub­tle than that.

Think about the ways artists use com­po­si­tion to con­trol your atten­tion and mood: A pho­tog­ra­pher can set the focus to exactly what she wants you to look at first, and let the rest of the image go blurry. Or she might use a strik­ing color on a bland back­ground. Or she might use geom­e­try, arrang­ing the objects in the frame so your eyes fall where she wants them nat­u­rally. She can adjust the col­ors, light­ing, and per­spec­tive to tune your mood: dark, grey, and moody, or bright and col­or­ful. These are the tools that have been used from Da Vinci to LaChapelle.
Because video and film are tem­po­ral, film­mak­ers can use move­ment and time as a sim­i­lar com­po­si­tional ele­ment, for exam­ple in cam­era move­ment. When the cam­era pans away from a dis­cus­sion to a closed door, we know someone’s going to come rough it. When a char­ac­ter throws a ball, the cam­era pans to see where it went. Camera move­ment is a lit­tle voice whis­per­ing, “look over here”. Filmmakers can use cam­era move­ment to draw your atten­tion wher­ever they like. Additionally they can con­trol the way it moves to set your moves: slow push-in for an intensely seri­ous moment, jerk­ily erratic move­ment for con­fu­sion.
The tem­po­ral com­po­nent has sev­eral effects that are sub­tle and psy­cho­log­i­cal. For exam­ple, on sev­eral occa­sions, I’ve shown peo­ple a photo essay of mine, com­pletely scram­bling the order of the pho­tographs each time I show it. I’ve found that peo­ple walk away with the same impres­sion of the sub­ject and same appre­ci­a­tion for the work regard­less of the order of the images. They also don’t mind that some ele­ments are miss­ing. If I show a photo of peo­ple argu­ing, and another after they have resolved the mat­ter, view­ers feel sat­is­fied. Viewers don’t need the photo of the begin­ning of the argu­ment that shows what it was about. People fill in the gaps. In fact, with still pho­tog­ra­phy, peo­ple expect to fill in the gaps.
But movies move, and as a result, I think peo­ple expect to have the gaps filled in for them. If I had shown you the same argu­ment scene, this time as clips of video, again show­ing the argu­ment and the res­o­lu­tion but omit­ting the begin­ning, you’d be con­fused or unin­ter­ested. You’d expect to be shown what it is about. That tem­po­ral com­po­nent sets up a rhythm: this hap­pened, then this, then this. If I leave out the begin­ning, mid­dle, or end, it feels shoddy and incom­plete.
I believe this rhythm forces the story to the fore­ground. With a photo essay, the story is abstract — the viewer cre­ates the story them­selves as they inves­ti­gate the pho­tos. With movies, the story is lit­eral; the whole point of watch­ing a movie is to see how a story unfolds. Think about it. If a friend told you about a photo show, you’d ask, “Did the show look good?” If a friend told you about a movie, you’d ask, “What was it about?”.
Why is this? Researchers have found that when a per­son watches another per­son, the watcher’s brain is stim­u­lated almost exactly as if the watcher were doing the task them­selves. That’s how we learn from oth­ers. Perhaps sim­i­larly, because movies move, we expect them to act more like real life — this hap­pens, then this, then this — just as we expe­ri­ence real life. We expect each scene to have a begin­ning, mid­dle, and end feel.
How you arrange those scenes, and how you show the ele­ments of begin­ning, mid­dle, and end is where the tem­po­ral com­po­nent becomes a com­po­si­tional com­po­nent. Think of the movie Memento. It has a begin­ning, mid­dle, and end feel, yet gives you the events of the story com­pletely out of order. Compositionally, they played with the tem­po­ral aspect of the story time­line, yet it still fol­lows the pat­tern of expo­si­tion, devel­op­ment, cli­max, denoue­ment. The time­line of the audi­ence and that of the story draw our atten­tion towards the cli­max.
Watching a movie is like going on a tour — the audi­ence moves through the land­scape of the story. The direc­tor is your tour guide. While film­ing, his job is to be con­stantly aware of which scenes came before and after, and how the audi­ence moves from moment to moment in the story. The fea­ture film direc­tor places the cam­era and actors and directs every­one based on this aware­ness of time. The doc­u­men­tary film­maker does all this on the fly, decid­ing where to point the cam­era, when to cut, and when to get extra reac­tion shots, all while the action unfolds in front of her. It’s much more impro­vi­sa­tional. Either way, though, the direc­tor is doing the same thing: Using the tra­di­tional visual com­po­si­tional ele­ments as well as tem­po­ral ele­ments, he shows you the story; “Look over there. Now over here.“
In the next post, I’ll describe how this tem­po­ral com­po­nent affected my shooting.

Related posts:

1. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 4
2. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 1
3. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 2
4. Camerawork and edit­ing RAAM
5. We need another hero