film-comment-art-design-homework-help
comment on what two different classmates posted, (Each comment should be 80 words.)
Post 1
As an audience we take for granted the hard task of editing a film to make it cohesive and or flow in an interesting manner. One way to do this cohesively is to use continuity editing; an idea is to convey a story as plainly, capably and logically as can be. To make it more interesting way of editing is discontinuity editing; which disrupts the law of continuity editing by searching to get shifts among shots that are not smooth, unbroken, or intelligible. Dreamscapes by Sean McBride is an animated film that uses animation to capture the spirit of people’s dreams. Altogether Dreamscapes want to show us the spontaneity of dreams and dreaming by using continuity and discontinuity editing.
Discontinuity editing is seen by different styles of art and music in Dreamscapes. The film starts with wistful music paralleled with hand painted stars and faces, suddenly a voice says space and time and diagrams of the brain plus scattered marimba music disorients us out of our dream state. It fits with what the person says, but is surprising in what we actually see. Another severe cut and we see an animated three-dimensional long view shot, an expansive view of the surroundings of a roadway and in comes a racing car, with soft electronic jazz. Each scene has a different look and feel so I feel the editing is not as clear as it could be.
Continuity editing is seen before each’s new dreamer thoughts. For example a man is seen flying on a rocket pack from the first 3-d animation scene into next collage animated scene. We don’t know where one dream starts and one dream ends. There is a scene where a chalk drawn man drowns in pitch darkness, then can breathe in water in pitch startling light to contrast a woman recalling a sunny day on a beach with those who are alive and those who die in fast sketch form. From these scenes we can assume that there is a “people die and people live themeâ€. An old video game style animation pops out with a child voice over and peppy music. Although we feel it is unusual after the death theme the director places a sense of transportation in between the scenes in order to make a smooth transition with a car train into a point of view of a moving car seeing a suburban neighborhood.
post two.
This week I chose to watch The Big Charade (2003). This short film turns out to be a movie trailer satire that follows one man’s life and the influence that the game of charades has along the way. Continuity editing is not found to be a key element of this short film. Continuity editing refers to the smoothness of sequential flow; this is important for achieving a logical coherence and transition over space and time. Since a movie trailer is a collection of short clips of significant scenes throughout a movie, there tends to be a lack of continuity. In this short film, the director had to jump from childhood to adulthood very quickly in order to better explain the story. There were several changes in setting that did not flow with much context. One of the goals of this satire was to appeal to a wide range of audiences. In order to do this, they presented the film as a hybrid movie with genres such as action, romance, and suspense. This combination of types of movies, although meant as a joke, make it hard to follow along with the plot of the movie. For these reasons I would assume The Big Charade used the approach of discontinuity editing to break the rules of traditional continuity and use less-than-coherent transitions between shots.
