All kinds of shots.

Subjective Camera 

In the text, Dicke describes subjective camera as representing what the character sees (pg. 56). In other words, the shot is filmed as if the audience is looking through the character’s eyes at everything that is happening to them. Used in moderation, this technique can enhance a movie scene by heightening suspense by only being able to see what the character sees rather than what is happening to them. A good example of this kind of shot is found in the show Game of Thrones where the audience sees the world through Bran’s wolf’s eyes.

Here, the audience sees everything that the wolf sees. The camera hangs low to the ground; each camera swivel represents the wolf turning his head; even the color scheme changes to enhance the red colors as if we were looking through the wolf’s eyes. At the end of the scene the audience sees the wolf look at its own reflection in the pond to verify that we have in fact been embodying a creature and seeing the world through its perspective.

Linear Temporal Montage

According to Dicke, a linear temporal montage is a “sequence compressing a decade into ten seconds,” (pg. 69). If I were trying to describe this to a friend I would say that it is a series of shots showing an aging sequence usually accompanied by music. This type of montage can allow large amounts of time to pass in a movie without the audience feeling disconnected to what is happening during that passage of time. I found a good example of this in The Lion King when Simba grows into a full grown lion during Hakuna Matata.

As you can see at about time 2:50, Simba gets bigger and grows a full mane while walking across the log by the waterfall. The viewers essentially see a decade of Simba’s life in only ten seconds but still feel like they’ve watched him grow out of his childhood. Retaining that feeling of connection is very important to character development because if the audience can no longer feel attached to the older character then their interest in the story line diminishes rapidly.

Parallel Cutting 

Parallel cutting is described in Dicke’s article as, “presenting two actions occurring simultaneously,” (pg. 70). A more descriptive way of saying this is that the action is cutting back and forth between two or more scenes that are happening at the same time and are somehow connected. The movie Inception uses this cutting technique frequently to show the dreams happening within the dreams.

This clip actually uses parallel cutting between three different scenes: one on the ski slopes, one on the stairs, and one in the van where all the characters are sleeping soundly in their first dream state. The parallel cutting is essential to this movie because so much is happening in every different level all at the same time and it keeps all the scenes interconnected.

Video | This entry was posted in Blog #2. Fleshing out film jargon, Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

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