I recently edited a video that was shot in a hurried fashion over three weeks in Nepal. The footage (though there is a lot of it) is claustrophobic and never lets the viewer out of the frenetic pace of what must have been a busy, production-oriented trip.
As in the great film Baraka, which has been a huge influence on my approach to working with non-narrative storytelling as well as landscape, I hope to find the time during production on Song of The Untouchable to step back and find ways to portray India in many different ways. I think the frenetic, confusing, crowded part will be easy enough... but finding moments that go beyond the shakey and confusing path of a video camera through India will be the real finesse.
One thing I've noticed is that lately, and due partly to the fact that the camera I'm using is such high resolution, I've been discarding the rule of thirds in favor of composing my shots in a combination of thirds and fifths. I've been trying to place large structural components of the composition according to the rule of thirds, but I'll almost always have something important - or even the very subject of the shot - placed according to fifths. Here's a couple frames from the Wyoming segment of the film I'm working on now:
I overheard an interview with a wonderful film director yesterday, and he called his visual style 'clutter'... which he basically described as the secondary or tertiary layers of subject matter in a shot. I'm starting to understand what he is talking about, as clutter is not only a theme in the shooting I'm doing now, but is quite possibly a requisite component to any shoot in India.
Happy Holidays.
Chuck
No comments:
Post a Comment