Fiction Adaptation: Montage Workshop
Over the past few days, we've have been working on what a montage is. From directors such as Edgar Wright to John G. Avildsen, montages are seen everywhere.
A montage is simply a compression of time that shows or symbolises some form of progression. Most montages have narrative purposes which develop the story in a more creative way. Avildsen uses a montage in Rocky to show the protagonist's progression in training for the fight. The use of the montage was to show the audience the hard work that he has gone through to get to the stage where he is ready to fight.
We were then tasked to create a montage in groups that were relative to certain themes. My group (Sammi, Rosie, Imogen and myself) chose to do JOY. We began brainstorming what joy was and how we could portray it through cinema and we eventually came up with the idea of looking through a photo album at some happy memories. Joy is very personal to many different people, not everyone finds the same things joyous which made this task even harder.
On the day of the shoot, we were told that our idea was not suitable for the brief as it was too personal and had too much of a narrative. This confused us because the examples we were shown were narrative examples and we didn't realise that the idea of the workshop was to be non-narrative and to simply show symbolisms of joy.
We went back to brainstorming what we could do and ended up thinking about using the weather to our advantage and shooting the warm colours of autumn to portray joy. We went to the nature reserve and tried to get shots that we thought showed Joy the best.
We then came back to the studios and decided that we didn't have enough footage that was different to show both the compression of time as well as something different to the "foresty" feel of our other shots. We decided that we would film the making of a coffee. Yes this is narrative, but in the edit we would not slot it together in a linear order.
This worked out quite well as it became quite a nice way to edit the forest scenes into the making of the coffee. Mike Rymer said that the best way to do shots with a coffee is to make it look like the best coffee in the world and that everyone who sees it will want a sip of the "joyous coffee". We experimented with camera movement and angles to get the best out of the shots for the coffee and I think it was quite successful.
Here is how my montage turned out:
A montage is simply a compression of time that shows or symbolises some form of progression. Most montages have narrative purposes which develop the story in a more creative way. Avildsen uses a montage in Rocky to show the protagonist's progression in training for the fight. The use of the montage was to show the audience the hard work that he has gone through to get to the stage where he is ready to fight.
We were then tasked to create a montage in groups that were relative to certain themes. My group (Sammi, Rosie, Imogen and myself) chose to do JOY. We began brainstorming what joy was and how we could portray it through cinema and we eventually came up with the idea of looking through a photo album at some happy memories. Joy is very personal to many different people, not everyone finds the same things joyous which made this task even harder.
On the day of the shoot, we were told that our idea was not suitable for the brief as it was too personal and had too much of a narrative. This confused us because the examples we were shown were narrative examples and we didn't realise that the idea of the workshop was to be non-narrative and to simply show symbolisms of joy.
We went back to brainstorming what we could do and ended up thinking about using the weather to our advantage and shooting the warm colours of autumn to portray joy. We went to the nature reserve and tried to get shots that we thought showed Joy the best.
We then came back to the studios and decided that we didn't have enough footage that was different to show both the compression of time as well as something different to the "foresty" feel of our other shots. We decided that we would film the making of a coffee. Yes this is narrative, but in the edit we would not slot it together in a linear order.
This worked out quite well as it became quite a nice way to edit the forest scenes into the making of the coffee. Mike Rymer said that the best way to do shots with a coffee is to make it look like the best coffee in the world and that everyone who sees it will want a sip of the "joyous coffee". We experimented with camera movement and angles to get the best out of the shots for the coffee and I think it was quite successful.
Here is how my montage turned out:
Comments
Post a Comment