Activating the Screen Ed Process: The Door Scene
I'm starting the new Lights, Camera, Learn! blog by re-posting the blog entries I made for the official AFI Screen Education blog. Mon 5 Nov 2007 Question: When do we usually see video cameras? Weddings, births, birthday parties, school and sporting events come to mind. Now ask yourself how often you actually sit down and watch those videos. How often can you get someone else to watch? Are these videos interesting? Do all those long continuous shots, wild moves and dizzying zooms make for compelling viewing? This ‘default mode’ for shooting video create the visual equivalent of a run-on sentence. This is because most people use their home video cameras to document an event rather than tell a story . The irony of this situation is that most people living in western culture during the last 50 years have learned to decode and understand a nearly continuous and increasingly sophisticated stream of visual information. Visual language, with its unique vocabulary and grammar, is ef...