Jun 14 2007
Shoot like an Egyptian
Artists in ancient Egypt represented motion by having subjects arms mimic the neck and and tail of some exotic bird. Somehow I guess they figured that the one arm pointing and the other trailing represented forward motion without ambiguity.
Today videographers strive to create narrow depth of field in order to focus our viewer’s attention and make the image appear more attractive - “less like video”.
Is the one convention really so different from the other?
Walter Murch (from Conversations with Michael Ondaatje):
“We look at ancient Egyptian painting today and may find it slightly comic, but what the Egyptians were trying to do with the figure was reveal the various aspects of the person’s body in the most characteristic aspect. The face is in profile because that reveals the most about the person’s face, but the shoulders are not in profile, they’re facing the viewer, because that’s the most revealing angle for the shoulders. The hips are not in profile, but the feet are. It gives a strange, twisted effect, but it was natural for the Egyptians. They were painting essences, and in order to paint an essence you have to paint it from its most characteristic angle….
That’s exactly what we do in film, except that instead of the body of the person, it’s the work itself. The director chooses the most characteristic, revealing, interesting angle for every situation and every line of dialogue and every scene….
It may be, five hundred years from now, when people see films from our era, they’ll seem “Egyptian” in a strange way. Here we are, cutting between different angles to achieve the most interesting, characteristic, revealing lens and camera angle for every situation. That may appear perfectly normal to us, but people 500 years from now may find it strange or comic.”
Maybe if instead of describing all these guidelines as RULES we called them CONVENTIONS filmmakers would be less afraid to break them. It seems in the last few years all the questions I see in online filmmaking forums are about CORRECT technique instead of CREATIVE technique.