Home Movies (1944)

HOME Jllll IKS Published in Hollywood JANUARY 1944 ■ '"ere should be a • ™nrary effort or \ ,Z "f St?ry a P'aylef, a do MIKE VIII II MOVIE TELL A STORY... By FREDERIC FOSTER HEN a contest film fails to place — when an amateur movie on any subject arouses but mild and disappointing enthusiasm — the fault invariably lies in lack of continuity. Excellent cinematography in itself does not necessarily make a good motion picture. The individual scenes must be strung together in an attractive pattern to tell a story or relate a fact just as these words, forming a sentence and then a paragraph, make a complete statement. Continuity, that far too little understood cinematic element, is the very technique of motion picture construction. Briefly, it is the method of arranging scenes and titles so that a continuous audience interest flows through the entire picture. It makes entertainment out of a number of assorted shots which would be of limited interest by themselves. Continuity is essential to films of every classification: family movies, documentaries, and to travel as well as fictional or dramatic compositions. The basic mechanical construction of continuity follows this pattern: an introductory long or "locale establishing" shot; medium shot of characters; and then depicting the story or narrative in medium, close and closeup shots. A sequence, which pictures the complete development of one idea or incident in the story, is equivalent to a chapter in a book, and is often underlined with a fadein at the beginning and a fadeout at the end. The visual content of the film as a whole is more intangible. Scenes must follow each other in a manner to afford smooth and understandable presentation of the subject. Hence, every scene we shoot must be considered not only for its own value, but its relationship to the scene preceding and the scene following it. If, for instance, we have a scene of our young daughter eating a dish of breakfast cereal, then follow it with a shot of her riding her tricycle on the sidewalk, the continuity is poor. Audiences will wonder how it all happened — will miss the omitted shots that would picture the child's activity between eating breakfast and riding her tricycle. It will not be a complete and comprehensive tale. That is why the best amateur movies are first planned on paper, in scenario or "shooting script" form. Here the action can be plotted, if only in skeleton form, making it possible to visualize any breaks in the continuous development cf the story. When such advance planning is not feasible, as with many travel and vacation films, we can at least keep in mind what we are going to do with the shots after we have made them. By keeping one eye on continuity this way, we often can pick up connecting or "tie-in" shots as we go along that can be used at editing time to knit our picture into a reasonable continuity. To the amateur to whom continuity is yet an untried technique, we suggest this procedure: construct your film or your shooting script, if you will, just as you would a letter covering the very subject you wish to film, with the same attention to detail and progressive steps of narration. In writing a letter about a trip from New York to California, we would not jump from a description of our experience in Chicago to that of our stay in Los Angeles without mentioning how we got there and give interesting account of things that happened to us between the two cities. Neither should we break continuity in a film story by jumping abruptly from one subject to another. Good continuity can be obtained by having successive scenes reveal the progressive stages of a manufacturing process, a surgical operation, or a boat race. Or by arranging our scenes in chronological order, as a day at the beach, a motor trip, a week-end excursion. Or by grouping our scenes by subjects as with a vacation in Florida, trip to the desert, the mountains, the beaches, etc. • Continued on Page }8 13