D. W.

Griffith

Introduction

David Wark Griffith, born January 27th 1875, is the man that is said to have single
handedly created the motion picture art form. As a pioneer, he came before Christopher
Nolan and Inception, he came before Spielberg and Saving Private Ryan, he came before
Scorsese and the Godfather, he even came before Orsen Welles and Citizen Kane. But yet,
strangely enough, he is obscured by the cloud of his most infamous film and is now observed
as both the most respected and disliked director in all of film‘s history. He wasn’t the racist
everyone believes him to be today, but rather the first superstar director, “with guaranteed
success wherever his name was stamped” [Pioneer]. “For his pioneering techniques and
early understanding of cinema, Griffith is considered among the most important figures in
the history of the medium.” [D.W. Griffith Wiki] He was not the first to edit a scene
together, or even make a feature length movie, and he certainly isn’t the inventor of the
close-up; however, he is the first man to utilize these things and pull them together to create
the narrative storytelling we have come to witness again and again in all films since his time.
His film The Birth of a Nation because brought motion pictures to the middle class and even
to the upper class whereas before World War I, films were typically viewed by those with
lower incomes. The Birth of a Nation attracted large crowds with its dramatic cutting and
movement of the camera gave interest to the audience and validated an art form that could be
more than just silly comedies, and could have all of the deep emotions, intriguing characters,
and in depth stories that one could read in a novel. However, Griffith’s contributions to the
Art do not begin and end with the Birth of a Nation. Many believe that is so, but if one
reviews the history they will find that his efforts go beyond his only infamous film. Because
so many see The Birth of a Nation as Griffith’s opus magnum and because of racist portrayal
of blacks, D.W. Griffith’s name is in infamy, and he is not given the credit he rightly
deserves. Nevertheless, such racist content doesn’t take away from the fact that this was his
only film to do such, and was completely unintentional in the mind of Griffith. Though he is
not the creator of the closeup, he is in fact the one who used it in a clear and systematic
manner, like my brother says: “It’s not who does it first [that makes it the greatest], but the
one who does it best.” D.W. Griffith is the father of the motion picture art form, and he
should be recognized for doing so.

A Part of the Industry

In order to understand Griffith’s contributions to the industry, we have to understand

where he started. Born in Kentucky, his father was a former Confederate Officer who died
before Griffith’s teens. Without a father, he was raised by his mother, and grew up in a very
poor home having to work to support his family. He received little formal education, with
the rest of his education coming from his own intuition. Desiring to be a playwright, Griffith
set out doing odd jobs during his early years, and making money for his family where he
could. Years later, after having met his future wife in a play that he acted in, and had
numerous acting jobs and a few failed ventures in the play-writing industry, Griffith’s
journey as a filmmaker began when he sent a script to Edwin S. Porter, the director of “The
Great Train Robbery”, who was working with the American Mutoscope and Biograph
Company (Biograph) in New York City. [?] An unsuccessful playwright, Griffith hoped his
script would garner some money in the filmmaking industry. Edwin S. Porter rejected the
script but decided to hire on Griffith as an actor instead, who had previous experience in the
theater. He acted as early as December, 1907 in his first motion picture ‘Rescued from an
Eagle’s Nest’ (1907), not as his favored occupation of writing. However, being encouraged
by his wife, Linda
Arvidsen, to stay on board with Biograph, he got his chance to begin directing films. After a
couple of years, Griffith finally became a director replacing another director who had fallen
ill. Griffith was just what the company needed to make the quality Biograph films that
couldn’t be made before, due to the company’s legal combat against Edison’s Trust during
the patent wars [D.W. Griffith], which distracted the attention from the quality of the films
they were making. His first film he ever directed was the Adventures of Dollie (1908).
During this time, he teamed up with the man that would become his long time cameraman:
G.W. “Billy” Bitzer. For his job as director, Griffith had to make two one-reel films (15
minutes) EACH week, an absolutely absurd amount of films by today’s standards. He
surprised with everyone with his skills, and increased the quality of Biograph’s pictures. For
the next four years he directed 450 different short-films, where in 1909 alone he directed
over 60 films [Pre20sIntro, Part 3]. While making these films he was able to experiment with
various techniques and storytelling methods such as composed shots, camera movement,
split screens, flashbacks, cross-cutting, close-ups, fades and irises, inter-cutting, dissolves,
changing camera angles, soft focus, lens filters, exposure, artistic lighting, etc. in such films
as The Lonely Villa (1909), the Girl and her Trust (1912) and his most artistic film being the
Mothering Heart (1913) [Pre20s Intro, Part 3]. He developed quite a colorful spectrum of
genres, ranging from romances to historical epics. Additionally, he can be considered the
very first ’Hollywood’ director. He was the director of the first ‘Hollywood’ film In Old
California (1910) in the Los Angeles area, where the film was shot in the actual Hollywood
village that existed at that time.
Due to disagreement with Biograph (which I will explain later), he had to leave in order
to pursue his desire to make feature length films. He joined with Reliance Majestic Pictures
[?] and the final product of his activities was The Birth of a Nation (1915). Not only did
Griffith essentially make movies that were so adequately popular, but he managed to do it
outside of popular studio systems that were already in place.
Even after making many films outside of studios, he also managed to co-found one of
the strongest standing independent film studios during that time: United Artists. Although he
did not participate much after its creation, the studio became an outlet for future filmmakers
such as Orsen Welles.
He worked for virtually every section of the industry, from Biograph director, to
independent filmmaker, to becoming a director for Paramount Pictures. [Pioneer] He
essentially desired to be able to make the movies he wanted to make, and when that didn‘t
work he instead made the movies that would keep food on the table. No man has single
handedly contributed so much to the motion picture art form as D.W. Griffith. Griffith was
one of the few directors of his time who later on in his life deposited his films at the Museum
of Modern Art making his films the few surviving from that era. [Pioneer] Unfortunately,
Griffith’s insistence on expensive road shows and orchestras caused his films to be financial
failures, though they exhibited technical brilliance and marvelous artistry. His last
masterpiece was Orphans of the Storm (1921). In his later films, they exhibited a more
formulaic storyline and were not nearly as excellent as previous endeavors. Sadly in his later
years after having several failed ventures, the
coming of sound, and his old fashioned style that didn’t appeal to the 20s, he fell from the
industry. His last film he ever made was The Struggle (1931) [D.W. Griffith Wiki]. From
then on, he was no longer hired as a director and lived the rest of his life trailing behind the
industry that he rocketed into existence. He died alone in Hollywood, on July 23rd, 1948 of a
cerebral hemorrhage. [D.W. Griffith Wiki]

Pioneer of the Motion Picture Art Form

During his career as a filmmaker, Griffith pioneered the very art of motion pictures that
we have come to know. Though he never invented any of the camera angles of the time,
Griffith was the first to utilize them in a systematic way to create a visual language. This
language arose from the fact that in silent films ideas and the thoughts of characters could
only be played out by title cards. Everything else communicated had to be through intense
body language, such as in his film: ‘His Trust’ (1910). Griffith sought out a method by
which he could communicate ideas to the audience without using any choppy interruptions
by title cards. [Language]
Griffith who was a reader of classic literature and a former playwright began to form an
analogy in his films. Griffith correlated the shots and scenes of a film, to the sentences and
paragraphs of literature. Later in his career, he moved the cameras around within a scene,
rather than leaving it stationary from a single wide angle shot that captured all the actions of
the characters on set. He learned that by doing so, he could draw the audience into the scene
itself, adding emphasis on certain elements important to the story. This allowed him to
control what the audience saw, and with the analogy in mind, tell a story much like we
utilize words in literature to describe, express, and expose a story. According to Tim Dirks,
on the AMC Filmsite, Griffith “gave the grammar of film” [Tim Dirks, Part 3]. Griffith, with
his innovative techniques, popularized several modern methods of editing that would
become standard in the motion picture industry even into our modern age.
With the analogy of literature in mind, Griffith was able to add significance to certain
elements of a scene by moving the cameras around. A close up to give us closer details on a
person’s face, a long shot to give us some context for a scene, a full body shot to allow us to
see the entirety of the person’s actions, or low and high angles to give a sense of inferiority
or superiority to a character.
 With the close up, Griffith was able to emphasize the expressions on a person’s face.
With being so ‘close’ to the character’s face we get a sense of intimacy where the smallest
motions are seen, especially the eyes. Although Griffith didn’t invent the close up, he did
invent the soft focus used in a close-up to give a sense of glamour by intentionally offsetting
the focus, making a slightly blurry image, making the face appear smooth and more
attractive, in an almost glowing manner. Additionally, the momentum of a scene can be
stopped by using a close-up, almost like slowing down in order to place importance on an
individual object or character. Griffith didn‘t truly begin to use this angle until after 1915,
when his film The Birth of a Nation was finished, which also featured quite a few medium
shots as well.
Though not as intimate as a close-up, the medium shot, Griffith discovered, emphasizes
importance on the upper half of the actor. The shot provides an engaging stance, putting
importance on what the person is doing or perhaps saying in relation to the scene.
Move the camera back a bit further away from the medium shot, and we get the full body
shot. Just as its name implies it is framed around the entirety of the actor on screen. This shot
puts less emphasis on the features and emotions of the face and more emphasis on the
entirety of the character. With this in mind, a full body shot is less emotional and is based
around the motions of the characters.
Finally, one of Griffith’s most popular angles was the long shot and the extreme long
shot. With the analogy in mind, a long shot would be the contextual information presented at
the beginning of a paragraph to tell us the where, what, who and when of the beginning of a
scene. In literature its called the topic sentence. In film, its called the establishing shot, and it
allows the audience to understand the context of a scene from (usually) its beginning,
allowing us to understand the geography of what’s happening. Rather than beginning a scene
with a medium or close-up, which would be confusing without knowing how the characters
ended up there (though this is sometimes done, but only in the case that the audience
understands where the characters are in the first place, such as implying in the previous
scene where they are in the current scene). Additionally, by using the extreme long shot
Griffith could emphasize the massive scale of a set, showing the grandeur of a scene, used
for epic battle scenes such as in The Birth of a Nation, or his famous Babylon set shot in his
film Intolerance (1916). He could also use the long shot to create the illusion of large scale.
By showing only part of a seemingly large crowd, he could create the illusion of a much
larger crowd as we see multiple planes of action and then we as the audience assume that
that action continues off screen. From the close-up to the long shot, Griffith was able to
apply these elements in a manner that would allow even modern audiences to understand the
ongoing of the film, even though not a single word is expressed! And you thought “Up’s”
montage was brilliant?
In the realm of editing, Griffith almost single-handedly created parallel editing. While
most motion pictures up to that point in history had a single story with simple progression
from scene to scene in a chronological manner, Griffith introduced the idea of parallel
storylines, that he later perfected in his epic ‘Intolerance’.
In his film Intolerance, he was able to establish the idea of intolerance and then used that
to unite the four different storylines that all took place in different times and space. By
cutting between them, Griffith effectively could unite the message of the movie. Though in
earlier films of his, this technique wasn’t nearly as elaborate.
In his film, A Corner in Wheat [Inception], he was able to correlate the actions and
reactions of three different people groups: the farmers, merchants, and Wallstreet tycoons.
By cutting between the three, Griffith was able to show the effects of when the rich
monopolized the wheat industry, and the following effects on the farmers and merchants.
The impression is quite dramatic.
In the same film, Griffith additionally used inter-cutting between scenes to compare and
contrast the parties that the rich were enjoying with the poverty that the farmers were
suffering, as each scene where the boisterous movement of the rich is deeply contrasted with
the solemn stillness of the suffering poor.
Finally, his staple in editing was the crosscut to add tension. He would periodically cut
between two scenes occurring at the same time. With each scene unable to finish completely
as one interrupts the other, tension is created resulting in excitement and peril for the
audience who desire to see the outcome of the events as they climax. One can see this kind
of tension being built in modern films such as Star Trek: Into Darkness, as the movie cuts in
the climax between Khan and Spock fighting on earth, to those trying to support Spock on
the Enterprise hovering above the earth. An early version of the crosscut is found in
Griffith’s ‘The Sealed Room’ (1909): “where a tryst between a cheating queen and her lover
is cross-cut with a jealous and infuriated king’s macabre attempt to seal them off in their
love nest.” [Michael Joshua Rowin].
In addition to the crosscutting would be Griffith’s own ability to manipulate the scene by
cutting to different shots in different ways. Much like long or short sentences, Griffith could
impact the level of excitement and the drama by periodically slowing down or speeding up
the number of cuts, with shorter and shorter shots, or longer and longer cuts, the audience
gets a sense of excitement or perhaps relaxation respectively. Griffith’s own use of this can
be seen in ‘His Trust’ (1910). The movie is about a Confederate soldier who goes off to war
and ends up dying for the cause of the Confederacy. His saber is sent to his family‘s home,
but the Yankee troops invade the home. A Trustee, a slave, runs into the house and rescues
the daughter and the soldier’s saber as the house burns down in flames, and offers his own
home for the family to sleep in while he sleeps outside of it. In the climax of the story we
witness the shorter and shorter shots to create excitement as the Yankees burn down the
house and the subsequent rescue of the daughter inside the house, and the slowing down of
the cuts as the dramatic shots of the mother and the daughter watching their home burn down
to the ground for great emotional affect.
Popular at the time (not so much in our ‘Dark Knight’ realistic editing age), transitions
between scenes were used to give a certain amount of fluidity to the otherwise choppy
editing of hard cuts. Griffith, again, was not the first to use transitions, but was the first to
employ them in a systematic manner. Dissolves and fades were very popular up until the
1960s, and still remain fairly popular today commonly used to provide emotional impact,
add cinematic effect in movie trailers, or perhaps even cover up a sloppy editing job where
the scene transition doesn’t make sense. Griffith discovered a logical way to use transitions:
the passage of time. He used a dissolve between the ending and beginnings of two different
scenes in order to signify a passage of time. Similarly, he used the fades to black as a much
longer period of time that has passed. He even was able to systemize the use of irises. By
irising in on a character as a scene ends, he could show that the story will now move away
from that character’s perspective, or just the other way around when you iris out in the
opening of a scene to say “this is who will be following in this part of the story.” [Language]
Apart from optical transitions, Griffith also employed different kinds of cuts. If the
establishing shot is the visual equivalent of a topic sentence in a paragraph, then a
transitional sentence, from one paragraph to another, would be the same as the match cut.
“For example, in the now standard doorway cut, Griffith might present a shot of a character
moving towards a door located on the right side of the screen-frame, and just as the character
reaches the edge of the screen steps through the doorway, Griffith cuts to a scene with the
doorway now on the left side of the frame as the character steps through- still moving left to
right- and enters another room.” [Language] This use gives a sense of connection and
smoothness.
This is the match cut, a transitional device. There’s the match-on-action, where the cutting
takes place on actions where the action of one shot carries into the next shot, giving us a
sense of continuity.
In a combination of editing and framing, Griffith was able to achieve multiple effects,
such as a flashback. By cutting in on a pondering face, then cutting to a different scene we
could the idea that the person is thinking back on something. Then we cut back to the
person’s face and the ‘real world’. This method is still used quite often by modern
filmmakers.
Even in the techniques of lighting Griffith had some innovation. Though in his time
merely lighting the set was the most important part of lighting, and absolutely no emotional
or atmospheric inspiration was involved. But Griffith did have innovations, such as the low
key and high key lighting techniques used either to highlight or enhance a element in a shot.
Though these techniques are not witnessed in his earlier Biograph films, they are present in
his later films after Intolerance (1916).
By doing all of these things Griffith gave the language for the narrative films we have
witnessed in our own time. He introduced a new method of acting in relationship to the
camera and the perspective of the audience. [John Steinle]. That way, the melodrama that
was rampant in the theatres would not protrude, and a more realistic form of acting was
portrayed. He also invented the soft focus for close-ups, which would be used to create a
sense of glamour and attraction of the character presented, and later replicated by Hollywood
during the 50s for such female stars as Marylyn Monroe. The man’s filmmaking career is
tremendous. Nearly every element for the standard of narrative storytelling was made by
Griffith. Which has led many to conclude: “Whatever Griffith’s faults, there simply is no
other director where lifetime film output and overall contributions to motion picture
storytelling are worthy enough to consider using any other director’s name than Griffith’s for
a “career” achievement award.” [Christopher P. Jacobs] Still, the man is hated for his film
The Birth of a Nation, and lives in infamy and the misunderstanding of the modern age.
“At his best, in films like Hearts of the World, Broken Blossom, Way Down East,
Orphans of the Storm, and Isn’t Life Wonderful?, he was able to combine technical
brilliance with emotionally moving artistic vision, and cathartic popular entertainment.”
[Christopher P. Jacobs].

Pioneer of the Historical Epic

Among his many achievements in the filmmaking genre was pioneering both the feature
length film, and the historical epic that came to dominate the early years of the filmmaking
industry into the 1950s. Though it should be noted that he did not create the first feature
length or historical epic in either case, but did in fact have other achievements besides these.
His first film that belongs in both of these categories was Judith of Bethulia (1914), an hour
long (six reel) Biblical apocrypha shot outside of the knowledge of Biograph, who at the
time was opposed to Griffith doing anything other one to two reel films (15-30 minutes).
Somewhat simplistic in its nature, the film cost
D.W. Griffith his position as director at Biograph and was demoted to supervisor, and the
film’s release was postponed several months as it was cut down to just four reels. Lilian
Gish, one of D.W. Griffith’s future actresses, reports on Biograph: “. . . thought that a movie
that long would hurt eyes.” [D.W. Griffith Wiki]. The disappointment, however, led him
down the route to create his first prominent feature length film (and perhaps most prominent
film of all time), the Birth of a Nation.
A spectacle and an experience for all to see, the Birth of a Nation (1915) was the first
feature length film that made movie going a thing, and something that all classes could take
a part in. Though, few who are familiar with Griffith’s work would say that this was his best
film. [Christopher P. Jacobs] Based off of the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon (who
Griffith actually knew, and was in a play written by him) it follows the story of two families
on the south and north side of the Line before, during, and after the Civil War.
[danielleshortfilm] It premiered February 8th, 1915, with tickets that cost $2 more than usual
due to its being a feature film, and widely advertised as an experience for everyone to see
with its elaborate road show and own orchestra to play the music along with the movie. [Tim
Dirks, Part 5] Noted for its engaging story of the civil war, and the epic battle scenes
portrayed, it was the first film that truly showcased the potential that films had, and gave
birth to the industry we have all come to know, and is probably the highest grossing film of
all time with possibly anywhere between $10-$14 million dollars without adjusting for
inflation. It was the first film to be showcased at the White House, where then President
Woodrow Wilson remarked: “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is
that it is all terribly true.” [Tim Dirks, Part 5] Griffith single handedly validated an entire art
form, popular entertainment, and political propaganda [?]. Dramatic Mirror commented “No
orater, no editorial writer, no essayist could so strongly and effectively present the thoughts
conveyed in this picture.” [John Steinle] Griffith risked $100,000 for the twelve reeler film,
but sadly though it met with financial success, it also was met with social ruin.
The racist portrayal of blacks as either fools or cut throats caused great distress among
African Americans and anti-racists. The NAACP issued requests for bans on the film for its
racist content and riots broke out in front of a few theaters. The film has come to be known
as both the most controversial film of all time, but also the most influential.
 Despite the racism expressed, the film was a financial success: “filmed at a cut of
$110,00, it returned millions of dollars in profits making it, perhaps, the most profitable film
of all time. . .” [John Steinle]. But, the critical offense of racism in a film he did not intend to
be racist at all still bothered Griffith. He set out to create the largest and most epic film up
until that time- and in some ways it still is.
Intolerance (1916). Griffith’s last large scale endeavor, was in part a response to the
critics who raged over The Birth of a Nation‘s racist portrayal of blacks. The film was anti-
bigot, anti-do-gooders, and was a call for tolerance [Christopher P. Jacobs]. Its primary focus
being the theme of Intolerance across the ages and its affects on the lives of people. And by
across the ages, literally its across the ages. Tackling a story can be difficult for many
people. Tackling several stories progressing within the same time frame among several
characters is also difficult (Lord of the Rings eg). But what Griffith
did is something both ahead of its time, and still is quite a rare element: four stories, all in
different places, all in different times, all with different characters, and all climax in the same
mix. Featuring the story of the Fall of Babylon, the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the Hugenots
of France, and a contemporary modern story, the film did something very ambitious that few
have accomplished. The film had a tremendous budget of $500,000 as Griffith was trying to
top the scale of the Birth of a Nation which was already massive for its time. Griffith brought
back his favorite stars such as Lilian Gish and Mary Pickford for the star roles. Still,
however, the film was not as successful as the Birth of a Nation. This was because Griffith
who insisted on elaborate road shows and expensive orchestras actually dwindled the profit
beyond the budget of the film. It does feature greater use of cinematography that Griffith was
utilizing, as its natural cuts and smooth pacing are a bit more familiar with the modern
audience. Even though the film was by far better than the Birth of a Nation, the Birth of a
Nation’s effect was far more tremendous. Intolerance was a financial failure, but perhaps an
artistic achievement. Nevertheless, Griffith never made another historical epic as big as
either of these movies again.

Pioneer of the Expounding of Worldview in Motion Pictures

One thing that Griffith is especially noted for, is his ability to express a message within
his films. However accidental that message was in The Birth of a Nation that was supposed
to be an anti-war film, Griffith was onto something. With the ability to tell stories with
editing and camera angles, Griffith could in fact present a subjective perspective, and
therefore expound a worldview or a point much like an essay could. His films had themes of
Populism; resentment of the wealthy and powerful; a pacifistic viewpoint; prejudice and fear
of African Americans; and sympathy for the working class, but never did he express a strong
political perspective. [John Steinle]
These techniques of implying ideas in the mind’s of the audience were so effective that
they were later exploited by a Russian filmmaker Lev Kirlshov who discovered from
Griffith’s films the technique of montage. While in our modern day understanding of the
word ’montage’ as a series of images presented in a somewhat random order of a particular
topic, montage in its cinematic sense is when one edits a series of shots in order to formulate
an idea. Griffith managed to do this long before the Soviet Filmmaker however, as even in
his Biograph films he was inflicting worldview points in films such as A Corner in Wheat.
This idea of a message is almost the entire premise of Intolerance, where the entire film’s
point was to show the wrongs of people who were intolerant.
One of the most important parts of montage is the giving of perspective, or portrayal of
certain things such as people. In the Birth of a Nation, this is witnessed first hand as blacks
are portrayed rather poorly. But, also most anyone in that film is portrayed in a certain way,
such as the carpetbaggers of the north, and Abraham Lincoln as a particular hero. But
perhaps the main portrayal that has sparked the most controversy is the heroic acts of the Ku
Klux Klan within the film, as they are shown as liberators of the south and are seen
punishing a black man for a crime, making the film appear even more racist than Griffith
ever intended it to be.
Griffith’s messages in films can be seen in such films as Hearts of the World (1918),
which was supposed to be shot as a World War I propaganda film for the allied forces,
turned out to be more of an anti-war film where the film presents war and military men as
the villains and soldiers and everyone else as the victims of war. In his film, Broken
Blossoms (1919) we witness perhaps cinema’s earliest tragedy. About a Chinese man who
goes to London England to preach his ideals of peace, he ends disillusioned and working for
a shopkeeper in the slums. While there, he falls in love with an illegitimate child whose
father is an abusive prizefighter. The father finds out about the relationship and ends it in a
rage, killing them both. While the film itself doesn’t express the adamant ideology behind
such films as Intolerance, it does have that Griffith air about it with its common theme of
family, and the example of what a destructive lifestyle can cause, as well as show the
emotional depth of the tragedy and the unnecessary loss of life that occurs when violence is
resorted to.
With stories where the theme directly inspires an idea in the audience, one could say that
this is propaganda, or perhaps merely a method of expounding upon worldview of a
particular director. Either way, this method is still used strongly today in combination with
the way certain people groups or others are presented as evil, negative, or perhaps favored
over others. Still, this doesn’t mean controversy will not arise when a film presents an idea
that many disagree with, and think it justice to shut it down quickly. This is what has
happened with D.W. Griffith’s the Birth of a Nation. The film has been misunderstood in its
intent, Griffith has been misunderstood in his intent. Now, because of it he suffers being
thrown into the dark side of history. Its racist depiction of blacks caused a great stir and still
does (and rightly should, but one must realize that this perspective was even held in a book
called “A History of the Ancient World“ published around 1914 for schools, and holds that
the white ‘Caucasian‘ race is superior and has contributed the most to human society.
Something that I believe is not only a moral wrong, but spawns the absolute strife between
peoples. However, this proves that during Griffith’s time, the perspective presented in the
Birth of a Nation was in fact held by many Americans including the youth [even though it is
sad that they were indoctrinated into believing it], despite some allegations that Griffith held
this perspective because of his being the son of a Confederate general). Even a filmmaking
career achievement
10

award given out in 1935 in honor of his name was changed over a decade ago simply
because of the allegations of his racism. “Whatever Griffith’s faults, there simply is no other
director where lifetime film output and overall contribution to motion picture storytelling are
worthy enough to consider using any other directors name Griffith for a “career”
achievement award.“ [Christopher P. Jacobs, Pioneer Film Director] It is in fact still banned
in many states and is only available in limited places, and never in the public sphere.

Conclusion

Though D.W. Griffith was far ahead of his own time in creating marvels of silent cinema,
his career and life remains stained by his most influential and infamous film The Birth of a
Nation. But, despite these condemning attitudes of our time, some pay tribute to the man
who is David Wark Griffith: the father of the motion picture art form and the American
motion picture industry. As an artist and a fellow man, despite his own beliefs or
misconceptions surrounding him, he should be recognized for doing so, despite the
allegations of being a racist, and forever in the dark side of history. “Recognized throughout
the world as the single most important individual in the development of film as an art form,
D.W. (David Wark) Griffith is known today as “the father of film technique”, the man who
invented Hollywood, and “the Shakespeare of the screen.” In his long career Griffith crafted
over 450 films and caused quite a bit of controversy. Today, he is seen as one of the most
hated and most revered man in cinematic history, however there is no denying that he
forever shaped the way we view cinema today.” [danielleshortfilm]

HOLLYWOOD FILM DIRECTORS

Steven Spielberg, in full Steven Allan Spielberg, (born December 18,

1946, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.), American motion-picture director and producer
whose diverse films—which ranged from science-fiction fare, including such classics
as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982),
to historical dramas, notably Schindler’s List (1993) and Saving Private
Ryan (1998)—enjoyed both unprecedented popularity and critical success.

Early Life And Work

Spielberg developed an interest in filmmaking as a child, and during his teens
his Escape to Nowhere(1962), a 40-minute war movie, won first prize at a film
festival. He next directed Firelight (1964), a feature-length science-fiction yarn, which
was followed by an accomplished short about hitchhikers called Amblin’ (1968). An
executive at Universal Studios saw the latter film and tendered a contract to Spielberg,
who began working in the studio’s television division after attending California State
College, Long Beach (now California State University, from which he would
eventually receive a B.A. in 2002). He directed episodes of various TV series,
notably Columbo, Marcus Welby, M.D., and Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law. In
1971 he made his first television movie, Duel, a taut, almost claustrophobic exercise in
psychosis that was more intense than typical TV fare (it was released theatrically in
Europe). Although Spielberg permitted star Dennis Weaver—who played a motorist
chased by a homicidal truck driver—to register a one-note impression of sweaty terror
throughout the movie, his handling of the action sequences was staged and executed
with bravado. The success of Duel enabled Spielberg to make theatrically released
motion pictures, beginning with The Sugarland Express (1974), a chase picture with
deft accents of comedy but an inexorable movement toward tragedy; it was anchored
by Goldie Hawn’s performance.

Commercial Success

Spielberg’s next movie, Jaws (1975), established him as a leading director, and it was
one of the highest-grossing films ever. It featured Roy Scheider as the police chief of a
resort town who battles a man-eating white shark. Joining him are Richard Dreyfuss as
a marine biologist and Robert Shaw as a shark hunter. The highly praised thriller
received an Academy Award nomination for best picture, and its ominous soundtrack
by John Williams won an Oscar. The film all but created the genre of summer
blockbuster—big action-packed movie released to an audience grateful to be in an air-
conditioned theatre—and it established many of the touchstones of Spielberg’s work:
an ordinary but sympathetic main character is enlightened through a confrontation with
some extraordinary being or force that gradually reveals itself as the narrative unfolds.
Spielberg then directed the mystical science-fiction tale Close Encounters of the Third
Kind (1977), which he also wrote. Dreyfuss was cast as the lead, and he submitted one
of the best performances of his career, as a telephone lineman who encounters
an unidentified flying object and subsequently becomes obsessed with UFOs. For the
film, Spielberg received his first Academy Award nomination for best director. Vilmos
Zsigmond’s cinematography earned the film’s only Oscar, though the special
effects were also praised. Spielberg became just the second director in history to score
back-to-back $100 million grosses.
After the disappointing 1941 (1979)—which was received as an unfunny comedy,
despite the presence of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd—Spielberg directed Raiders of
the Lost Ark (1981), a loving, expert (if slightly redundant) tribute to old
adventure serials. The film and its sequels, which starred Harrison Ford as handsome
archaeologist Indiana Jones, used rich colour cinematography, brisk editing,
memorable musical soundtracks, and inventive special effects to create a cinematic
experience that was typically light yet highly suspenseful. Spielberg received his
second Academy Award nomination for best director; the film was also a best picture
nominee.
Spielberg’s tendency toward broad storytelling may have hampered his attempts at
more complex filmmaking, and The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun, in the view
of many critics, lacked emotional depth or insight. Yet the aggressive commercialism
and optimism of Spielberg’s films became the prevailing style in Hollywood in the late
20th century. His pervasive influence was recognized in 1986 by the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when it honoured him with the Irving G.
Thalberg Award, given for excellence in producing.

Martin Scorsese - Director Martin Scorsese has produced some of the most
memorable films in cinema history, including the iconic 'Taxi Driver' and Academy
Award-winning 'The Departed.'
Who Is Martin Scorsese?

Born November 17, 1942, in Flushing, New York, Martin Scorsese is known for his
gritty, meticulous filmmaking style and is widely considered one of the most important
directors of all time. Scorsese's passion for films started at a young age, as he was an
8-year-old, pint-sized filmmaker. In 1968, he completed his first feature-length
film, Who's That Knocking at My Door?, but it wasn't until he released Taxi
Driver nearly 10 years later that he skyrocketed to fame for his raw formula of
storytelling. He proved that the film wasn't a fluke with a lengthy string of successes
that included Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed and Hugo.

Early Life

Acclaimed director and producer Martin Charles Scorsese was born on November 17,
1942, in Flushing, New York. Raised by Italian-American parents in the Little Italy
district of Manhattan, Scorsese later remembered his neighborhood as being "like a
village in Sicily." Scorsese's parents, Charles and Catherine, both worked part-time as
actors, helping set the stage for their son's love of cinema.

Because Scorsese was afflicted by severe asthma, his childhood activities were
limited; rather than play sports, he spent much of his time in front of the television or
at the movie theater, where he fell in love especially with stories about the Italian
experience and films by director Michael Powell. By the time he was 8 years old,
Scorsese was already drawing his own storyboards, often complete with the line,
"Directed and Produced by Martin Scorsese."

Scorsese was raised a devout Catholic and even entertained the idea of entering the
priesthood before deciding to pursue filmmaking instead. Although his parents "didn't
get" his mania for movies, Scorsese felt he was headed in the right direction when a
10-minute comedy short earned him a $500 scholarship to New York University.

Cinematic Success
After completing his MFA in film directing at NYU in 1966, Scorsese briefly worked
at the university as a film instructor. His students included Jonathan Kaplan and Oliver
Stone. In 1968, Scorsese completed his first feature-length film, Who's That Knocking
at My Door?While working on that project, he met Harvey Keitel, whom he would go
on to cast in many future projects, as well as Thelma Schoonmaker, an editor with
whom he would collaborate for more than 40 years.

In 1973, Scorsese directed Mean Streets, his first film to be widely acknowledged as a
masterpiece. Revisiting characters from Who's That Knocking at My Door?, the film
showcased elements that have since become trademarks of Scorsese's filmmaking:
dark themes, unsympathetic lead characters, religion, the Mafia, unusual camera
techniques and contemporary music. Directing Mean Streets also introduced Scorsese
to Robert De Niro, sparking one of the most dynamic filmmaking partnerships in
Hollywood history.

Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, Scorsese directed hard-hitting films that
helped define a generation of cinema. His gritty 1976 masterpiece, Taxi Driver, won
the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and fixed De Niro's status as a living movie
legend. Apparently, it also inspired an unstable John Hinckley to attempt to assassinate
President Ronald Reagan five years later. "I never thought in a million years there was
a connection with the film," Scorsese later recalled. "It turned out even my limo driver
was FBI."

Scorsese and De Niro struck gold together once more in their 1980 picture Raging
Bull, based on the life of troubled boxer Jake LaMotta. Expecting it to be his last
feature film, Scorsese decided to "pull out all the stops and then find a new career."
Although initial reactions were mixed due to the picture's violent nature, Raging
Bull is now widely considered to be one of the greatest movies of all time.

Abandoning thoughts of leaving the industry, Scorsese continued to make films

through the 1980s, directing his first huge box-office success, The Color of Money, in
1986.

The 1990s saw the release of two of Scorsese's most important Mafia movies to
date: GoodFellas, a 1990 film based on the life of former gangster Henry Hill,
and Casino, a 1995 film about the rise and fall of the gambling underworld during the
1970s. Although he has joked that he should make "another film about Italian
Americans where they're not gangsters," Scorsese also believes that "there is no such
thing as pointless violence" on-screen. "Deep down you want to think that people are
really good—but the reality outweighs that."
A Living Legend

In an American Express print ad, Scorsese once revealed that his "wildest dream" was
to write music. While he seems unlikely to become a rock star or conduct an orchestra,
he did use his filmmaking talents to make his mark on the music industry. In 1978,
Scorsese made an acclaimed documentary called The Last Waltz, showcasing the
farewell performance of The Band, with guest performances by Van Morrison, Bob
Dylan and Muddy Waters. In addition to being hailed as one of the greatest concert
movies of all time, The Last Waltz was then spoofed in Rob Reiner's landmark 1984
mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap.

Christopher Nolan is an innovative film director and screenwriter who's helmed

several early 21st century megahits, including 'Memento,' 'Inception,' 'The Dark
Knight Rises,' 'Interstellar' and 'Dunkirk.'
Who Is Christopher Nolan?

Born on July 30, 1970, in London, England, Christopher Nolan received attention for
his early films, Following (1998) and Memento (2000). After directing Insomnia,
Nolan's next film was Batman Begins, a re-launch of the comic-book franchise that
became a worldwide hit. The film's sequel, The Dark Knight, broke box office records,
and Nolan's heady sci-fi thriller, Inception, became another blockbuster two years
later. In 2012, he produced the third film of his Batman saga, The Dark Knight
Rises. Nolan followed with the space odyssey Interstellar in 2014 and the World War
II film Dunkirk in 2017.

Early Years and Training

Born on July 30, 1970, in London, England, Christopher Nolan started creating films
as a child, making his first short at the age of 7. Nolan traveled between Chicago and
London while growing up—his mother was from America and his father was from
Britain—and eventually went on to attend University College London, where he
studied English literature and joined the school's film society. He created shorts
like Tarantula, Larceny and Doodlebug before releasing longer-form work.

Directing Career

Nolan's major film debut, Following, was a black-and-white, small-budget work about
a lonely writer who's obsessed with following strangers and then partners with a
burglar. The film's unconventional, non-linear narrative scheme helped garner interest
in Nolan's work and propelled him to his next film, Memento. The noir-ish indie
feature starred Guy Pearce as an amnesiac man who relies on Polaroids and copious
note-taking while seeking vengeance. Nolan adapted the work from a story written by
his brother Jonathan Nolan, and the film received two Oscar nominations for its
editing and screenplay.

Nolan continued presenting psychological thrillers with the remake Insomnia, starring
Al Pacino as a police officer in Alaska handling a murder investigation while
contending with a lingering guilt. The director's career then traveled into the
stratosphere, when he agreed to helm the re-launch of the comic book hero Batman
with the 2005 film Batman Begins, starring Christian Bale as the titular character. The
movie went on to earn more than $372 million worldwide. Nolan next released
2006's The Prestige, a well-received story about dueling magicians starring Bale, Hugh
Jackman and Scarlett Johansson.

Directing Career

Nolan's major film debut, Following, was a black-and-white, small-budget work about
a lonely writer who's obsessed with following strangers and then partners with a
burglar. The film's unconventional, non-linear narrative scheme helped garner interest
in Nolan's work and propelled him to his next film, Memento. The noir-ish indie
feature starred Guy Pearce as an amnesiac man who relies on Polaroids and copious
note-taking while seeking vengeance. Nolan adapted the work from a story written by
his brother Jonathan Nolan, and the film received two Oscar nominations for its
editing and screenplay.

Nolan continued presenting psychological thrillers with the remake Insomnia, starring
Al Pacino as a police officer in Alaska handling a murder investigation while
contending with a lingering guilt. The director's career then traveled into the
stratosphere, when he agreed to helm the re-launch of the comic book hero Batman
with the 2005 film Batman Begins, starring Christian Bale as the titular character. The
movie went on to earn more than $372 million worldwide. Nolan next released
2006's The Prestige, a well-received story about dueling magicians starring Bale, Hugh
Jackman and Scarlett Johansson.

Quentin Tarantino - Known for his unpredictable, violent films, Quentin Tarantino
first earned widespread fame for 'Pulp Fiction,' before going on to direct 'Inglourious
Basterds' and 'Django Unchained.'
Synopsis

Born in Tennessee in 1963, Quentin Tarantino moved to California at age 4. His love
of movies led to a job in a video store, during which time he wrote the scripts for True
Romanceand Natural Born Killers. Tarantino's directorial debut came with
1992's Reservoir Dogs, but he received widespread critical and commercial acclaim
with Pulp Fiction (1994), for which he won an Academy Award for best screenplay.
Subsequent features included Jackie Brown(1997), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol.
2 (2004) and Grindhouse (2007). Tarantino earned several award nominations
for Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012), the latter garnering
him a second Oscar win for best screenplay.

Early Life

Quentin Tarantino was born on March 27, 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee. He is the
only child of Connie McHugh, who is part Cherokee and part Irish, and actor Tony
Tarantino, who left the family before Quentin was born.

Moving to California at the age of 4, Tarantino developed his love for movies at an
early age. One of his earliest memories is of his grandmother taking him to see a John
Wayne movie. Tarantino also loved storytelling, but he showed his creativity in
unusual ways. "He wrote me sad Mother's Day stories. He'd always kill me and tell me
how bad he felt about it," Connie once told Entertainment Weekly. "It was enough to
bring a tear to a mother's eye."

Tarantino loathed school, choosing to spend his time watching movies or reading
comics rather than studying. The only subject that appealed to him was history.
"History was cool and I did well there, because it was kind of like the movies," he
told Entertainment Weekly. After dropping out of high school, Tarantino worked as an
usher at a adult film theater for a time. He also took acting classes. Tarantino
eventually landed a job at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. There he
worked with Roger Avary, who shared his passion for film. The two even worked on
some script ideas together.

Early Films

During his time at Video Archives, Tarantino worked on several screenplays,

including True Romance and Natural Born Killers. He also landed a guest spot on the
popular sitcom The Golden Girls, playing an Elvis impersonator. In 1990, Tarantino
left Video Archives to work for Cinetel, a production company. Through one of the
producers there, he was able to get his script for True Romance in the hands of director
Tony Scott. Scott liked Tarantino's script, and bought the rights to it.

Working with producer Lawrence Bender, Tarantino was able to secure funding for his
directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992), for which he had also written the screenplay.
Actor Harvey Keitel was impressed when he read the script, saying "I haven't seen
characters like these in years." He signed on as an actor and a producer for the project.
Other cast members included Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi
and Tarantino himself.

In 1992, audiences at the Sundance Film Festival were entranced by Reservoir Dogs,
Tarantino's ultraviolent crime caper gone wrong. He drew inspiration for the project
from such classic heist films as Rififi and City on Fire. The independent film helped
make Tarantino one of the most talked-about figures in Hollywood. While not a big hit
in the United States, it became a popular title on video and did well overseas.

'Pulp Fiction'

With Pulp Fiction (1994), Tarantino created an unpredictable thrill ride filled with
violence and pop culture references. In one story in the film, John Travolta played
Vincent Vega, a hit man assigned to look after his boss's girlfriend (Uma Thurman)—a
role that helped resuscitate his then-flagging career. Another part examined Vega's
partnership with fellow hit man Jules Winnfield (played by Samuel L. Jackson). And
yet another storyline involved Bruce Willis as a boxer. Tarantino managed to
successfully interweave all these different stories to make a fascinating film. "His mind
works like the Tasmanian Devil on a bullet train. It's so fast that very few people can
keep up with his references," actor Eric Stoltz, who played a drug dealer in the film,
explained to Los Angeles magazine.

Pulp Fiction was both a commercial and critical success. In the United States, it earned
over $108 million at the box office, becoming the first independent film to do so. Pulp
Fiction won the prestigious Palme d'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994 and
received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best
Director. For his work on the film, Tarantino took home the award for Best Original
Screenplay, an honor he had to share with former collaborator Roger Avary. The two
had a falling out over the writing credits for the film.

Criticism and Success

Known for his temper, Tarantino got into a public disagreement with director Oliver
Stone. Stone directed Natural Born Killers (1994) and rewrote parts of Tarantino's
script. Enraged by the rewrites, Tarantino fought to have his name taken off the film.
Stone told the press that the changes were an improvement over the original, which
had poor character development. In a related incident, Tarantino slapped one of the
producers of Natural Born Killers when he ran into him at Los Angeles restaurant.
In 1995, Tarantino wrote and directed one of the four stories featured in Four Rooms.
The other three were handled by other rising independent filmmakers Allison Anders,
Alexandre Rockwell and Robert Rodriguez. After the release of Four Rooms,
Tarantino and Rodriguez collaborated on From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). Tarantino
wrote the screenplay for the film and starred opposite George Clooney, the two
playing criminals who end up battle vampires. Rodriguez directed the film, which
received negative reviews from critics.

Tarantino soon tackled Jackie Brown (1997), a crime thriller starring Pam Grier as a
stewardess who gets caught smuggling money for an arms dealer (played by Samuel L.
Jackson). A tribute to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, the film was adapted from
an Elmore Leonard novel. Grier herself had appeared in many blaxploitation classics,
including Foxy Brown (1974). The film was well received, with many calling it a more
mature work for Tarantino. Critic Leonard Matlin commented that there were
"dynamite performances all around" for a cast that also included Michael Keaton,
Robert De Niro, and Robert Forster. Not everyone loved the film, however. Fellow
filmmaker Spike Lee objected to Tarantino's overuse of a derogatory term for African-
Americans in Jackie Brown, publicly complaining in Army Archerd's column
in Variety.

Creative Pursuits

After Jackie Brown, Tarantino took a break from filmmaking. He starred on Broadway
in 1998 in a revival of Wait Until Dark with Marisa Tomei. It was a bold move for
him, as he had never done professional stage work before. Tarantino played a thug
who terrorizes a blind woman (played by Tomei), and the critics were less than
impressed. The reviews for the production were brutally harsh, and Tarantino was
devastated. He felt people on the street were recognizing him as "the one whose acting
sucks. I tried not to take it personally, but it was personal. It was not about the play—it
was about me, and at a certain point I started getting too thin a skin about the constant
criticism."

Tarantino worked on a World War II script during this period. The screenplay "became
big and sprawling. It was some of the best stuff I've ever written, but at a certain point,
I thought, 'Am I writing a script or am I writing a novel?' I basically ended up writing
three World War II scripts. None of them had an ending," he later explained to Vanity
Fair.

'Kill Bill'
Instead of tackling his war epic, Tarantino jumped into the world of martial arts films.
The idea for Kill Bill was formed by Tarantino and Uma Thurman in a bar during the
filming of Pulp Fiction. In 2000, Thurman ran into Tarantino at an Oscar party and
asked whether he had made any progress with the idea. He promised her that he would
write the script as a birthday present for her, initially saying he would finish in two
weeks, though it ended up taking a year. Tarantino had to learn on the fly how to make
a kung fu film, working and reworking the sequences as he went along.

Tarantino originally wanted Warren Beatty for the titular "Bill," but he moved on to
David Carradine from the television series Kung Fu. The plot focused on revenge, as a
female assassin known as the Bride (Thurman) seeks to kill those involved in the
savage attack on her and her wedding party. Running over budget and over schedule,
Tarantino persevered with the project, shooting so much that he eventually had to
create two films. Kill Bill: Vol. 1was released in late 2003, with Kill Bill: Vol.
2 following a few months later.

Recent Work

After Kill Bill, Tarantino dabbled in television. He wrote and directed an episode of
the drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in 2005, for which he received an Emmy
Award nomination. Tarantino then worked with Robert Rodriguez again. The two
filmmakers each made their own gory and graphic ode to the B-movies, which were
shown together as a double-feature known as Grindhouse (2007). Critics and movie-
goers alike were not quite certain what to make of this collaboration, and it flopped at
the box office.

Tarantino finally returned to work on his World War II script. In 2009, he released the
long-awaited Inglourious Basterds, which focused on a group of Jewish-American
soldiers out to destroy as many Nazis as possible. He had wooed Brad Pitt to play the
leader of the "Basterds." Some of the reviews were mixed, but Tarantino seemed
unfazed by any negative comments. "I respect criticism. But I know more about film
than most of the people writing about me. Not only that, I'm a better writer than most
of the people writing about me," he explained to GQ magazine. He clearly may have
known best in this case, as the film was nominated for eight Academy Awards,
including two for Tarantino (for best director and best original screenplay).

Tarantino went on to meet with both commercial and critical success with his action
Western Django Unchained, released in late 2012. In the film, Jamie Foxx starred as
Django, a freed slave who teams up with a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to search
for his wife, played by Kerry Washington. Django then has to face off against his
wife's plantation owner, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film. Other cast members
include Samuel L. Jackson and Jonah Hill. At the 85th Academy Awards in 2013,
Tarantino won an Academy Award for best original screenplay for Django
Unchained. The film received several other Oscar nominations, including for best
picture, cinematography and sound editing.

In 2015, the director revisited the Western theme for The Hateful Eight. Featuring such
frequent Tarantino collaborators as Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth and Michael
Madsen, the film snagged Golden Globe nominations in several categories.

For Tarantino, film is an all-consuming passion. Although he had a long-term

relationship with actress Mira Sorvino, he chose to focus on his career over his
personal life—at least for the time being. "When I'm doing a movie, I'm not doing
anything else. It's all about the movie. I don't have a wife. I don't have a kid. Nothing
can get in my way ... I've made a choice, so far, to go on this road alone. Because this
is my time. This is my time to make movies," he explained to GQ.

James Cameron, (born August 16, 1954, Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada), Canadian
filmmaker known for his expansive vision and innovative special-effects films, most
notably Titanic (1997), for which he won an Academy Award for best director,
and Avatar (2009).
Cameron studied art as a child; he later provided the drawings that figured prominently
in Titanic. In 1971 his family moved to California. After studying physics at California
State University at Fullerton, Cameron worked at a series of jobs, including machinist
and truck driver, before a viewing of Star Wars (1977) inspired him to try his hand at
moviemaking.
In 1980 Cameron was hired as a production designer, and the following year he made
his directorial debut with Piranha II: The Spawning. A flop at the box office,
the movie encouraged Cameron to write his own material. The result
was Terminator (1984), an action thriller about a robot hit man that made actor Arnold
Schwarzenegger a star and established Cameron as a bankable filmmaker. A series of
high-tech and big-budget pictures followed, including Aliens (1986) and The
Abyss (1989), each of which received an Oscar for best visual effects, Terminator 2:
Judgment Day (1991), and True Lies (1994). In 1992 Cameron formed his own
production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, and the following year he cofounded
Digital Domain, a state-of-the-art effects company.
Although his films met with success at the box office, many viewers complained that
the films lacked substance and relied too heavily on visual effects. In 1998 Cameron
defied critics with Titanic, his screen adaptation of the doomed ocean liner’s 1912
maiden voyage. Written, directed, and coproduced by Cameron, Titanic was one of the
most expensive movies ever made, but it broke box-office records and tied Ben-
Hur (1959) for most Academy Awards won (11). Skillfully blending special
effects with a fictional love story between a penniless artist (played by Leonardo
DiCaprio) and an unhappily engaged first-class passenger (Kate
Winslet), Titanic stood atop the American charts for an unprecedented 15 weeks and
earned more than $2.1 billion to become the highest-grossing movie in the world.

Following Titanic’s unparalleled success, Cameron took a break from feature films.
He created and coproduced Dark Angel (2000–01), a science-fiction television series
about a genetically altered female warrior, and he made several
documentaries. Expedition: Bismarck (2002) took the director and his crew deep into
the Atlantic Ocean, where they captured footage of the sunken Nazi
battleship Bismarck. The documentary won an Emmy Award. Other underwater
excursions were chronicled in Ghosts of the Abyss (2003), which explored
the Titanic, and Aliens of the Deep (2005).
In 2009 Cameron returned to feature films with Avatar, a science-fiction thriller that
was noted for its special effects. A major box-office success, it surpassed Titanic to
become the highest-grossing movie in the world, earning more than $2.7 billion. The
movie also received critical acclaim. At the Golden Globes ceremony in 2010,
Cameron received the award for best director, and the film was named best picture. He
later cowrote the screenplay for the sci-fi thriller Alita: Battle Angel (2019), an
adaptation of a manga series.

A scene from Avatar (2009).Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation/The Kobal

Collection
Cameron remained involved in underwater exploration. In 2012 he debuted
the Deepsea Challenger, a submersible that he codesigned. Described as a “vertical
torpedo,” the one-person vehicle performed quick ascents and descents and was able to
withstand extreme pressure. In March Cameron completed a test dive in which he
traveled to a depth of approximately 5 miles (8 km), a record for a solo mission. Later
that month he journeyed nearly 7 miles (11 km) below the Pacific Ocean to explore the
Challenger Deep, the world’s deepest known recess, in the Mariana Trench. In 2014 he
released a documentary, Deepsea Challenge 3D, which chronicled the construction of
the submersible and debuted striking footage captured during its voyages beneath the
waves.

Changing Trends of Hindi Cinema

A movie is considered as a one-way communication. They distract us from our
monotonous problems by diverting our attention to the visuals and in the process often
extracting emotions or providing relaxation, there by entertaining us. They also allow
social interaction by providing an opportunity to discuss common topics of interest.
More often than not we relate to the characters of the movie, thus creating a sense of
connection and sometimes even reinforcing our values. Movies intensify on some
aspect of life such as comedy, romance, war etc. It plays the role of magnifying glass
and it is a platform to quench curiosity towards a serious subject.

Recently, a new flow has come into the industry by through some respective directors
and actors who are ready to pick a socially relevant topic that could benefit our
society. I truly believe that movies are no longer just a simple source of entertainment.
On the other hand it is a great technique to convey a message or a story or a concept,
which ultimately has a superior impact on your life than what you’d expect.

India has so many topics to discuss, like women’s education, women’s empowerment,
use of the toilet, cast discrimination and achievements of India. India government is
continuously working to highlight those topics, but somehow it cannot reach
maximum people. But cinema has an attractive way to spread a matter or an initiative
you can easily circulate in a broad way. For example, recently released Toilet Ek
Preem Katha is a political satire that deals with the issues of sanitation and lack of
toilets in the rural parts of India. The concept of the film is picked from our Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.

Amir Khan’s ‘Dangal’ has not only inspired millions of girls across the country, but is
also making a mark worldwide. The movie portrayed Mahavir Singh Phogat who is an
incredible father and a dedicated wrestler who led his daughters to victory in the field
of wrestling. Padman tells the life story of Tamil Nadu-based social activist
Arunachalam Muruganantham, who revolutionized the concept of menstrual hygiene
in rural India by creating a low-cost sanitary napkins machine. Door was a movie
which has spoken about widow re-marriage. Lipstick Under My Burkha the movie
clearly articulates the restrictions of women in both Hindu and Muslim families. The
movie Airlift highlighted the incident where one lakh Indians, who were stuck in
Kuwait after Saddam Hussein led Iraq declared war against Kuwait. Gabbar is Back
the movie delivered a very good message to treat everyone equally and no compromise
with corruption in the society.

A good film does more than entertaining or fills seats at the cinema. It has the power to
change hearts and minds and sometimes society more widely. I believe one film can
give information in a creative way which can create huge awareness about an issue.
The best part is some directors showing their interest towards important topics more
than box office collection. Surprisingly, most of these movies were blockbuster hits,
even though they were based on unconventional subjects. This only shows that the
audience is also accepting these movies and hence, we can safely say that, the Golden
Age of Indian Cinema is coming back.

Documentary Filmmaking VS. Journalism

From a distance documentary filmmaking and journalism can seem to be in contrast

with one another from details of content, method of distribution, and the motivation to
produce such specific works. But upon closer introspection and study the two
endeavors overlap in many ways. If the term documentary is defined as any form of
material used to communicate, document, and cover a real-life actual event, era, life
story, etc. with factual accounts containing no fictional elements than journalism in
many ways follows in that same vein and pursuit to truth. Reporting in the field of
journalism is the attempt to document impartially the who, what, where, when, why,
and how of a given topic, story or subject matter. Here, both endeavors in documentary
filmmaking and journalism are investigative and motivated by matters of the truth. The
difference comes between the two endeavors in the amount of content given, the
turnaround time in production, the motivation in distributing such content and
materials to a given audience of viewers/readers, the degree of neutrality and
objectivity, and last (but certainly not least)–the tendency in doing art.

Documentary filmmakers are inspired like that of a philanthropist or an activist bent on

tackling a complex issue, raising awareness on a problem for available solution(s), or
plainly inspired for social, economic or political change. He or she in their pursuit of
constructing a documentary film may be more moved in ways larger than just
documenting a storyline or narrating a real-life drama. A meaning to the story and the
importance in revealing the motif to the story is of high priority to the documentary
filmmaker. This tilts or expands the degree of work in content building, story-telling,
and distribution documentary filmmakers accomplish in contrast to journalists. On the
other hand journalists are simply reporters out in the field determined to cover a
storyline or real-life drama in one avenue of expression that prominently centers on the
facts. A journalist’s motto would be: “Facts no commentary.” Journalists—depending
on their method and access to distribution—are not exclusively motivated or inspired
in the emotional telling of the story or any teaching/preaching moment of a lesson and
motif germane to their storyline. Journalists aren’t working to give his or her audience
a means to how to think about a given story. They are essentially there to give to his or
her audience what to think about.
If journalist expands their area of expertise from print publication for distribution in
his or her work into areas like video/film or television broadcast than the lines may
blur to how “investigative” a reporter or journalist are in the likes of a documentary
filmmaker. In other words, with new and popularly-growing 21st century terms like a
“photojournalist” “video journalist”, “multimedia journalism” and “digital
communication” a journalist based on his or her motivation and inspiration and the
amount/level of content ready for distribution can produce work that can, in fact, be
parallel to that of a documentary filmmaker and his or her work. With the advent of
rapidly growing digital technology, the popular growth in social media platforms, and
the high importance in including the Millennial Generation different methods through
digital video has changed the ever-shifting landscape in reporting the news and
documenting the “Truth” to such a degree where traditional job descriptions of a
journalist and documentary filmmaker no longer hold up. Moreover, in order to keep
the attention span of a younger generation groomed in the digital world documentary
filmmakers are constantly going back and forth in long-form to short-form content to
telling their stories and inspiring their call to raising awareness.

Is a 30-minute investigation special on MSNBC purely a journalist at work or an

example of a documentary short? Can the approach in production and editing an ESPN
documentary be the same in CNN’s approach to cover a news topic? Are full-length
documentaries on PBS Frontline not something a journalist can do especially if the
documentaries follow the same method to reporting? Does journalism depend entirely
on turnaround time of a given work or a TRT (Total Running Time) of the output of a
given work? How much of journalism differs with documentary filmmaking based on
the creative control and involvement both the producer and reporter have in their
work(s)? Is it important in identifying if not creating a dichotomy between journalism
and documentary filmmaking? To answer the latter question—the two endeavors may
be argued for contrast to the degree of what motivates a given work to be produced
and then eventually distributed. Long-form documentaries—depending on the
budget—usually take 2-10 years to complete for the purposes of following a storyline
for a thorough, balanced and focused narrative. Separate from producing today’s
reality television shows with fast cuts, snippets of soundbites from sit-down, on-
camera interviews tightly juxtaposed in the edit of a given episode, and multiple
camera angles capturing real life moments—documentary films usually blend with the
characters of a story as they follow a subject matter to such an important degree that
the camera itself becomes a window to the story—through the cinéma vérité style.
This makes documentary filmmaking deeper and more conscious. Journalist in using
the video camera moves at a different pace, methodology, and motivation. He or she
sees their content as “making air not art”—where timing is vital. A given turnaround
time for a broadcast journalist may be in fact a couple of weeks if not days. This
method in reporting will then require a different style to the one whose putting
together a documentary film. More, importantly a journalist is more pressed with time
in execution where the reward is in telling the story at the onset of its problem,
popularity, and value. The reward in the documentary filmmaker is documenting a
balanced subject matter in raising awareness on a given subject matter and producing
film art—which incorporates emotion, feeling, and inspiration that comes with any and
all artistic expressions. Journalists are reporters while documentary filmmakers are
artists.

Art is a big factor in what documentary filmmakers do which is surprisingly often

overlooked by the lay public as well as “experts” in the field. Creativity is what drives
the director in telling a strong narrative and documenting a specific issue through film
language. Symbolic imagery where the camera catches things, people, and occurrences
on camera as a symbolic representations of the style of the story being told is a
fundamental aspect to documentary film artists at work. Art takes documentary
filmmaking to a different avenue and degree than video journalism where being
impartial to story content is an unwritten rule. Art doesn’t necessarily hinder the
objectivity and engrossing element to documentaries it only enhances the way the
story is told and the way the issue(s) is being addressed. That focus in doing art takes a
viewer into a world that they may not have entered otherwise. This essentially makes
television or film documentaries much different that long extended news packages
done in feature-length time.

However, objectivity and neutrality can always blur in any media platform—especially
a media platform motivated in making money. Here, documentary filmmakers are no
more immune to this reality than journalists are. One can argue that the notion of
100% objectivity in the sense of a reporter or documentarian who is simply on the
outside looking in as a way of finding out what’s going on and highlighting the
importance of the story is a mirage. It’ll be better in this sake for either person to come
at an angle in telling a story or arguing a point no different than what one might read in
a nonfiction book or expository essay. Journalist in comparison to a documentary
filmmaker can get away with this more easily if he or she is out in the field in a limited
time frame covering a hot topic that needs to go out to air or in publication. There isn’t
enough time to spin a story or produce a work that critics and viewers may argue is
propaganda within that structure. However, it is important to note that there is growing
popularity and constant attention put on pontificating commentary where op-ed
columns, editorials, lively pundits, and blogs get weighed upon more than factual
reporting and political journalism. Documentary filmmakers exclusively operate in one
angle of a given subject matter or narrative however subtly it is portrayed and
conveyed. For example, Ken Burns’ historical documentaries on PBS usually affirms
the belief in American exceptionalism and deep American national pride—whether it
be in an anthology of the Civil War, Jazz music or National Parks or biographical
documentaries on Mark Twain and Thomas Jefferson. The best documentary
filmmakers do in regard to the level of objectivity is to keep it subtle where facts are
not construed with commentary, the documentaries are thorough in research and
provide valuable information and both sides of an issue or problem are represented and
addressed in the film.

Journalism and documentary films overlap in production value, focus on truth,

methodology of approach and the gathering of information and research. The two
endeavors differ in distribution method, time frame of execution, level and degree of
content and the motivation and inspiration in making art and news. The degree in
raising awareness and reaching close to the Truth—with the capital T—is what
delivers value in both endeavors. Both endeavors can be painstaking in information
gathering and research, dangerous in going into the field and working on certain
contentious subject matter and issues, and both require much diligence and
determination to perform especially in their respective fields that are currently
undergoing measures of significant downsizing due to economics and growing
technology.

The Difference between Documentarians and Journalists

What is the place of the documentary journalism within the relentless crush of the
24-hour news cycle? Are there differences in methodology between the filmmaker
and the journalist? Does the medium matter (print versus broadcast versus the
Internet versus film)? Are there clear lines of demarcation, or does one simply leave
off where the other begins? The answers may lie in how the work of journalists and
filmmakers, and/or journalists/filmmakers, is perceived beyond their respective
communities, as well as how consumers want to receive news.

With the best journalism programs in the country offering documentary filmmaking
as part of their curricula, the medium is beginning to take its rightful place under the
news umbrella, but it's not without growing pains. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan's ruling
this past May in the case involving Joe Berlinger and his film Crude is a chilling
example. The film documents a lawsuit filed by thousands of Ecuadorians against
Chevron, stating that its subsidiary, Texaco, had systematically contaminated the
land in its three decades of drilling there. While Kaplan acknowledged that Berlinger
is indeed a journalist with First Amendment protections, the judge still ruled that
Chevron had the right to examine 600 hours of raw footage.

Chevron claims overt advocacy on Berlinger's part, but within the widely diverse
documentary community and its supporters, one would be hard-pressed to compare a
film by Berlinger with one by Michael Moore. It should be obvious as well to the
uninitiated that Berlinger's nuanced, balanced and impeccably researched work may
conjure a long-form Edward R. Morrow or Walter Cronkite, while Moore's buoyant,
screeching wheel makes no bones about what side he's on.
While the Court of Appeals recently modified Kaplan's ruling and narrowed the
scope of what Chevron could view and use, it's the reality of those hundreds of hours
of film that differentiates documentary filmmakers from other journalists in the first
place. The situation begs the question: Would Chevron have been so obdurate if
Berlinger had written a lengthy series for The Washington Post, or produced and
directed news segments for network or cable?

In a show of solidarity with documentary filmmakers (who were joined by the IDA,
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Directors Guild of America
and HBO, among other entities), ABC TV, the Associated Press, CBS TV, the Daily
News, the Dow Jones Company, the Gannett Company, the Hearst Corporation, NBC
Universal, the New York Times Company and The Washington Post all signed an
amicus brief that was filed in support of Berlinger's cause.

"I was glad to see that media companies are now supporting Joe," says filmmaker,
blogger and former broadcast news journalist A.J. Schnack. "It's a bigger issue for
journalists [broadcast and print] in their day-to-day employment than it is even for
us. There are only a handful of cases a year where this is going to impact
documentary filmmakers, but it's crucial to journalists in other media. The fact that
news organizations are starting to say that they need to weigh in on what's happening
with Crude is a positive development. It continues to blur the lines between the
disciplines."

Perhaps the best current example of a trans-media, trans-journalistic approach is

journalist, author and filmmaker Sebastian Junger and photojournalist and filmmaker
Tim Hetherington's devastating documentary Restrepo. Different angles of this story
have been covered via broadcast news, magazine articles, a narrative book, a book of
documentary photographs and a documentary film.

Restrepo may be in a class by itself for its multi-disciplinary, year-long, immersive

portrayal of a small combat unit's ongoing battle to build and defend a lonely outpost
in Afghanistan's deadly Korengal Valley. Asked about how he and Junger
approached the story for each medium, Hetherington says, "I think that what happens
is that as the content gets put into different forms, it changes the emphasis slightly
and changes the audience. Each form has its own particular needs, and different
audiences look at different forms. A young person may be more engaged digitally,
but someone who is older may want to go to a photographic exhibition."

"Different material has to be treated it in different ways," adds Junger. "But I think
the demands of narrative are kind of the same. You have to engage people's interest
and give them what feels like a narrative arc, and you can't have the moment of
greatest tension at the beginning and have it flatline for the rest for the story. It's
ancient in all forms of storytelling, regardless of the medium. That's what you have to
tap into to be effective."

While narrative is necessary in the telling of any news story at any length, what's
gained in viewership often lacks in depth. Hetherington noted the difference between
his and Junger's broadcast coverage of the Afghan conflict on
ABC's Nightline versus their documentary Restrepo. "You can present something on
network news that has clarity but doesn't necessarily have nuance," he explains.
"ABC News told us that our audience figures for dispatches from Afghanistan were
22 million. For the first time, a large number of Americans were beginning to see that
the war had slipped out of control. That was an effective message, but it didn't have
the nuance we were able to imbue into the film."

Documentary producer and director Carl Deal, a former combat and investigative
journalist and international broadcast news producer, remembers the particular thrill
of creating two-to three-minute news segments as a distinctly different experience
from creating a film. "Reporting on the latest activities that are related to the much
bigger stories that are unfolding day to day is a blast," Deal maintains. "You're
engaged with the content in some respect, but when you're producing news segments,
you're also managing satellite feeds and delivery mechanisms and whoever is editing.
It's an adrenaline rush, and I think that's a big part of broadcast news. While I
enjoyed it immensely, it also fell short for me because it's limited by time and
because there are a hundred stories unfolding at once."

When Deal made the switch to documentaries, he took a huge pay cut to do
something he believes provides an extremely valuable service that goes far beyond
network news and is more rewarding personally. "There's not a lot of support for
documentary filmmaking," he admits. "We essentially had a solid two-plus years to
make Trouble the Water. If we had a firm commission from someone or a deadline, it
would have been a much different film, but we got to tell the story we felt needed to
be told because we had the time. I'm not advocating for not funding docs by saying
this, but when you have time, you can certainly go deeper."

Amy Berg, a former segment producer for both network and cable news, directed the
2006 documentary Deliver Us from Evil, which came about as a direct result of her
work as a producer at CNN. Berg had an early opportunity to dig into the pathology
behind the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, when Father Oliver O'Grady
presented himself to her as an interview subject. Knowing she wouldn't be able to
cover O'Grady with sound bites, she left news behind and went to Ireland with a
cameraman to fully cover the story for which she had developed a passion.
Berg's lengthy experience as a producer of investigative news segments gives her a
unique perspective on the more corporate aspects of creating newscasts. "As a
producer at a network, you are beholden to the corporate agenda," says Berg. "This
means that if there is an advertiser that might not like the findings of an investigation,
you might not be able to get the story green-lit, let alone on the air. Other constraints
were the ‘company look'--which does not allow for any creative liberties, as
pertaining to storytelling, shooting style and look--and competition with other
stations--which results in competing car chases or the latest drug-addled starlet leads-
-instead of making headlines for having an investigation at the top."

That being said, Berg, like other journalists/filmmakers, sees that the crossover of the
two media is the story, as well as the types of people who choose to labor in service
of a story. "Having a journalistic sensibility transcends the constraints, whatever
storytelling style one chooses," she maintains. "The personalities tend to be similar:
intense, passionate, inquisitive, etc. I often think it is easy to get excited about a vast
array of subjects, and when offered the room to tell a good story, the documentary
medium is much less intrusive to finding the real story, no matter how long it takes."

With the continuing controversy over Crude and the rapidly transforming news
landscape, the question that continues to crop up is: What kind of storytellers get to
be called journalists? "We find that asked about bloggers, about documentarians,"
says Schnack. "Who deserves the right that has been so far afforded to traditional
journalism? Documentarians have been on the outside looking in on a lot of those
rights--and sometimes we've liked it that way because it's given us more freedom to
make artistic choices in our films--so it's an interesting question. As we move
forward, are we going to codify the relationship between documentary filmmakers
and journalists in specific way, or will it really even be necessary?"

Deal sees concrete advantages to the ever-expanding sources for news, of which
documentaries make up one part. "We're all really fortunate right now that there are
many more options than there were 10 years ago to get news and information," he
points out. "How many 15-year-olds you know have ever watched a news program?
It doesn't mean they're not getting good information; it's that they're getting it from a
variety of sources."

While documentaries do allow the filmmaker, and eventually the audience, to

become immersed in the events being reported, Deal may have the final word on the
subtle and not so subtle differences as to what constitutes a journalist, regardless of
the system of delivery. "I don't make big distinctions about what motivates me as a
filmmaker as opposed to what motivates me as a journalist, as opposed to what
motivates me as a citizen of the world," he maintains. "My interest in doing this is
because I have something to say. When journalists have something to say, the
medium we're working in is an influence, and we get creative about new ways to say
things."

Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson is a writer whose work has appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, Documentary Magazine, Movie City News, Valley Scene
Magazine and the LA Reader. She also has over 18 years experience implementing
publicity and marketing campaigns and creating materials for a variety of film- and
non-film-related organizations.

Auteur Theory

INTRODUCTION

In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's
personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur" (the French word for
"author"). In spite of—and sometimes even because of—the production of the film
aspart of an industrial process, the auteur's creative voice is distinct enough to shine
through all kinds of studio interference and through the collective process.

In law, the film is treated as a work of art, and the auteur, as the creator of the film, is
the original copyright holder. Under European Union law, the film director is
considered the author or one of the authors of a film, largely as a result of the influence
of auteur theory. Auteur theory has influenced film criticism since 1954, when it was
advocated by film director and critic François Truffaut. This method of film analysis
was originally associated with the French New Wave and the film critics who wrote
for the French film review periodical Cahiers du Cinéma. Auteur theory was
developed a few years later in the United States through the writings of The Village
Voice critic Andrew Sarris. Sarris used auteur theory as a way to further the analysis
of what defines serious work through the study of respected directors and their films.
Its Origin Auteur theory draws on the work of a group of cinema enthusiasts who
wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma and argued that films should reflect a director's personal
vision. The championed filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Alfred

Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Jean Renoir are known as absolute "auteurs" of their
films. Although André Bazin, cofounder of the Cahiers, provided a forum for
auteurism to flourish, he explained his concern about its excesses in his article "On the
Auteur Theory" (Cahiers du Cinéma #70, 1957). Another element of auteur theory
comes from Alexandre Astruc's notion of the caméra-stylo or "camera-pen", which
encourages directors to wield cameras as writers use pens and to guard against the
hindrances of traditional storytelling. Truffaut and the members of the Cahiers
recognized that movie-making was an industrial process. However, they proposed an
ideal to strive for, encouraging the director to use the commercial apparatus as a writer
uses a pen, and, through the mise en scène, imprint his or her vision on the work
(minimizing the role of the screenwriter). Recognizing the difficulty of reaching this
ideal, they valued the work of directors who came close. The definition of an auteur
has been debated upon since the 1940s. Andre Bazin and Roger Leenhardt presented
the theory that it is the director that brings the film to life and uses the film to express
their thoughts and feelings about the subject matter as well as a world view as an
auteur. An auteur can use lighting, camerawork, staging and editing to add to their
vision.

Developments

In his 1954 essay "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" ("A certain tendency in
French cinema"), François Truffaut coined the phrase "la politique des Auteurs",
asserting that the worst of Jean Renoir's movies would always be more interesting than
the best of the movies of Jean Delannoy. "Politique" might very well be translated as
"policy" or "program"; it involves a conscious decision to value and look at films in a
certain way. One might see it as the policy of treating any director that uses a personal
style or a unique world view as an Auteur. Truffaut criticized the Cinema of Quality as
"Scenarists' films", which are works that lack originality and rely on literary classics.
According to Truffaut, this means that the director is only a metteur en scene, a
"stager". This tradition suggests that the screenwriter hands the script to the director
and the director simply adds the performers and pictures. Truffaut provocatively said:
"(t)here are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors".

Truffaut's article, by his own admission, dealt primarily with scenarists or

screenwriters, precisely the screenwriting duo Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who,
Truffaut believed, simplified and compromised many of the great works of French
literature in order to support the political agenda of their day. In Truffaut's article, he
references the director Claude Autant-Lara's characterization of his adaptation of
Raymond Radiguet's Devil in the Flesh as an "anti-war" book, citing the problem that

the book pre-dated the Second World War. Truffaut applied the term "auteur" to
directors like Jean Renoir, Max Ophüls, Jacques Becker, Jacques Tati, and Robert
Bresson, who, aside from exerting their distinct style, wrote the screenplays or worked
on the writing of screenplays of their films. In its embryonic form, the auteur theory
dealt with the nature of literary adaptations and Truffaut's discomfort with the
screenwriters Aurenche's and Bost's maxim that any film adaptation of a novel should
capture the spirit of the novel and deal only with its "filmable" aspects. Truffaut
believed that film directors like Robert Bresson were able to use the film narrative to
approach even the so-called "unfilmable" scenes. To support this assertion, he used the
film version of Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest. Much of the writing of
Truffaut and his colleagues at the film criticism magazine Cahiers du cinéma was
designed to lambaste not only the post-war French cinema but especially the big
production films of the cinéma de qualité ("quality films"). Although it has become
widely believed that Truffaut's circle referred to these films with disdain as sterile,
oldfashioned cinéma de papa (or "Dad's cinema"), in fact Truffaut never used the term
"cinéma de papa". During the Nazi occupation, the Vichy government did not allow
the exhibition of U.S. films such as The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane. In 1946,
when French film critics were finally able to see the 1940s U.S. movies, they were
enamoured with these films.

Truffaut's theory maintains that a good director (and many bad ones) exerts such a
distinctive style or promotes such a mconsistent theme that his or her influence is
unmistakable in the body of his or her work. Truffaut himself was appreciative of
directors whose work showed a marked visual style (such as Alfred Hitchcock) as well
as those whose visual style was less pronounced but whose movies reflected a
consistent theme (such as Jean Renoir's humanism). Truffaut et al. made the distinction
between auteurs and 'metteurs en scene', the latter not being described as inferior
directors making inherently poor films, just lacking the authorial signature.

Impact

with the result that fewer of the sort of films Truffaut admired were actually being
made. While in the U.S., Andrew Sarris introduced it in the essay, "Notes on the
Auteur Theory in 1962". This essay is where the Identifying an Auteur.

When you wake up, suppose in the search of eliminating idle-ship trod up a specific
miles and you reach a bookstore. If it’s a self-check place, either you will look out for
the bestsellers, identifying the stocks that are usually tagged ‘not bad!’ or, you may
choose a book by a specific author. If you are one among the class of the followers,
then well is the idea to combat boredom. But, if you belong to the latter shows your
inclination towards the style (literal and/or beautification) adopted by the auteur a.k.a.
the author in crafting a visual synthesis for its readers. In a mere simplification, a
creation has to be a modest patent of its creator and this relationship is best understood
by the latter group. Although an auteur is to be simplified being most able to foster
his/her creation, there are people who would always prefer to treat a piece of novel or
poetry as an accompaniment to alleviate monotone or even at times, to pretend the
opacity of intellect. Such is the gap between what we may call as a cinema profounder
and a movie fan that tougher becomes the process of identifying a Cinema Auteur.
Michael Moore, in full Michael Francis Moore, (born April 23, 1954, Flint,
Michigan, U.S.), American filmmaker, author, and political activist, who was best
known for a series of documentaries—often controversial—that addressed major
political and social issues in the United States.
Following his graduation from high school, Moore, as an 18-year-old member of the
Flint school board, began his populist assault on what he viewed as the injustices of
American capitalism. In 1976, after having attended but not graduated from
the University of Michigan at Flint, Moore started a radical weekly newspaper,
the Flint Voice (later Michigan Voice), which he edited for 10 years. He was later
hired to edit the San Francisco-based left-wing magazine Mother Jones but was fired
after a few months (he later accepted an out-of-court settlement for a wrongful-
dismissal suit).
Returning to Flint, Moore filmed his first documentary, Roger & Me (1989), which
chronicles the effects of unemployment in Flint due to the closing of two General
Motors (GM) factories and the company’s longer-term policy of downsizing. At the
centre of the film were Moore’s “in-your-face” efforts to gain an audience with GM’s
chairman, Roger Smith. Mixing humour and poignancy with indignation, Roger &
Me was a hit with critics and at the box office. Moore subsequently moved to New
York City and established Dog Eat Dog Films. He also created an organization to
finance social-action groups and other filmmakers.
After producing three television series and other limited-release films—including
the comedyCanadian Bacon (1995), in which a U.S. president starts a cold war
with Canada in order to boost his approval ratings—Moore achieved major success
with Bowling for Columbine (2002). The film, which profiles gun violence in
the United States, won the Academy Award for best documentary. In his next
documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Moore criticized U.S. Pres. George W. Bush’s
handling of the September 11 attacks and the administration’s decision to start the Iraq
War. Although highly controversial, it won the Golden Palm at the Cannes film
festival and earned more than $222 million worldwide to become the highest-grossing
documentary.
Michael Moore arriving at the 2003 Academy Awards ceremony, where he won an
Oscar for best documentary. In 2007 Moore released Sicko, an examination of the
health care industry in the United States. For his next documentary, Capitalism: A
Love Story (2009), Moore took a critical look at the U.S. economy, including
the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–08 and the subsequent bailout of banks. Where
to Invade Next (2015) unfavourably compared various aspects of daily life in other
countries—such as educational practices and the balance between work and leisure—
with those in the United States. Moore’s live stage performance about the 2016
presidential election—filmed prior to Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton—
was the basis for Michael Moore in TrumpLand (2016). In 2017 Moore made his
Broadway debut in the one-man show The Terms of My Surrender, which examined
the Trump presidency. The following year he considered the 2016 presidential election
and the unexpected rise of Trump in the documentary Fahrenheit 11/9. The movie
especially takes to task the policies of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, under
whose tenure Moore’s hometown was exposed to dangerous levels of lead.
Moore wrote a series of best-selling books, including Downsize This! (1996); Stupid
White Men (2002), which assails the legitimacy, methods, and motives of President
Bush’s administration; Dude, Where’s My Country? (2003), a call for “regime
change” in the United States; and Mike’s Election Guide (2008), a guidebook to the
2008 U.S. presidential election. In 2011 he published Here Comes Trouble, a
collection of autobiographical stories.

EISENSTEIN’S FIVE TYPES OF MONTAGE

Sergei Eisenstein talks about five different methods of montage through out his work.
These varieties of montage build one upon the other so the “higher” forms also include
the approaches of the “simpler” varieties. These are the five:

Metric - Where the editing follows a specific number of frames, this is based purely
on the physical nature of time, cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening
within the image. The reason for this is to get an emotional reaction from the audience.

Rhythmic - The cutting happens for the sake of continuity. This creates visual
continuity but it may also be used in order to keep with the pace of the film. A good
example of this is the legendary car/train chase scene in The French Connection.

Tonal - A tonal montage uses the emotional meaning of the shots. Not just
manipulating the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmical characteristics. The point
of this is to elicit a reaction that is more complex than Rhythmic and Metric. An
example of this is in one of Eisenstein’s fllms called Battleship Potemkin where the
character ‘Vakulinchuk’ dies.

Overtonal/Associational - An accumulation of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage to

synthesise its effect on the audience for an even more abstract and complicated effect.

Intellectual - Uses a combination of shots from outside the film in order to create a meaning.
A good example of this would be the scene from apocalypse now where Klutz is being
executed They mix in shots of a water buffalo being slaughtered.

SHORT NOTES ON FILM FESTIVALS

Cannes Film Festival - The first annual Cannes Film Festival opens at the resort city of
Cannes on the French Riviera. The festival had intended to make its debut in
September 1939, but the outbreak of World War II forced the cancellation of the
inaugural Cannes.

The world’s first annual international film festival was inaugurated at Venice in 1932.
By 1938, the Venice Film Festival had become a vehicle for Fascist and Nazi
propaganda, with Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany dictating the
choices of films and sharing the prizes among themselves. Outraged, France decided to
organize an alternative film festival. In June 1939, the establishment of a film festival
at Cannes, to be held from September 1 to 20, was announced in Paris. Cannes, an
elegant beach city, lies southeast of Nice on the Mediterranean coast. One of the resort
town’s casinos agreed to host the event.

Films were selected and the filmmakers and stars began arriving in mid-August.
Among the American selections was The Wizard of Oz. France offered The Nigerian,
and Poland The Black Diamond. The USSR brought the aptly titled Tomorrow, It’s
War. On the morning of September 1, the day the festival was to begin, Hitler invaded
Poland. In Paris, the French government ordered a general mobilization, and the
Cannes festival was called off after the screening of just one film: German American
director William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Two days later, France
and Britain declared war on Germany.

World War II lasted six long years. In 1946, France’s provincial government approved
a revival of the Festival de Cannes as a means of luring tourists back to the French
Riviera. The festival began on September 20, 1946, and 18 nations were represented.
The festival schedule included Austrian American director Billy Wilder’s The Lost
Weekend, Italian director Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, French director René
Clement’s The Battle of the Rails,and British director David Lean’sBrief Encounter. At
the first Cannes, organizers placed more emphasis on creative stimulation between
national productions than on competition. Nine films were honored with the top award:
Grand Prix du Festival.

The Cannes Film Festival stumbled through its early years; the 1948 and 1950 festivals
were canceled for economic reasons. In 1952, the Palais des Festivals was dedicated as
a permanent home for the festival, and in 1955, the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) award
for best film of the festival was introduced, an allusion to the palm-planted Promenade
de la Croisette that parallels Cannes’ celebrated beach. In the 1950s, the Festival
International du Film de Cannescame to be regarded as the most prestigious film
festival in the world. It still

holds that allure today, though many have criticized it as overly commercial. More
than 30,000 people come to Cannes each May to attend the festival, about 100 times
the number of film devotees who showed up for the first Cannes in 1946.
The Cannes Festival, named until 2002 as the International Film Festival (Festival
international du film) and known in English as the Cannes Film Festival, is an annual
film festival held inCannes, France, which previews new films of all genres, including
documentaries, from all around the world.

Venice Film Festival - Official name Venice International Film Festival, Italian
Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia, world’s oldest Film
Festival, held annually in Venice beginning in late August or early September.
Officially part of the Venice Biennale, the festival takes place in the picturesque Lido
section of the city, and the combination of location and tradition makes it a popular
destination for the elite of the film industry.

The Venice Film Festival was founded in 1932 as the Esposizione d’Arte
Cinematografica (Exhibition of Cinematographic Arts), which was a part of that year’s
Venice Biennale, the second to be held under the aegis of the Italian fascist
government. (Music and theatre were also added to the Biennale in the 1930s.) The
first festival was noncompetitive, and the first film to be shown was American director
Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). Other films showcased at that
inaugural festival included the American filmsGrand Hotel (1932) and The Champ
(1931).

Two years later the festival returned, this time with a competitive dimension. Nineteen
countries took part, and an award called the Coppa Mussolini (Mussolini Cup) was
introduced for best foreign film and best Italian film. The festival was so popular that
in 1935 it became an annual event, and the Coppa Volpi (Volpi Cup)—named for
festival founder Count Giuseppe Volpi—was awarded to the best actor and actress for
the first time. After World War II the Coppa Mussolini was discontinued and replaced
as the festival’s highest honour by the Leone d’Oro (Golden Lion), awarded to the best
film. In 1968 students began to protest the Venice Biennale because of what they
perceived to be its increasing commodification of art; as a result, no film prizes were
awarded in 1969–79, and the festival’s reputation briefly suffered. By the early 21st
century, however, the festival was screening more than 150 films each year and
boasted an average annual attendance of more than 50,000 film professionals and
cinephiles.

Berlin Film Festival - Berlin Film Festival is hosted annually in Berlin, Germany, and
it is one of the world’s leading film festivals. This reputable media event is also known
as ‘Berlinale’. Each year, there are approximately 300,000 tickets sold in advance and
admissions can reach 500,000. For this reason, it is now one of the best-attended film
festivals in the world.

The festival was founded in 1951 in West Berlin and the first Berlinale was opened
with a showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rebecca’. This movie was actually released in
1940. However, many people in Germany did not have the good fortune to see this
movie because of World War II and the political and social circumstances that
followed. From 1978 onwards, the film has been held annually each February.

The Golden Bear Awards are one of the awards presented each year at the festival. At
the festival’s debut event, these awards were decided by a panel of German judges.
Between 1952 and 1955, the winners were determined by members of the audience.
From 1956 to the present day, winners of the Golden Bear Awards are decided by an
international jury. Originally, there was just one Golden Bear Award for Best Motion
Picture. In 1956, a second award was added for the best short film. Since 1982, there
has been a third award for lifetime achievement.

In 1956, the second category of award was introduced; the Silver Bear. These awards
were given for the best short film and for individual achievements in acting or
directing. In 1965, a further award was added for the runner-up to the Golden Bear.
Silver Bear Awards for special recognition were added to the list of awards in 1978
and an award for the best film music was included from 2002 onwards. The most
recent addition to the list of the awards is the award for best screenplay, which has
been included since 2008. Officially, the Silver Bear Awards were originally called the
‘Special Jury Price’ and were then called the ‘Jury Grand Prix’ from 2000.

Now, around 400 films are shown with approximately 20 competing for the Golden
and Silver Bear Awards. Dieter Kosslick has been the director of the Berlin Film
Festival since 2001. The festival is split into seven categories; Competition, Panorama,
Forum, Generation, Perspektive Deutsches Kino, Berlinale Shorts, and Retrospective.
Further to these sections, there are several curated special series. These include Forum
5, the Homage, Berlinale Special, Culinary Cinema, and Gala Special. With the
exception of the Retrospective, there is a 50-second trailer shown at the beginning of
each of the sections. A section director is responsible for choosing the films for each of
the sections and there is a committee of experts who offer the directors advice.

THREE TYPES OF DOCUMENTAY

Investigative documentary is a form of journalism deeply investigating a single topic

of interest, often involving crime, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing.

An investigative journalist/director may spend months or years researching and

preparing a documentary. Practitioners sometimes use the terms ‘watchdog
journalism’ or ‘accountability reporting’. Investigative documentaries can be defined
as films enquiring intensively into and seeking to expose malpractice, the miscarriage
of justice, or other controversial issues. Investigative documentaries reach larger
audiences. They provide opinions, a specific message, as well as facts.

Educational documentary

An educational film is a film or movie whose primary purpose is to educate.

Educational films have been used in classrooms as an alternative to other teaching
methods.

Many educational films shown in schools are part of long series - for example, films
demonstrating scientific principles and experiments tend to be episodic, with each
episode devoted to a specific experiment or principle.

Experimental documentary

Experimental film, experimental cinema or avant-garde cinema is a mode of

filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-
narrative forms and alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working.

Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines:
painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new
technical resources.

Marking Strategies of Indie Film

The panel primarily centered on how indie filmmakers could get their movie seen, and
how to find the right audience to give a film prolonged attention in a hugely
competitive specialty market. They also discussed the rocky road of VOD distribution,
the dangers of awards season, the values of playing in a fading DVD market and what
kinds of films among hundreds of pitches they give their attention to. Read the best
highlights from the panel below.

In today’s climate, you have to be honest about your film, or you are screwed.

For popular but small distributors, you can’t take full swings on what audience you
pitch your movie to, or what you are telling them in the first place.

“You can’t bullsh*t,” said Well Go USA’s Dylan Marchetti, distributor of films like
“The Assassin” and the recent release “King Jack.”

“There are two revelations: On social media, you can’t market a movie as anything
other than what it is, because on Friday and on Saturday everyone’s like ‘guys, this
movie’s terrible’... I’ve seen films drop 70% on second weekend because of Twitter,”
he added. “Second, you’ve got to really be savvy on the way you tell people about
films and who you tell about them. For our distribution, we have a flexible model: lot
of our films are traditional theatrical, some are day and date, but it’s not random.”

He discussed the virtues of taking a theatrically-minded approach where more

attention would be given to a film, as Well Go USA did for “Kumiko The Treasure
Hunter,” or marketing more specifically to a core audience as they are currently doing
with “King Jack.”

“King Jack”

“When you’ve got a film like [‘Kumiko’], I know that when we put that film out on
VOD, it’s a big question of will they put a big square around its name or will it get lost
on a list somewhere,” said Marchetti. “If I put it there it will do well for a week, and
then get lost in the shuffle. But if I spend three months putting it in theaters, people
will see it and talk about it and see the trailer when they see other stuff, so then if it’s
on digital it’ll get attention.”

“My logic is, we can’t justify spending a million dollars in this business on marketing
this movie,” said Marchetti. “Then we’ll lose that money and go out of business and
won’t be able to make movies anymore. But if we put it in a couple of theaters and
also make it available on VOD it can get national attention. I can do a national release
without having to spend millions of dollars and do commercials.”

VOD or not, you have to be creative in who you market to.

“Every movie has a core audience,” said Bleecker Street’s Kent Sanderson. “How big
that core audience is varies movie to movie, but it’s all about finding the right way to,
once the movies’s in theaters, reach your theatrical consumer. Marketing in theaters,
getting trailers, getting standees up. On VOD, it’s reaching your VOD audience, on
DVD, it’s reaching your DVD audience to make sure they’re aware and interested that
it’s on that platform. The one thing that most of our movies except big studio stuff
have in common is that the life cycle after movie theaters will be bigger.”

Sanderson cited Bleecker’s “I’ll See You in My Dreams” as a solid success story for
the label last summer, and a targeted marketing campaign to thank for it.

“Sundance movie, Blythe Danner, really lovely...so you could probably imagine that
we didn’t buy ad time on the Sci-Fi Channel,” said Sanderson. “That’s just not what
that audience follows. We put it out in papers and reached out to older audiences
through social media platforms, and when the time came to release it on VOD at that
point we’d brought a lot of television to promote VOD for the film. It’s choosing your
marketing for what’s best for the film.”

The Orchard is more than happy to release VOD numbers, but other outfits don’t
see the need.

Many indie distributors are anxious about making their ancillary revenue data public.
The Orchard, on the other hand, is happy to casually discuss them.

“We had a documentary out last year called ‘Cartel Land,’ about the cartels south of
the border in Mexico,” said The Orchard’s Danielle DiGiacomo. “The way we got
people in theaters was a lot of group sales, a lot of targeting where immigration and
issues relating to the cartels were major social topics. We went to our digital media, we
partnered with Mic Media, we were able to target people who’d already bought tickets
through their email. It ended up in the digital window and I can actually say because
we’ve reported the numbers is that we’ve gotten 2 million in VOD sales and 550k in
just the first two weeks.”

“Cartel Land”

“So long as we report theatrical box office, we will report VOD,” said DiGiacomo.
“Even if it’s not so great we just feel like the filmmakers deserve it. It’s been part of
our business since

the beginning. And actually in the next few months in the next few months we’ll report
a breakdown of the ‘Cartel’ numbers and where came from what.”

Participant’s Rob Williams as well as Sanderson and Marchetti naturally disagreed.

“VOD is a little less linear than moviegoing,” said Williams. “With theaters there’s an
average ticket price and though the revenue split with the distributors varies, it’s
usually around the same.”

“The industry is complicated and releasing numbers is complicated because there

needs to be context for what you’re seeing,” said Sanderson. “Box office is very
simple – it’s people showing up. In an age where windowing and pricing vary wildly,
and that’s only changing more and more, I’m not sure where having a blanket sharing
policy is necessarily educational.”

Marchetti offered a slightly varied argument: “We don’t get the numbers immediately.
The truth about VOD grosses is that there are some platforms where I can look the
next night and find out what we did and there are some platforms that kind of estimate
and report and the actual reports come out two months later. There are other platforms
that report quarterly: There are other platforms that report quarterly, and you can ask
for one quarter on one film and that’s it. There’s no real way in reporting our VOD
gross.”

“Eye in the Sky”

“We obviously release movies in the fourth quarter,” said Sanderson. “We released
‘Trumbo’ in the fourth quarter and that got an Oscar nomination we were very happy
about that. But we just put out [‘Eye in the Sky’], and that’s grossed $18.5 million
right now, whereas ‘Carol’ did about $12 million. A great movie’s a great movie, and
sometimes having that runway where you’re not trampled by other awards contenders
in weeks two, three and four can be everything.”
DVD and Blu-ray is not the way for everyone to go, but it shouldn’t be ignored.

Sometimes spending a fortune on exporting production of DVDs will not be helping

your film, but again, every film is unique.

“We have to recognize the way the business has evolved over the last 10 years,” says
Sanderson. “The major retailers have consolidated: You really need to talk about
Walmart, Best Buy and Redbox as your drivers. But if you feel there’s business to be
done on VOD, like if the movie has a big cast that would play well at those labels, then
yeah, that would make sense. But when we’re talking about thousands and thousands
of movies a year, there certainly isn’t enough shelf space at Walmart to accommodate
all of those movies. Making thousands of copies of DVDs and not having a place to
sell them is not going to work.”

“I’m a firm believer in an art business culture, and if there’s one thing we have to
discuss internally and be honest with ourselves, it’s that film is both art and a
business,” said Marchetti. “I think it’s getting to a point where we’ll have to have a
really difficult conversation about how much of this is really art and how much is
business. And that’s okay. So I think if you’re distributing your film yourself you
deserve the right to make a really, really good Blu-Ray because you’re probably going
to have people who want to put that on their shelf.”

DiGiacomo used her documentary-centric release schedule to offer a counterpoint. “I

think that DVD post-theatrical is still viable, something that gets sold with public
performance rights,” she said. “For professors screening films especially, those rights
are at least $300. So there’s revenue to be made on that side, and a lot of people don’t
think about that attention.”

To pitch a film to one of these distributors, you need to have someone with you
who knows the game.

In an age where self-promotion is key for a budding filmmaker, these distributors

suggest ways of standing out from the pack.

“Working with a sales agent can be great,” said Sanderson. “They understand how to
go to market. Sometimes that means showing a script earlier and having to do pitch
meetings with distributors sooner, but sometimes that means...there’s something to be
said if you feel like you have something that’s going to play well that first night. And
if you end up in a situation where you have a bidding war, and a sales agent is going to
help guide that process.”

“I’m probably getting 300 pitches a month,” said Marchetti. “When you contact a
distributor, you always want to be able to put your best foot forward, you’ll want to be
able to tell us why people are going to want your film and what makes it special. And
it’ll sound cool if I see
a rough cut. If you have some sort of representation, if you have a friend in the film
industry or you have a sales agent on it – that helps us sift through the pile. Because it
is a pile. We know how much goes into any single film and we respect that, but there
is simply no way to appreciate all of them.”

“More films are being made now than ever before,” said Sanderson. “And that’s both a
great thing and a challenge for getting noticed.”

Even in the age of VOD, nothing beats the theatrical experience.

All of these labels – especially Well Go USA and Orchard – have made a large amount
of their business through VOD. But they don’t just understand the value of playing a
film in theaters: They know it adds another cinematic language to the experience.

“‘Weiner’ was a documentary I really liked, watching the campaign unravel and the
access they had was incredible,” said Williams. “Two audience members at a premiere
we hosted got into a fight over seats. And it was the most New York screening event
ever. Everybody was screaming at each other, then everyone was screaming onscreen
for two hours. And that’s an ‘Only in NY’ kind of thing, but it completely enhances
the picture.”

“Anyone who doesn’t cry in movies...I don’t know. I cried when Gandalf died,” said
Marchetti. “At Sundance I saw [‘Manchester by the Sea’], it’s a movie that Amazon is
putting out sometime in November, and I saw it with a crowd of 1,200 people. And
seeing a movie like that is putting it through an amplifier and turning it to 11. You
could just feel the audience around you emotionally experiencing what this guy did on
the screen and it was incredible. You can’t do that anywhere else.”

FILM PRODUCTION

Stage 1: PRE-PRODUCTION Pre-Production refers to everything that happens before

your video shoot can take place. As a general rule nothing you see on screen is an
accident, someone somewhere has planned it! Don’t think that because your film is
just a series of interviews this stage doesn’t need to happen, there will still be planning
to do.

Pre production normally begins with an initial meeting to discuss your needs for the
film. Once this has been established the production team will work on the creative idea
for the film, thinking about the style, scripting, devising questions for interviewees and
storyboarding.

As a client you should be able to choose how involved you would like to be at this
stage. Often it is just reading through the script and facilitating some introductions to
people who will be filmed, but you may want more involvement.

Then it is a case of pulling together all the logistics of your shoot such as casting,
location planning, scheduling, travel arrangements and sorting consent or licences that
need granting. Everything that would need organising to make sure that when filming
happens things can run like clockwork.

The pre production stage of a film is incredibly important, especially on larger shoots
or if you know you will be filming on a tight deadline. It is always important to
remember that “people that cost money”, so if everyone is held up while a location or
costume is sourced, or a script is still being written, that is not a cost effective
production!

As a client you should be prepared for plenty of meetings and phone calls and emails
during pre production. If you know you are extremely busy and won’t be able to give
much time to the project you could delegate a jnr member of staff to the project, it can
be a really rewarding process. If this can’t happen make sure the production company
know the best time to talk to you during the day. It can be very difficult if a customer
goes “offline” when you need to run something by them.

Stage 2: PRODUCTION This is the fun bit! It can also be the shortest part of the
whole process.

In a video shoot this stage is where all the filming takes place to gather the content for
the film.

Shoots can often be quite hectic, with cameramen, directors, actors and presenters all
trying to do their part. BUT because of all the careful

planning in stage 1, this stage should be painless! Depending on your production a

crew can range from a 1 – 2 person crew upwards.

However everyone working for a good and experienced production company will
know their role and will make it all look easy. Don’t be fooled, it can actually be quite
stressful for them. Your production crew may know they have one day to shoot a lot of
footage, or that there is only one shot at filming a particular scene or interview and
everything will need to be right for this. With the best will in the world, sometimes
things do conspire against them (normally weather and building works), but an
experienced crew should be able to work around most things. Production crews tend to
work 8-10 hr days and will understand the need to be flexible in when they can shoot.
This means things don’t tend to shoot purely within 9-5. So if you choose to
accompany the production crew onto the shoot be prepared for a long day, early start
or late finish.
Stage 3: POST-PRODUCTION

Some people think this is the magic bit of the process because it’s where all that
footage that has been shot gets turned into your final film. This stage includes editing,
adding voice over or music, adding any graphics, text or additional footage to the film.

This stage can often take the longest, so long in fact that we tend to break it down into
its own 3 stages. The first thing is preparation of the footage is when the editor looks at
what they have, makes sure it is all synced up and in a format they can work with in
the edit. Then comes editing the footage. This is the process of cutting up and piecing
together all of the footage and audio that has been recorded in a way that gets your
message across. An experienced editor can take what to the untrained eye seems like a
jumble of words and pictures and make something truly spectacular. There workflow
is normally, assembly of the footage, rough cut, final cut.

An experienced production company and editor will always want the client to view the
film after rough cut an sign off the film after the final cut.

History of British Documentary Film

The 1930s were an intriguing time for the class struggle. During this time, a number of
leading cultural figures declared their support for the working class. These leading
cultural figures, however, were almost always middle-class. There were the poets WH
Auden and Stephen Spender, who both went to the private Gresham’s School and
Oxford, and considered themselves socialists. There was George Orwell, the Old
Etonian who documented working-class life in The Road to Wigan Pier. There was
Graham Greene (Berkhamsted School and Oxford), who expressed various left-wing
views (although this did not prevent him complaining, in a letter to his wife, that in
Nottingham, “One sees absolutely no one here of one’s own class... It destroys
democratic feelings at birth”).

Then there were the young documentary makers. In BBC Four’s fascinating Britain
Through a Lens – a documentary about the documentary – we learn about the origins
of this form of film, from the late 1920s to the mid 1940s. But we also learn about how
it was born out of a desire both to champion and to aid the working class – often by
members of the middle class. As one early participant in the “British Documentary
Movement” of the time dryly remarked, “A documentary maker must be a gentleman,
a Socialist, have a university education, a private income, his own car, a nasal voice,
and have made some sort of film. A well-developed nasal voice has been known to
excuse the other requirements – except being a gentleman and a socialist, of
course.” The most important figure in the birth of the British documentary film was a
Scot, John Grierson, the son of a schoolteacher. After studying English and Moral
Philosophy at Glasgow University, he began postgraduate research into propaganda in
newspapers and film – and then set out to make a kind of propaganda himself. “I look
on cinema as a pulpit,” he declared – a pulpit from which to preach about how the
working class really lived, and to show the middle and upper classes how much their
comfort depended on working-class labour. In 1929, employed by the government-
funded Empire Marketing Board Film Unit, he made his first documentary. Titled
Drifters, and running to 80 minutes, it followed – without voice-over – the work of
herring fishermen in the North Sea. The public – or at least the sections of it that had
no experience of such draining toil – had never seen anything like it; the British
cinema, till now, had shown either fiction (usually about the well-heeled) or news. The
documentary was a portal to an unfamiliar world. In 1931, he helped produce
Industrial Britain. This latest documentary, unlike Drifters, had a voice-over –
delivered in an exemplary cut-glass accent. The same was true of Housing Problems, a
1935 documentary about the horrors of East End slums: its narrator describes “a block
of flets”, and renders “here” as “hyah”. Britain’s early documentary makers may well
have wanted to celebrate the working class, but they evidently didn’t

feel the country was ready for a working-class narrator. Still, working-class voices
were heard in Housing Problems – it was the first documentary to feature interviews.
This was the idea of Grierson’s sister, Ruby, who wanted to hear what the slum-
dwellers had to say about their vermin-infested homes (she apparently told them, “It’s
your chance to tell the b------s what it’s really like to live in a slum”). This
documentary was funded not by the government but by the British Commercial Gas
Association, which stood to make a handsome profit out of the rebuilding work the
documentary was calling for. In a sense, Housing Problems was a case not only of the
middle class trying to help the working class, but the rich trying to help the poor –
even if only out of capitalist self-interest.

The year after, 1936, saw the release of the period’s best-known documentary: Night
Mail, a tribute to postal workers, featuring music by Benjamin Britten and verse by
Auden. Again, the purpose was to hail the ordinary working man, but you need only to
read Auden’s lines to see that they were written with an upper- or middle-class voice
in mind: he uses “course” and “across” as a rhyme.

Another striking characteristic of these early documentaries is their crispness:

occasionally Britain Through a Lens drops in clips from documentaries of the 1980s,
and their inferiority in picture quality is puzzling. The 1930s and 40s footage, all in
black-and- white, is clear, vivid, stirring, particularly in the films of Humphrey
Jennings, once acclaimed as “the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced”.
But the 1980s footage, in colour, is bathed in a wan, drab, sickly light, as in a men’s
public lavatory. In documentary, the distant past appears to be ageing better than the
recent. A more significant comparison, though, is between attitutes to social class then
and now. In the 1930s, middle-class producers made films extolling the working class;
in the 21st century, middle-class producers make reality TV series, from Big Brother
to Geordie Shore, in which the working class is held up to ridicule. John Grierson, one
suspects, would probably not have rejoiced.

History of British Documentary Film

The 1930s were an intriguing time for the class struggle. During this time, a number of
leading cultural figures declared their support for the working class. These leading
cultural figures, however, were almost always middle-class. There were the poets WH
Auden and Stephen Spender, who both went to the private Gresham’s School and
Oxford, and considered themselves socialists. There was George Orwell, the Old
Etonian who documented working-class life in The Road to Wigan Pier. There was
Graham Greene (Berkhamsted School and Oxford), who expressed various left-wing
views (although this did not prevent him complaining, in a letter to his wife, that in
Nottingham, “One sees absolutely no one here of one’s own class... It destroys
democratic feelings at birth”).

Then there were the young documentary makers. In BBC Four’s fascinating Britain
Through a Lens – a documentary about the documentary – we learn about the origins
of this form of film, from the late 1920s to the mid 1940s. But we also learn about how
it was born out of a desire both to champion and to aid the working class – often by
members of the middle class. As one early participant in the “British Documentary
Movement” of the time dryly remarked, “A documentary maker must be a gentleman,
a Socialist, have a university education, a private income, his own car, a nasal voice,
and have made some sort of film. A well-developed nasal voice has been known to
excuse the other requirements – except being a gentleman and a socialist, of
course.” The most important figure in the birth of the British documentary film was a
Scot, John Grierson, the son of a schoolteacher. After studying English and Moral
Philosophy at Glasgow University, he began postgraduate research into propaganda in
newspapers and film – and then set out to make a kind of propaganda himself. “I look
on cinema as a pulpit,” he declared – a pulpit from which to preach about how the
working class really lived, and to show the middle and upper classes how much their
comfort depended on working-class labour. In 1929, employed by the government-
funded Empire Marketing Board Film Unit, he made his first documentary. Titled
Drifters, and running to 80 minutes, it followed – without voice-over – the work of
herring fishermen in the North Sea. The public – or at least the sections of it that had
no experience of such draining toil – had never seen anything like it; the British
cinema, till now, had shown either fiction (usually about the well-heeled) or news. The
documentary was a portal to an unfamiliar world. In 1931, he helped produce
Industrial Britain. This latest documentary, unlike Drifters, had a voice-over –
delivered in an exemplary cut-glass accent. The same was true of Housing Problems, a
1935 documentary about the horrors of East End slums: its narrator describes “a block
of flets”, and renders “here” as “hyah”. Britain’s early documentary makers may well
have wanted to celebrate the working class, but they evidently didn’t

feel the country was ready for a working-class narrator. Still, working-class voices
were heard in Housing Problems – it was the first documentary to feature interviews.
This was the idea of Grierson’s sister, Ruby, who wanted to hear what the slum-
dwellers had to say about their vermin-infested homes (she apparently told them, “It’s
your chance to tell the b------s what it’s really like to live in a slum”). This
documentary was funded not by the government but by the British Commercial Gas
Association, which stood to make a handsome profit out of the rebuilding work the
documentary was calling for. In a sense, Housing Problems was a case not only of the
middle class trying to help the working class, but the rich trying to help the poor –
even if only out of capitalist self-interest.

The year after, 1936, saw the release of the period’s best-known documentary: Night
Mail, a tribute to postal workers, featuring music by Benjamin Britten and verse by
Auden. Again, the purpose was to hail the ordinary working man, but you need only to
read Auden’s lines to see that they were written with an upper- or middle-class voice
in mind: he uses “course” and “across” as a rhyme.

Another striking characteristic of these early documentaries is their crispness:

occasionally Britain Through a Lens drops in clips from documentaries of the 1980s,
and their inferiority in picture quality is puzzling. The 1930s and 40s footage, all in
black-and- white, is clear, vivid, stirring, particularly in the films of Humphrey
Jennings, once acclaimed as “the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced”.
But the 1980s footage, in colour, is bathed in a wan, drab, sickly light, as in a men’s
public lavatory. In documentary, the distant past appears to be ageing better than the
recent. A more significant comparison, though, is between attitutes to social class then
and now. In the 1930s, middle-class producers made films extolling the working class;
in the 21st century, middle-class producers make reality TV series, from Big Brother
to Geordie Shore, in which the working class is held up to ridicule. John Grierson, one
suspects, would probably not have rejoiced.

HISTORY OF INDIAN DOCUMENTAR FILM

On the historic midnight of August 14 and 15, 1947, India became independent from
British rule. First Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's speech, "A Tryst with
Destiny," was recorded by independent filmmaker Ambles J. Patel with two cameras
and sound equipment. There were no official film units of the Government of India or
other Indian filmmakers to film this historic moment and the subsequent nationwide
celebrations.

That was 57 years ago, but today India boasts a vibrant independent documentary
filmmaking community. Indian documentary filmmakers have today carved a niche for
themselves in the nonfiction genre world with their creativity and hard-hitting works
on subjects ranging from Indian arts and social concerns to natural history.
But the Indian documentary filmmaking tradition dates back well before
independence. In 1888 a short film of wrestlers Pundalik Dada and Krishna Navi at
Bombay's Hanging Gardens was filmed by Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar.
This was the first recorded documentary film in India. In the 1930s, filmmakers D.G.
Tendulkar, who had studied motion pictures in Moscow and Germany, and K.S.
Hirelekar, who had studied culture films in Germany, brought the latest concepts of
documentary film and laid the foundation of the documentary movement in India.

In April 1948 the Indian Government formed the Films Division and described it as
"the official organ of the Government of India for the production and distribution of
information films and newsreels." Screenings of Films Division documentaries were
made mandatory before feature films at all cinemas in India. From June 1949, the
Films Division started regular distribution of newsreels and documentaries through its
own distribution set-up. Films were dubbed in five languages—English, Hindi,
Bengali, Tamil and Telegu—and 97 films were produced in 1949-50. The Films
Division soon became one of the most important sources of public information, and it
tried to reach out to people in the remotest corners of India. Many exciting films
emerged from the Films Division—S.N.S. Sastry's I Am 20, Fali Bilimoria's The
House That

Ananda Built, Sukhdev's India 1967 and M.F. Husain's Through the Eyes of a Painter.
The Films Division today is Asia's biggest documentary and short film producer,
having to its credit innumerable films that have won laurels at home and abroad during
the last 56 years.

In the 1950s Burmah-Shell, a private company, invested in making training films and
sales promotion films of outstanding merit. Canadian filmmaker James Beveridge,
who had worked at National Film Board of Canada and was a protégé of John
Grierson, produced and directed several Burmah-Shell Films in India.

In 1978, An Encounter with Faces, Vinod Chopra's documentary about Bombay street
children, went all the way to Hollywood, where it was nominated for an Oscar. The
film also earned nine out of 12 awards at the Oberhausen Film Festival, and won the
top prizes at festivals in Milan, Leipzig and Finland. At the International Film Festival
of India, it won the Golden Peacock. The technique of the film was singled out for
special mention: direct, unwavering conversations with children, neither patronizing
nor pitying.

The advent of digital video technology has further revolutionized the Indian
documentary technique. Traditionally Indian documentary overwhelmingly favored
the didactic social documentary, but now filmmakers have moved towards the
internationally accepted direct cinema style, adopting its realist aesthetic and reliance
on interviews, while continuing to retain Griersonian voiceover narration.
Until the advent of the satellite television boom in India in the early 1990s, state
broadcaster Doordarshan's two national terrestrial channels were the only TV networks
in India where documentary films could be screened. The launch of Discovery
Channel in India in August 1995 and the subsequent entry of National Geographic
Channel in 1998 created further avenues for Indian filmmakers to screen their work.
Discovery Channel has also launched Animal Planet in India and will add a Lifestyle
channel in October 2004. India's largest TV network, Zee TV, has announced plans to
launch a documentary channel called Khoj in the next few months.

In addition to the broadcasters, the nonprofit Public Service Broadcasting Trust was
formed to support the production of independent documentary films. The trust receives
its funding from the Ford Foundation and Doordarshan. According to Rajiv Mehrotra,
an internationally renowned filmmaker and the founder of PSBT, "We do not seek
sensationalism or explicit confrontation— though that might bring in TV ratings—but
to provide quiet, considered insights and, dare I add, wisdom to focus on contemporary
predicaments and valuable elements of our heritage. We encourage filmmakers to
work with the newer, less expensive digital technologies so that they could explore
more innovative treatments and approaches to the documentary, afford more time on
location and create truly in-depth, incisive films." PSBT has already produced over 50
films and has started work on a documentary miniseries: The Story of Indian
Broadcasting, which will both evaluate and document the achievements of Public
Service Broadcasting in India.

The Indian documentary community has presented cinematic gems and has put Indian
images on television screens across the planet. Mike Pandey is the only Asian
filmmaker ever to have won the Green Oscar twice at the Wildscreen Festival in the
UK, for his documentaries Rogue Elephants of India and Shore Whale Sharks in India.
The latter film was shot under extreme conditions and took almost three years to
complete. "Shore Whale Sharks in

India aimed towards creating policies to support a ban on the killing and trade of whale
sharks in India as well as finding sustainable alternatives for the fishermen," says
Pandey. The Earth Matters Foundation set up by Pandey to create the preservation of
wildlife in their natural habitat began an awareness campaign to save the whale shark.
The campaign successfully got the hunting of this species banned worldwide.

Besides Pandey, several Indian filmmakers, including Anand Patwardhan, Sanjay Kak,
Amar Kanwar and Rakesh Sharma, have already carved a niche for themselves on the
international documentary stage. Award-winning Patwardhan's latest documentary,
War and Peace (2002), documents activist movements in South Asia since the 1998
nuclear tests in India and Pakistan. Patwardhan has been making documentary films
for the past 25 years about human rights issues in India, like street

dwellers in Bombay, the rise of religious fundamentalism and the negative impact of
globalization.

Kak has carved out a special niche in the echelon of experimental cinema, and his
films such as Land, My Land, England (1993), A House and a Home (1993), Geeli
Mitti (1985), A Matter of Choice, Harvest of Rain and One Weapon have received
awards as well as critical appreciation at film festivals in Paris, Fribourg, Hawaii and
Dhaka. His documentary In the Forest Hangs a

Bridge won the 1999 Margaret Mead Film Festival Documentary Film Award in the
US.

Kanwar, a recipient of a 1998 MacArthur Fellowship, was awarded the Golden Conch-
Best Film Award at the 1998 Mumbai International Documentary Film Festival for his
film A Season Outside. His next film, A Night of Prophecy (2002), was filmed in
several diverse regions of India and features music and poetry of tragedy and protest
performed by regional artists.

Sharma's Final Solution (2003) graphically documents the changing face of right wing
politics in India through a study of the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat. The film was
banned by the Indian censors, even though the film has been acclaimed at international
film festivals.

Other Indian films that have fared well on the international film festival circuit include
Rahul Roy's When Our Friends Meet, a film on male sexuality; Barf Snow, a film by
Saba Dewan, on trekking with slum girls; and Into the Abyss, Vandana Kohli's film on
depression, for which he won the RAPA 2003 award in India for Best Director.

The Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films
was launched in 1990 as a biennial competitive event and is organized by the Films
Division, in close cooperation with the State Government of Maharashtra. In this
festival, outstanding films in various categories are selected by an international jury for
Golden and Silver Conches and hefty cash prizes. The festival aims to serve as a
platform where the filmmakers of the world can meet and exchange ideas, explore the
possibility of co-production and market their films.

In August 2003 over 300 Indian documentary filmmakers came together to protest the
attempt by the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to make censor
certificates a mandatory precondition for Indian documentaries entered into the 2004
Mumbai International Film Festival. The documentary filmmaking community saw
through this apparently innocuous step, recognizing it as a part of a wider structure of
control and repression, where the rights to free speech, dissent and even creative
expression are increasingly coming under threat in India. In an unprecedented display
of collective resistance, filmmakers from across the country organized around the
Campaign Against Censorship, and were successful in forcing the ministry to drop its
attempts to introduce censor certification for the festival. The filmmakers then set in
motion Vikalp—Films for Freedom, an independent documentary film festival. After a
stopover at Bangalore, the celluloid caravan traveled on to Trivandrum, Chennai,
Delhi and Kolkata.

In the near future it seems there will be a documentary film made by an Indian
filmmaker screening at a theater near you....

In all cases, the ethical and aesthetic analysis of documentary form (see docufiction) of
the 1950s and 1960s has to be linked with a critical look at post-war propaganda
analysis. The best way to describe this type of cinema is probably to say that it is
concerned with notions of truth and reality in film. Also feminist documentary films of
the 1970s often used cinéma-vérité techniques. Soon this sort of 'realism' was
criticized for its deceptive pseudo-natural construction of reality.

As Edgar Morin wrote: "There are two ways to conceive of the cinema of the Real: the
first is to pretend that you can present reality to be seen; the second is to pose the
problem of reality. In the same way, there were two ways to conceive cinéma vérité.
The first was to pretend that you brought truth. The second was to pose the problem of
truth."

Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, invented by Jean Rouch,

inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda and influenced by Robert
Flaherty’s films. It combines improvisation with the use of the camera to unveil truth
or highlight subjects hidden behind crude reality.

Cinéma vérité , (French: “truth cinema”), French film movement of the 1960s that
showed people in everyday situations with authentic dialogue and naturalness of
action. Rather than following the usual technique of shooting sound and pictures
together, the film maker first tapes actual conversations, interviews, and opinions.
After selecting the best material, he films the visual material to fit the sound, often
using a hand-held camera. The film is then put together in the cutting room.

British documentaries in the 20th century, the neorealist movement of post-World War
II Italy, and the British “free” documentaries of the 1950s that dealt with the
significance of ordinary situations influenced the development of the French cinéma
vérité. The movement was criticized for too often degenerating into reportage rather
than artistic expression. Nevertheless, it continued the movement toward greater
realism in films and demonstrated a different approach to documentary film making.
Outstanding examples of French cinéma vérité are Jean Rouch’s Chronique d’un été
(1961; Chronicle of a Summer) and Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai (1962).
Cinéma vérité in relationship to direct cinema and observational cinema

It is sometimes called observational cinema, if understood as pure direct cinema:

mainly without a narrator's voice-over. There are subtle, yet important, differences
among terms expressing similar concepts. Direct Cinema is largely concerned with the
recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's
presence: operating within what Bill Nichols, an American historian and theoretician
of documentary film, calls the "observational mode", a fly on the wall. Many therefore
see a paradox in drawing attention away from the presence of the camera and
simultaneously interfering in the reality it registers when attempting to discover a
cinematic truth.

Cinéma vérité can involve stylized set-ups and the interaction between the filmmaker
and the subject, even to the point of provocation. Some argue that the obvious
presence of the filmmaker and camera was seen by most cinéma vérité filmmakers as
the best way to reveal the truth in cinema. The camera is always acknowledged, for it
performs the raw act of filming real objects, people, and events in a confrontational
way. The filmmaker's intention was to represent the truth in what he or she was seeing
as objectively as possible, freeing people from any deceptions in how those aspects of
life were formerly presented to them. From this perspective, the filmmaker should be
the catalyst of a situation. Few agree on the meanings of these terms, even the
filmmakers whose films are being described.

Pierre Perrault sets situations up and then films them, for example in Pour la suite du
monde (1963) where he asked old people to fish for whale. The result is not a
documentary about whale fishing; it is about memory and lineage. In this sense cinéma
vérité is concerned with anthropological cinema, and with the social and political
implications of what is captured on film. How a filmmaker shoots a film, what is being
filmed, what to do with what was filmed, and how that film will be presented to an
audience, all were very important for filmmakers of the time.

In all cases, the ethical and aesthetic analysis of documentary form (see docufiction) of
the 1950s and 1960s has to be linked with a critical look at post-war propaganda
analysis. The best way to describe this type of cinema is probably to say that it is
concerned with notions of truth and reality in film. Also feminist documentary films of
the 1970s often used cinéma-vérité techniques. Soon this sort of 'realism' was
criticized for its deceptive pseudo-natural construction of reality.

As Edgar Morin wrote: "There are two ways to conceive of the cinema of the Real: the
first is to pretend that you can present reality to be seen; the second is to pose the
problem of reality. In the same way, there were two ways to conceive cinéma vérité.
The first was to pretend that you brought truth. The second was to pose the problem of
truth."
Feminist Film Theory

Feminism is a social movement which has had an enormous impact on film theory and
criticism. Cinema is taken by feminists to be a cultural practice representing myths
about women and femininity, as well as about men and masculinity. Issues of
representation and spectatorship are central to feminist film theory and criticism. Early
feminist criticism was directed at stereotypes of women, mostly in Hollywood films
(Haskell 1973/1987, Rosen 1973). Such fixed and endlessly repeated images of
women were considered to be objectionable distortions which would have a negative
impact on the female spectator. Hence, the call for positive images of women in
cinema. Soon, however, the insight dawned that positive images were not enough to
change underlying structures in film. Feminist critics tried to understand the all-
pervasive power of patriarchal imagery with the help of structuralist theoretical
frameworks such as semiotics and psychoanalysis. These theoretical discourses have
proved very productive in analysing the ways in which sexual difference is encoded in
classical narrative.

History

The development of feminist film theory was influenced by second wave feminism
and women's studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Initially in the United States in the early
1970s feminist film theory was generally based on sociological theory and focused on
the function of female characters in film narratives or genres. Feminist film theory.

British feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey, best known for her essay, Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema, written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British
film theory journal, Screen[3] was influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and
Jacques Lacan. Visual Pleasure is one of the first major essays that helped shift the
orientation offilm theory towards a psychoanalytic framework. Prior to Mulvey, film
theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz used psychoanalytic ideas in
their theoretical accounts of cinema. Mulvey's contribution, however, initiated the
intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism.[4]

Essay on Importance of Music in Hindi Films!

The birth of the Indian film song may be traced to the advent of India’s first sound
motion picture in 1931. Between 1931 and 1940, India produced 931 Hindi feature
films with an average of 10 songs per film. The numbers for the regional films were
much lower, but the orientation towards music was similar.
In the 1930s, many of the original actors and actresses sang their own songs. Many
times, actors were chosen specifically for their singing abilities, such as Bal
Gandharva and Baburao Pendharkar. There was no concept of a ‘playback singer’ at
that time. Songs had to be recorded along with the shooting.

The entire orchestra used to be present at the shooting. Noorjahan, Suraiya, Surendra,
Ashok Kumar, M.S. Subbalakshmi and K.L. Sehgal were all actors and actresses who
could sing well. Noted music directors of the time were Pankaj Mullick, Keshavrao
Bhole, and Anil Biswas.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the business began to shift away from the big motion picture
studios to independent producers. New musicians and music directors emerged. The
distribution networks began to rely heavily on a certain number of songs, number of
dances, etc.

‘Formula’ music became the trend there were a certain number of songs, with a certain
set variety. The ‘playback’ singer was introduced. The earlier artists acted and sang,
but the movies of this period had actors who did not sign their own songs and instead
had other singers do this for them.

Film music derived its melodies from three diverse sources: Indian classical music,
folk music from different regions, and Western classical and popular music. Initial
music directors adapted and modified music from these sources to create a music
tradition suitable to the common man.

At this time, the use of the orchestra was minimal and the music director displayed his
musical abilities with the help of very few musical instruments. This did not, however,
take away from the music its melody and charm. R.C. Bora, Pankaj Mulick, K.L.
Sehgal, Kanan Devi, K.C. Dey, Pahari Sanyal, Saraswati Devi and Khem Chandra
Prakash were some of the greatest singers and music directors.
Many new and promising music directors emerged during the 1950s including Anil
Biswas, Vasant Desai, Naushad, C. Ramchandra, S.D. Burman, Jaidev, Madan Mohan,
Roshan, M.S. Baburaj, S. Bal Chander, Salil Choudhry, Bhupen Hazarika, Hemant
Kumar, P. Nageshwar Rao and Sudhir Phadke.

The role of the lyricists, who drew inspiration from poetry and literature, played a
major role in enriching the music of the time. Songs conveyed a meaning owing to
their rich lyrics. Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Shailendra, Kafi Azmi, Pradeep
and Gopal Das Neeraj were some of the leading lyricists of the 1950s.

Geeta Dutt, Talat Mehmood, Mukesh, Manna Dey were great singers who, in company
with the music directors and the lyricists, produced everlasting melodies. These singers
sang not only in Hindi and Urdu but in other Indian languages.

Music in Indian films is generally not conceived as an autonomous entity within itself,
but has to be intimately connected to the storyline. So songs and music were created in
accordance with the requirements of the film and were woven into the various
situations of the film. Much melodious music was produced. This is especially true of
the period 1950s- 1970s.

In the 1960s and 1970s there was relative stability. There was an ever increasing
standard of recording quality as technical advances were made. But playback singers
such as Lata Mangeshkar, Hemant Kumar, Asha Bhonsle, Kishore Kumar, and
Mohammad Rafi were the mainstay of the playback singing scene. Kalyanji Anandji,
R.D. Burman and Laxmikant- Pyarelal emerged as the talented and big music directors
in the two decades.

By the end of the 1970s, film music began losing its golden image. Romance and soft
emotions, fodder for good music in the films, received a setback in the popular films of
the 1980s. In trying to keep pace with life, softness and subtle nuances of music gave
way to fast, loud and orchestral forms.
R.D. Burman, Laxmikant-Pyarelal and Bappi Lahiri were some of the popular music
directors of the 1980s who tried to adapt their music to suit the new kind of films that
was emerging. At this time, under political and economic pressure, the television
began to open up to private productions. Such independent productions began to
adversely affect cinema attendance. It gave the music producers an alternative outlet
for their musical productions. Other factors affecting Indian film songs at the time
included problems within the Bombay (now, Mumbai) film world. For many decades,
Bombay (now, Mumbai) had monopolised the Hindi film industry. However, increased
cost of production, rising trade unionism and organised extortion rackets decimated
this industry.

The introduction of the VCR and the satellite/cable networks also impacted the film
Industry in the 1990s. Unlike the standard TV, the satellite/cable networks are all
private sector undertakings.

Overproduction of cinema houses coupled with ever- increasing entertainment taxes

have made it difficult for many theatre owners to survive in recent times. This has
shaken the distribution networks even though multiplexes have came up in big cities.

Today, Hindi film music or filmy sangeet is not as well-defined as it once was. Songs
do not fit the context of the scenes in the film any longer. A song and dance sequence
is introduced just for the sake of introducing it: to appeal to the masses and rake in the
moolah.

Over the last few decades Bollywood producers have been releasing the film’s
soundtrack, as tapes or CDs, before the main movie release, hoping that the music will
pull audiences into the cinema later.

Often the soundtrack is more popular than the movie. Some producers have also been
releasing music videos, usually featuring a song or songs from the film. However,
some promotional videos feature songs which are not included in the movie. This is
done for publicity.

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA

In 1929, the year it was released, films had an average shot length (ASL) of 11.2
seconds. "Man With a Movie Camera" had an ASL of 2.3 seconds. The ASL of
Michael Bay's "Armageddon" was -- also 2.3 seconds. Why would I begin a discussion
of a silent classic by discussing such a mundane matter? It helps to understand the
impact the film made at the time. Viewers had never seen anything like it, and
Mordaunt Hall, the horrified author of the New York Times review, wrote: "The
producer, Dziga Vertof, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye
fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention." This reminds me of
Harry Carey's advice in 1929 to John Wayne, as the talkies were coming in: "Stop
halfway through every sentence. The audience can't listen that fast."
"Man With a Movie Camera" is fascinating for many better reasons than its ASL, but
let's begin with the point Dziga Vertof was trying to make. He felt film was locked into
the tradition of stage plays, and it was time to discover a new style that was
specifically cinematic. Movies could move with the speed of our minds when we are
free-associating, or with the speed of a passionate musical composition. They did not
need any dialogue--and indeed, at the opening of the film he pointed out that it had no
scenario, no intertitles, and no characters. It was a series of images, and his notes
specified a fast-moving musical score.
There was an overall plan. He would show 24 hours in a single day of a Russian city.
It took him four years to film this day, and he worked in three cities: Moscow, Kiev
and Odessa. His wife Yelizaveta Svilova supervised the editing from about 1,775
separate shots -- all the more impressive because most of the shots consisted of
separate set-ups. The cinematography was by his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, who
refused to ever work with him again. (Vertov was born Denis Kaufman, and worked
under a name meaning "spinning top." Another brother, Boris Kaufman, immigrated to
Hollywood and won an Oscar for filming "On the Waterfront.")
Born in 1896 and coming of age during the Russian Revolution, Vertov considered
himself a radical artist in a decade where modernism and surrealism were gaining
stature in all the arts. He began by editing official newsreels, which he assembled into
montages that must have appeared rather surprising to some audiences, and then
started making his own films. He would invent an entirely new style. Perhaps he did.
"It stands as a stinging indictment of almost every film made between its release in
1929 and the appearance of Godard’s 'Breathless' 30 years later," the critic Neil
Young wrote, "and Vertov’s dazzling picture seems, today, arguably the fresher of the
two." Godard is said to have introduced the "jump cut," but Vertov's film is entirely
jump cuts.
There is a temptation to review the simply by listing what you will see in it.
Machinery, crowds, boats, buildings, production line workers, streets, beaches,
crowds, hundreds of individual faces, planes, trains, automobiles, and so on. But these
shots have an organizing pattern. "Man With a Movie Camera" opens with an empty
cinema, its seats standing at attention. The seats swivel down (by themselves), and an
audience hurries in and fills them. They begin to look at a film. This film. And this
film is about--this film being made.
The only continuing figure -- not a "character" -- is the Man With the Movie Camera.
He uses an early hand-cracked model, smaller than the one Buster Keaton uses in "The
Cameraman" (1928), although even that one is light enough to be balanced on the
shoulder with its tripod. This Man is seen photographing many of the shots in the
movie. Then there are shots of how he does it--securing the tripod and himself to the
top of an automobile or the bed of a speeding truck, stooping to walk through a coal
mine, hanging in a basket over a waterfall. We see a hole being dug between two train
tracks, and later a train racing straight towards the camera. We're reminded that when
the earliest movie audiences saw such a shot, they were allegedly terrified, and ducked
down in their seats.
Intercut with this are shots of this film being edited. The machinery. The editor. The
physical film itself. Sometimes the action halts with a freeze frame, and we see that the
editor has stopped work. But that's later--placing it right after the freeze frame would
seem too much like continuity. If there is no continuity, there is a gathering rhythmic
speed that reaches a crescendo nearer the end. The film has shot itself,

Outline, Synopsis, or Treatment: Do You Know The Difference?

Let’s tackle the definition of an outline first. What is an outline? An outline is

normally the first thing I write. When I have a story idea in my head, I’ll take pen to
paper (or fingers to keyboard) and write down the key plot points in my story. I don’t
normally have the entire story worked out in my head yet, but I do have an idea of
story arc and character arc. This is what I focus on when writing an outline.

The outline is an attempt to keep me on track with the story I want to write. If you’re a
seasoned writer you are well aware that once you begin writing a story your characters
will often decide to take you in a different direction then you initially intended.
Sometimes the story you thought you were going to write turns out to be something
different altogether. Sure, there’ll be some resemblances to your original outline. The
theme and original plot may stay intact, but often times (at least for me) the characters
will take you on a few detours and get you to the heart of what you really wanted to
write.

In television the outline is usually referred to as a “beat sheet.” A beat sheet is the
breakdown of each scene into its major beats. A beat is a significant moment in a
scene. I try to make sure that each scene has at least three beats. There may be other
moments that happen in this scene, but those significant moments are what you want to
focus on when writing your beat sheet.

What is a synopsis? A synopsis is a one paragraph to one page description of the

overall premise of your film or show. Think of it as an extended logline. It’s what is
used to describe your film/show on a one-sheet (a one-sheet is what you leave behind
after a pitch). Within the one-sheet will be one solid paragraph that fully captures the
core idea of your script. Often times, those that are not as familiar with the term, will
confuse a synopsis with a treatment.

What’s a treatment? A treatment can be anywhere from two or three pages to 30 or

more pages. It’s basically a short story version of your script. It’s written in present
tense and in active voice just as you would write a script. It’s a much more detailed

version of an outline. Sometimes an outline will consist of just bullet points and brief
explanations of those bullet points. The treatment is written out in story format. It’s
very rare that you’ll have a producer ask you for a treatment. If you do, make sure that
it’s written superbly. It’s extremely unusual for a script to be purchased off of a
treatment. If you can’t sell them on the pitch it’s highly unlikely that you’ll sell them
with the treatment.

So an outline is basically notes for the writer; a tool used to keep your on course to tell
your story. Often written with bullet points, but can be written with more detail. I
treatment is very similar, but with much more detail and written more as a short story.
A synopsis is an extension of the logline. It covers the basic premise of your script in a
paragraph up to one page. The outline should never be seen by anyone other than the
writer. The first treatment (the extended outline) should never be seen by anyone other
the writer. If a producer asks you for one, write a new one specifically for him/her and
make it your best work. The synopsis is often used in the one-sheet and will be seen by
you, the producers, and sometimes (not often) by the public. And there you have it. I
hope that clears some things up for you. Until next week, happy writing.

Dziga Vertov - Dziga Vertov, pseudonym of Denis Arkadyevich Kaufman, (born

Jan. 2, 1896 [Dec. 21, 1895, Old Style], Belostok, Russia—died Feb. 12,
1954, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.), Soviet motion-picture director whose kino-
glaz (“film-eye”) theory—that the camera is an instrument, much like the human eye,
that is best used to explore the actual happenings of real life—had an international
impact on the development of documentaries and cinema realism during the 1920s. He
attempted to create a unique language of the cinema, free from theatrical influence and
artificial studio staging.
As a newsreel cameraman during the Russian Civil War, Vertov filmed events that
were the basis for such factual films as Godovshchina revolyutsii (1919; The
Anniversary of the October Revolution) and Boi pod Tsaritsynom (1920; Battle of
Tsaritsyn). At age 22 he was the director of a government cinema department. The
following year he formed the Kinoki (the Film-Eye Group), which subsequently issued
a series of manifestos against theatricalism in films and in support of Vertov’s film-eye
theory. In 1922 the group, led by Vertov, initiated a weekly newsreel called Kino-
pravda (“Film Truth”) that creatively integrated newly filmed factual material and
older news footage.
The subject matter of Vertov’s later feature films is life itself; form and technique are
preeminent. Vertov experimented with slow motion, camera angles, enlarged close-
ups, and crosscutting for comparisons; he attached the camera to locomotives,
motorcycles, and other moving objects; and he held shots on the screen for varying
lengths of time, a technique that contributes to the rhythmic flow of his films.
Outstanding among Vertov’s pictures are Shagay, Sovyet! (1925; Stride,
Soviet!), Shestaya chast mira (1926; A Sixth of the World), Odinnadtsatyi (1928; The
Eleventh), Chelovek s kinoapparatom (1928; The Man with a Movie
Camera), Simfoniya Donbassa (1930; Symphony of the Donbass), and Tri pesni o
Lenine (1934; Three Songs of Lenin). Vertov later became a director in the Soviet
Union’s Central Documentary Film Studio. His work and his theories became basic to
the rediscovery of cinéma vérité, or documentary realism, in the 1960s.

Pan
Panning is when the camera is moved horizontally from one side to another on a
central axis. This is a rotating movement in which the camera’s position remains in
place, but the direction that it faces changes. It can be used to follow a moving
character or to fit more into a frame, for example, panning across a landscape to create
a sense of place.

Tilt
Tilting is similar to panning in that the camera is kept in a stationary position, but
unlike panning (which looks from side to side) tilting focuses on upwards &
downwards movements. Using a tilting motion helps to fit more into a single frame. A
slow upwards tilt can be very effective in making a subject appear bigger or more
significant while a downwards tilt has the opposite effect.
Dolly

A dolly shot is when the entire camera is mounted on a track and is moved towards or
away from a subject. Unlike a zoom shot, the world around the subject moves with the
camera. A dolly gives the illusion that the viewer is walking towards the subject and
can be a great way of creating a sense of intimacy between them.
Zoom

Probably the most well-known camera move, zooming gives the impression of moving
closer or further away from the subject. It can be used effectively to magnify a certain
focus point in the frame, but other moves such as a dolly, are a more natural way to
show movement. While a quick zoom can help add a sense of drama and energy when
used correctly, avoid over-using zoom as your default move.

Establishing shot
Often included at the beginning of a scene, the establishing shot helps to build
ambiance and may give a nod towards the context of what’s to come. It generally
comes in the form of a long shot and indicates where (and sometimes when) the scene
is taking place.

Medium shot
Also known as the ¾ shot, the medium shot typically shows the subject from the knees
up. It allows the viewer to see the background environment and the character’s
gestures, while still being close enough to capture their emotions.

Close shot
With a close shot, the subject’s head/face takes up the majority of the frame and
therefore, allows their reactions and emotions to dictate the scene. The subject
becomes the prominent focus and helps the audience build a personal connection,
without being distracted by background interferences.

Extreme close shot

An extreme close shot is so close that only one specific detail, such as a person’s eyes
or mouth, can be seen. Because of the unnaturally close nature of the shot, it should be
used sparingly, but when used appropriately, an ECS can be incredibly effective at
adding drama to a scene. It allows the viewer to see details that may have otherwise
gone unnoticed and can really accentuate the emotions that the subject is experiencing.

Over the shoulder shot

This type of shot is taken from behind the shoulder of another character and typically
frames the subject in a medium or close shot. It is particularly effective in group
conversation scenes and helps establish which characters are speaking to each other.
Two shot
A two shot presents two characters together within the same frame. It’s a natural
means of introducing both people and can be used to shed light on their relationship
with one another. Different variations of the two shot can be applied to deliver
different messages about the characters. For example, when characters are positioned
next to each other, it may give the impression that they have equal prominence within
the scene.

Point of view shot

The point of view shot, also known as the POV shot, depicts an angle that shows what
a character is looking at. This type of shot allows the viewer to take on the perspective
of the character and begin to understand their state of mind on a more personal level.

Battleship Potemkin, Russian Bronenosets Potyomkin, Soviet silent film, released

in 1925, that was director Sergey M. Eisenstein’s tribute to the early Russian
revolutionaries and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of international cinema.
The film is based on the mutiny of Russian sailors against their tyrannical superiors
aboard the battleship Potemkin during the Revolution of 1905. Their victory was short-
lived, however, as during their attempts to get the population of Odessa (now in
Ukraine) to launch a massive revolution, Cossacks arrived and laid waste to the
insurgents, thus fanning the winds of war that would ultimately lead to the rise
of communism in the Revolution of 1917.
Although agitational to the core, Battleship Potemkin is a work of extraordinary
pictorial beauty and great elegance of form. It is symmetrically broken into five
movements or acts. In the first of these, “Men and Maggots,” the flagrant mistreatment
of the sailors at the hands of their officers is demonstrated, while the second, “Drama
on the Quarterdeck,” presents the actual mutiny and the ship’s arrival in Odessa.
“Appeal from the Dead” establishes the solidarity of the citizens of Odessa with the
mutineers.
It is the fourth sequence, “The Odessa Steps,” which depicts the massacre of the
citizens, that thrust Eisenstein and his film into the historical eminence that both
occupy today. It is unquestionably the most famous sequence of its kind in film
history, and Eisenstein displays his legendary ability to convey large-scale action
scenes. The shot of the baby carriage tumbling down the long staircase has been re-
created in many films, including Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987). The
sequence’s power is such that the film’s conclusion, “Meeting the Squadron,” in which
the Potemkinin a show of brotherhood is allowed to pass through the squadron
unharmed, is anticlimactic.
“The Odessa Steps” incarnates the theory of dialectical montage that Eisenstein later
expounded in his collected writings, The Film Sense (1942) and Film Form (1949).
Eisenstein believed that meaning in motion pictures is generated by the collision of
 opposing shots. Building on the ideas of Soviet film theorist Lev Kuleshov, Eisenstein
reasoned that montage operates according to the Marxist view of history as a perpetual
conflict in which a force (thesis) and a counterforce (antithesis) collide to produce a
totally new and greater phenomenon (synthesis). He compared this dialectical process
in film editing to “the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving
forward its automobile or tractor.” The force of “The Odessa Steps” arises when the
viewer’s mind combines individual, independent shots and forms a new,
distinct conceptual impression that far outweighs the shots’ narrative significance.
Through Eisenstein’s accelerated manipulations of filmic time and space, the slaughter
on the stone steps—where hundreds of citizens find themselves trapped between
descending tsarist militia above and Cossacks below—acquires a powerful symbolic
meaning. With the addition of a stirring revolutionary score by the German Marxist
composer Edmund Meisel, the agitational appeal of Battleship Potemkin became
nearly irresistible; when the film was exported in early 1926, it made Eisenstein world-
famous. Ironically, the film was eventually banned by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin over
fears it might incite a riot against his regime.

AFTER YOU WATCH THE MOVIE

The window of time immediately following the viewing is critical. Since I don’t take a
lot of notes during the movie, one of the most important aspects of writing a critique is
to stay focused and write down all of the things that stood out to me about the film.
And since collecting my thoughts after seeing a movie can be chaotic, I need to be sure
that I jot down everything that struck my radar as soon as it’s over. It’s better to get it
all down on paper, and then evaluate what’s necessary to convey to the reader later.
Being precise in your commentary and incorporating specific examples from the
movie to back up your opinions is key.

This is where the checklist comes into play. When I write a review, I do my best to
cover all aspects of filmmaking that went into creating the final product, including:

• Plot: What was the movie about? Was it believable? Interesting? Thought-
provoking? How was the climax revealed? How did the setting affect the story?
•
Themes and Tone: What was the central goal of the movie? Was it made to
entertain, educate, or bring awareness to an issue? Was there any strong impression the
movie made on you? Did any symbolism come into play?
• Acting and Characters: Did you like how the characters were portrayed? Did
the acting support the characters, and help them come to life? Did the characters
 display complex personalities or were they stereotypes? Were there characters that
embodied certain archetypes to enhance or diminish the film?
•
• Direction: Did you like how the director chose to tell the story? Was the pacing
and speed of the movie too fast or too slow? Was the direction comparable to other
movies this director has created? Was the storytelling complex or straightforward?
Was there a certain amount of suspense or tension that worked? Did the director create
a captivating conflict?
• Score: Did the music support the mood of the movie? Was it too distracting or
too subtle? Did it add to the production and work well with the script? Were the music
queues timed well for the scenes they were supporting?
• Cinematography: Were the shots used in a unique way to tell the story? Did the
coloring and lighting affect the tone? Was the action coherently shot? How well did
the camera move? Were actors or settings framed well?
• Production Design: Did the sets feel lived-in and believable to the story or
characters? Were the costumes suitable for the characters or story? Did the created
environments heighten the atmosphere on camera?
• Special Effects: Were the special effects believable? Did they align with the era
and tone of the movie? Were the effects overboard or too subtle? Did they integrate
well to the purpose of the story?
• Editing: Was the editing clean or choppy? Was the flow consistent? What
unique effects were used? How were the transitions between scenes?
• Pace: Did the movie flow well? Was it too fast or too slow? Was it clearly
organized? Did certain scenes drag down the movie?
• Dialogue: Were the conversations believable or necessary? Did the dialogue
bring context to plot developments? Did the words match the tone of the movie and
personality of the characters?
Let’s take the special effects as an example. I want to evaluate them based on utility,
use within the film, and obviously how well it looks on screen. When I saw Mad Max:
Fury Road, I was blown away with all the practical effects and how everything served
a purpose to the story. It looked like everything was well crafted and built with love to
develop such a brilliantly inspired wasteland.
On the other side of the coin, the Transformers movies, as detailed as the robots look,
most of the time while I was watching the movies, I felt like I was watching a jumbled
mess of computer animated metal smashing into each other. It didn’t look stimulating.
You want the special effects to complement the story rather than just being used as a
visual device.
FILM A POWERFUL VISUAL MEDIUM

Film is considered as an important art form, it is not just a popular source of

entertainment but also a powerful medium for educating or indoctrinating people.
Therefore, making a film is an art and now-a-days it has taken a shape of an industry.
Films reflect specific cultures thus considered as cultural artifacts and hence in turn
affect people belonging to that culture.

The visual basis of film gives it a universal power of communication. Keeping this in
mind V M Art Gallery, Karachi in collaboration with Visual Studies Department of
Karachi University presented a group show titled "Lights, Art and ...Action!" This
exhibition was the opening event of the Pakistan Calling Film Festival.

"Film has proved to be a wonderful and forceful means of entertainment and

amusement. A powerful cultural and political visual tool, film has the power to
influence the minds of millions and has changed societies and established social trends
for generations," said curator of the exhibition Munawar Ali Syed. Beside an
independent curator he is an active visual artist and art educationist. The exhibition has
taken viewers through the artistic reel of film while exploring different mediums from
drawings, paintings, sculptures, digital prints, videos to installations. The works of
fifty artists who have come together for the first Pakistan Calling Film Festival 2016
has been exhibited.

"Lights, Art...and Action!" has created an opportunity for artists to channel the power
of film through their art. Most of the artists used different mediums and styles to create
individual images that make up a film while others projected the famous frames of
blockbuster movies. Expressions, emotions, romance and Nature are the focus of
artists - the most talked about subjects of our films. Some paintings discovered a few
horror films made by our film industry.

The artworks were reflective and sensitive. The striking compositions of paintings
depicted women lost in this degenerated world losing their identities and becoming a
part of this social system, living their scattered lives unwillingly. While in other
posters women seemed to be the strongest entity of our social structure.

Each artist's skills can be judged by the diversity of images, colours and confident
strokes in their paintings and bold and sharp lines in the drawings. They rendered
emotions and fervor with fresh and unique compositions of old film posters, which are
skillfully created.

The characters and subjects diffused with each other in the paintings creating an aura
of mystery between past and present. A painting of actress Zeba with actor Wheed
Murad, a most loveable and bankable on-screen couple of 60s and 70s has an abstract
background and a lady showing curiosity about the actors showed a connection of the
present world with the past.

The artists got attracted by the fabulous lifestyle of those times. Therefore, they
decided to highlight our relationship to the past. They have done figurative descriptive
paintings of posters to enhance the importance of cultural heritage in our lives.

The colourful posters supported the Pakistan Calling Film Festival which is "an
initiative designed to give independent and student filmmakers the opportunity to
showcase their work in a space that celebrates and enables their cinematic creativity."

The Post-Production Workflow

The post-production phase begins with the raw source footage and ends with a
completed movie, ready for making distribution copies. As technology evolves, post-
production continues to proliferate into an increasing variety of jobs and tasks. Where
there was once a single editor who was responsible for the majority of the post-
production process, there may now be a whole special effects team, an audio
department, a colorist (responsible for color correction), and a number of assistant
editors keeping track of all the footage. Final Cut Pro is at the heart of the post-
production pipeline, allowing you to organize and assemble media from multiple
sources into a finished product.

Here is an overview of the basic Final Cut Pro post-production workflow. As you
begin your project, remember that there are no hard and fast rules for editing. Different
editors have different working styles and, given the same source material, no two
editors will cut the same finished program. The workflow described here offers just
one example of how you might approach a typical project.
1. Stage 1: Planning

Planning is where you choose your basic workflow, such as offline and online editing
(for projects with a lot of media) or editing the uncompressed footage (for shorter
projects with

quick turnaround times); choose input and output formats; and plan for equipment
requirements (such as hard disk space), timecode and sync requirements, effects shots
and color correction, audio mixing requirements, and so on.

Planning for post-production primarily means preparing for each of the upcoming
post- production phases: choosing input and output formats; acquiring your original
footage, music, and graphics; deciding on a logging and capturing method; choosing
an editing strategy; and planning the scope of effects you will be adding so you can
determine how much time and support you will need to dedicate to them.

2. Stage 2: Setting Up

In this phase, you set up your editing system by installing and connecting the hardware
you need, as well as configuring your software. For example, before logging and
ingesting, you need to connect your computer either to the video and audio from your
camcorder or VTR (video tape recorder) or to a device containing your file-based
media. You also need to make sure that the correct presets are chosen within Final Cut
Pro, so that Final Cut Pro knows what video and audio formats you are capturing and
what kind of device control you’re using. (Device control allows Final Cut Pro to
remotely control video and audio devices.)

Depending on the format and device you are using, setup can be fairly simple (as it is
with DV formats) or more complex. For example, if you are working with an
uncompressed video format, you need to install a third-party video interface in your
computer, as well as a serial port adapter to communicate with the deck.

For more information, see the various chapters on setup, starting with Connecting DV
Video Equipment.

3. Stage 3: Ingesting

Ingesting is a general term for capturing, transferring, or importing video, audio, still
images, and metadata to your computer’s hard disk, which creates media files. You
can ingest media files at any time, although most footage should be ingested before
you start editing.

Logging is the process of identifying which shots you want to ingest for editing. While
you log, you can add scene and shot descriptions, logging notes, and markers. Logging
also helps you become familiar with your footage before you begin editing.

The order in which you log and ingest your footage is up to you. There are several
possible workflows, depending upon your work style, the needs of your project, and
the availability of footage. You can log all or most clips before batch ingesting them
(in an automated way), or you can log and then ingest each clip individually. You can
also log clips after ingesting your footage to a hard disk.

For more information, see Overview of Capturing Tape-Based Media, Overview of

Transferring File-Based Media, and Importing Media Files into Your Project.

4. Stage 4: Editing

The editing process involves taking the video and audio you’ve captured, along with
any music or graphics you’ve imported, and arranging these raw materials into a final
edited sequence of clips. Most editors start with a rough cut, where they quickly
arrange all of the clips for a movie in sequence. Once that’s finished, they work on
fine-tuning, subtly adjusting the edit points between clips and refining the pacing of
each cut. Basic audio editing and synchronizing are also part of this process, as well as
adding transitions, such as fades and dissolves.

Often, the type of project you’re working on determines your method of editing. For
example, documentary editing, in which the script often evolves in parallel with the
editing, is quite different from commercial television and film editing, in which there
is already a finished script to provide an order for clips.

5. Stage 5: Mixing Audio

Once your movie is edited and the picture is “locked,” meaning the duration of the
movie is fixed and you no longer intend to change any of the edits, you can begin
working more extensively on your audio. This involves:
• Cleaning up the dialogue with more detailed audio editing, balancing audio levels,
and applying equalization

• Adding sound effects, music, and voiceover on additional audio tracks in the
sequence

• Mixing the levels of all the different clips together to create a balanced sound mix

You can use Final Cut Pro for each of these processes. For more information, see
Audio Fundamentals.

Note: You can also sweeten your audio with another audio application, perhaps even
at another facility. To export your movie audio, see Exporting Audio for Mixing in
Other Applications.

6. Stage 6: Adding Effects

Creating effects tends to be more time-consuming than cuts-only editing, so it’s good
to focus on basic edits first and work on effects when the timing of your project is
finalized. Effects are any enhancements you want to make to your footage, such as
color correction, special transitions, animation, still or motion graphics, multilayered
images (compositing), and titles. Final Cut Pro has a wide variety of video and audio
filters, each with parameters that you can keyframe to adjust over time in your
sequence. You can also create professional titles and motion graphics in Motion.

7. Stage 7: Finishing and Outputting

Once editing is finished, effects are added, and the final audio mix is complete, you
can output your movie to videotape or export your sequence to Compressor or send it
to Color for finishing. You can also use Share to quickly create and deliver output
media files in iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, MobileMe, DVD, Blu-ray Disc, and YouTube
formats.

• To output to tape, follow the standard procedures for using the Print to Video
command. For more information, see Preparing to Output to Tape.

• For more information about sending to Color, see the Color User Manual, available
in Color Help.

• For more information about Share, see Using Share.

• For more information about Compressor, see the Compressor User Manual, available
in Compressor Help.

If you need to finish your project on a different editing workstation, you can export
your project to an interchange file format such as Edit Decision List (EDL) or Final
Cut Pro XML Interchange Format. You may need to output on another system if you
work with uncompressed video, do lots of real-time effects processing, or require
specialized video monitoring. For more information, see Using Final Cut Pro XML
and QuickTime Metadata. You can also refer to Offline and Online Editing.