Eldon Booth

Eldon Booth, 9, Oct., 2009

Eldon now is doing an collaborative work with Juddy Darrah and Deborah Crowe. In the beginning of his talk, he mentioned about film convention. And some introduction related to the film field and skills which I would like to make assortment and put into my categories. Genres
Genres are formed by sets of conventions. Sometimes the iconography in the fil m that inform us of the genre. Like Westerns usually have good and bad cowboys. The film genres are assorted into comedy, action, foreign, children, family, western, music, war, thriller, romance, horror, drama, China town, documentary….and so on which I learnt after surfing from Video shop.
Convention
‘Cconvention’, meaning the way in which something is “usually” done. We can identify recurring elements with regard to narrative themes,characters, plots, sound and visual content(iconography)
The convention of ‘China Town’ just likes the movie “Chinatown’, the film was full of power struggles, a sense of darkness and helplessness
The continuity editing
Also called as ‘Chronological Editing’, logically move camera, not sudden. One event follows naturally on another. A story from start to end continuously happens. It is a linea of movement. Seamlessness is a key effect of continuity editing.
Cross cutting
The camera will cut away from one action to another action. The shots occur one after another, cross cutting is used for different actions happen in the same time. Cross Cutting was created by “Birth of Nation by D.W. Griffith-Trailer(1915)
The Kuleshov Effect
1910 and 1920 Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. The viewer brought their own emotional reaction and attribute to actor.
Montage(French word means putting together)
Image A, image B without any relationship, bring them together and create a third meaning. Montage is seen to operate in several ways, opposite colors, light and rhythmic tonal. Sergei Eisenstein was known as the father of Montage. It’s amazing that Eisensten used the creative Montage method to combine the scenes to make the film with special meaning in it. The movie“Battleship Potemkin” in 1920. Sergei Eisenstein noted that montage is “the nerve of cinema” and that to “to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema”.

With reviewing the contextual content from Rebecca’s moving image which we just completed last term, I had a further understanding about movie making. It is related a conventional drawing, the illusion of reality -the form is visible, using editing techniques to do camera editing, cut and paste format.

Eldon Booth’s representative documentary film-“Withdrawal” , 2001 and “Five Good Reasons”, 2006
In “Withdrawal”, I find the use of two two frame within the picture very appealing as a device that raises the viewer awareness the editing and the filmmaking process The contrast living style from the environment between an elderly man and a young people.“Five Good Reasons”, a long dialogues between 2 characters, a man seeks his identification for his thoughts and observation on society. Focusing on stories relating to the human condition and social concerns in New Zealand communities.

I just learnt very basic concept and editing techniques from Rebecca. It was challenging for me especially using the film editing with the software of Premier. During only 5 weeks course, I had a refreshing idea about film making. Film making is a fantastic creation as an art form. Comparing Elton’s 2 short film, obviously, the later one had much professional editing. The indentification, I might experiment to depict indigenous images into my practice from my culture. I would be mostly based on the visual imagery rather than the thinking of identification. The work I intend to focus on the impact of the visual effect instead of the implied meaning of identification.