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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3962 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski Book Club Info + flag is extremely impressed with Watchmen

So to continue my flawed analogy, a storyboard is going to have way more "pages" than a graphic novel of the same material would? But, if you feel like answering another question, how do you decide which shot gets a storyboard frame? Surely you can't account for every single different frame of a movie, too labor intensive.





kleinbl00  ·  3962 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    So to continue my flawed analogy, a storyboard is going to have way more "pages" than a graphic novel of the same material would?

Way more. Every time you see a cut in a movie, there's a frame of storyboard.

    But, if you feel like answering another question, how do you decide which shot gets a storyboard frame?

Simple. Every single goddamn one.

    Surely you can't account for every single different frame of a movie, too labor intensive.

No, but you get every single shot. As in, every single time we put the camera somewhere else, every single time we roll and then cut.

I don't think the White People Edition has it, but the Chinese and Japanese DVDs for Spirited Away include an alternate video track - the animatics of the film. That's the storyboards, timed out and presented as video. It was kinda trippy when I saw it, because my Chinese DVD defaulted to video track 2 for some reason. I thought it was a decidedly low-fi Miyazaki, but still pretty cool. I had to watch the first 20 minutes over again when I figured it out.

user-inactivated  ·  3962 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Any idea how many times the camera cuts in the average Spielberg film, say?

kleinbl00  ·  3962 days ago  ·  link  ·  

No idea. You can extrapolate, though - here's a nice representative clip from Jurassic Park. I count 8 shots in the first minute. It's 127 minutes long, of which probably 8 minutes or so are credits'n'shit. Spitballing, we're talking around a thousand shots.

Compare and contrast, though - here's Tony Scott's *Domino.* there's a dozen shots in 30 seconds. If you had to storyboard that shit (all 127 minutes - what a coinkidink!) you'd be looking at around three thousand shots.

Fortunately, Tony Scott didn't storyboard shit. He brought three or four cameras, pointed them all over the place, shot the fuck out of everything and then gave it in a bucket to his editors and said "turn this into a movie." Crimson Tide was shot with four cameras simultaneously and the editor had to turn over 240 hours of footage into a 2-hour movie. Michael Mann did nine cameras on some shots of Miami Vice. So you don't exactly get a one-to-one.

user-inactivated  ·  3962 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Interesting. Thanks for answering.

b_b  ·  3962 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hitchcock made a movie, Rope, with exactly 9 cuts, each one only because the film he was using came in 10 minute reels. If you watch it, you will count 4 cuts, the other 5 are disguised with close ups on dark objects such as a man's suit.

Edit: I guess technically it's 10 cuts, since the end of the movie is a cut. But maybe I'm just splitting hairs.

kleinbl00  ·  3962 days ago  ·  link  ·  

And Russian Arc was done without cuts.

I also worked on a no-cut movie. It was kinda fun. Wasn't very good, though.

b_b  ·  3962 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Funny that you mention that movie, because I just recently heard of it the other day. They are screening it soon at the Detroit Film Theater, which is the theater associated with the Detroit Institute of Art. I read about it in their flyer, and I plan to see it. Funny the way you avoid something in your consciousness for years then come across it multiple times in a short span. That seems to happen a lot. Maybe it's a matter of just paying attention.

elizabeth  ·  3962 days ago  ·  link  ·  
user-inactivated  ·  3962 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Is it bad that I've seen Rope multiple times and never particularly noticed the lack of cuts? Hitchcock was a master.