Filmmaking
Short Course Session I
A Brief History of
Cinema
FILM
• A thin flexible strip of plastic or other material coated
with light-sensitive emulsion for exposure in a camera,
used to produce photographs or motion pictures.
• A story or event recorded by a camera as a set of
moving images and shown in a cinema or on television.
Persistence of Vision
The retention of a visual image for a short
period of time after the removal of the stimulus that
produced it: the phenomenon that produces the
illusion of movement when viewing motion pictures.
Camera Obscura
The Zoetrope
Louis Daguerre
Daguerreotype
The First Photographic Film
George Eastman
Creates a method of capturing images on paper rather
than metal.
A method which required a much lesser requirement for
harsh chemicals to develop the image.
Muybridge Motion Studies
Étienne-Jules Marey
Thomas Edison
W.K.L Dickson
Kinetoscope
Kinetograph
The First Film Studio
Black Maria
The First Films
1890-1896
Lumiere Brothers
Cinématographe
Life of an American Fireman
1903
George Méliès
1888–1923
D. W. Griffith
Birth of a Nation
Color
• Early color films were painstakingly hand tinted, toned
and stenciled.
Technicolor
The early Technicolor processes from 1915 onwards
were cumbersome and expensive, and colour was not
used more widely until the introduction of its three‑colour
process in 1932.
Sound
The Jazz Singer (1927)
The Golden Age (1930s – 1940s)
During the 1930s and 1940s, cinema was the
principal form of popular entertainment, with people
often attending cinemas twice a week. Ornate ’super’
cinemas or ‘picture palaces’, offering extra facilities such
as cafés and ballrooms, came to towns and cities; many
of them could hold over 3,000 people in a single
auditorium.
Film Language
Visual Storytelling
Film Language
Framing
Angles
Movement
SHOTS
SEQUENCES
SCENES
FILMS
FRAMING
Wide Shot (WS)
Medium Shot (MS)
Close – up (CU)
Building a Visual Sequence
ANGLE
Low Angle
High Angle
Birds Eye
Tilt/Dutch
Over the Shoulder
Two-Shot
MOVEMENT
Pan & Tilt
Tracking
The Filmmaking
Workflow
The Filmmaking Workflow
Pre-production
Production
Post-production
Pre-Production
Scripting & Storyboarding
Getting organized
Locations (Recce included)
Organizing Talent
Be thorough
Production
The Shoot
Executing all planned shots.
Lighting/Framing/Composition
B-Roll
Post-Production
The Edit
Color/Graphics/Music/SFX
Putting the story together.
Telling a Story
Conveying Emotion
Story
Cinematic Storytelling
The Story Telling Process
The Power of film is in its ability to tell a story and to
elevate a story to communicate emotion.
Idea & Development
Conceiving the idea.
Understanding themes and purpose.
Telling a story visually
Story
Narrative Cinema
Narrative
The Plot
What is a Narrative?
A narrative is a series of events that are linked together
in several ways Including cause and effect, time and
place. Something that happens in the first event causes
the action in the second event, and soon, usually moving
forward in time.
Structure
Three Act Structure
First Act The Beginning The Setup
Second Act The Middle
Confrontation
Third Act The End Resolution
Three Act Structure
The Hero’s Journey
The Monomyth
Character
Driving your story forward
Writing Character
What is the characters background?
What motivates the characters actions?
Creating a relatable character
Objective
Intention and Obstacle
Intention and Obstacle
Create a sense of urgency.
The Intention will motivate the action/resolve needed to
overcome the Obstacle.
Log Line
A logline is a brief (one or two sentence) summary of a
movie that hooks the reader and describes the central
conflict of the story.
A seventeen-year-old aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist
aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic.
“A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true
nature of his reality and his role in the war against its controllers.”
One Page Synopsis
Beginning - Middle - End
Story - Narrative - Theme - Character - Objective
Exercise
• A series of 10 still Images using your phone camera.
• Apply concepts of shot and sequence covered in class
with the appropriate use of film language.
• Create a pdf or a presentation with the sequence
of images in the correct order ending with the
complete sequence as a grid (as shown in the
next slide).
• Try your best to have them sent to me before class.
Building a Visual Sequence
