Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Yes, Bill, you’re perfectly right in saying that directness of engagement is sometimes best avoided rather than sought, and context is all, but I gave a very specific example where the eyelines were very clearly defeating the whole point of the exercise.
The Guardian is pleading with me to hand over money every month and someone thought the best way of convincing me was to have the interviewees direct themselves not to me the viewer, but to someone somewhere well off camera.
If you want my money, Guardian, then please have the courtesy to speak directly to me! By refusing to engage with me, you are making it much less likely that I will open up my wallet – you’re actually annoying me instead. (Incidentally, getting people to hand over this subscription money is probably vital to the Guardian’s continued existence, so this is hardly trivial!!!)
I think my point is pretty relevant because 99% of the talking heads shot around the world every day involve someone trying to convince the viewer of a point of view and very frequently, as in this case, persuade the viewer to part with their cash.
OK, maybe not 99% … but the reality is that most talking heads are a lot more humdrum and simply mercantile than your example (where your choice was clearly a good one), and the people shooting them are “getting them wrong” usually because they just don’t understand what they’re doing, or rather because they’ve unthinkingly absorbed a misguided convention.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
Here’s another one that really manages to annoy the heck out of me …
.. and that’s shooting from an angle below the natural eyeline so that you’re looking up the interviewee’s nose …
… which contrives effortlessly to convey “supercilious, condescending, patronising”, in other words the exact reverse of what you’re actually trying to achieve in the main.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Mark Smith] “Ah – the seeds of another brilliant Hawaiki FCPX plug in….”
Hawaiki AutoEyelineCorrection, huh?
Hmmmm, yes, it might just work 😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Andrew Kimery] “I know there are some people that say the only rule is that there are no rules, but you still have to understand how shot composition, lighting, etc., impacts the audience if you want to effectively communicate with them.”
Exactly – couldn’t agree more.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Shawn Miller] “Yes, that, and framing so that the head is at the bottom corner of the frame… so that you can see branding in the background. :-(“
That’s a really nasty one!!!
I think there’s this assumption that “it’s just a talking head” so it doesn’t really matter how you mess around with the framing.
The reality is that in almost every case a talking head is being required to convey a message that needs to resonate with the viewer and create engagement. Which means that randomly mucking about with the shooting style is the very last thing you should be doing.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
I can understand the need to try and vary the shooting style for creative effect … goodness knows I’ve shot enough of these things over the years. But the basic misunderstanding of the visual language really bugs me.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Steve Connor] “The other thing that gets me is the current vogue for facing people out of the wrong side of frame”
Aaaaarrggggghhhhhhh! Don’t mention that. My blood pressure has just doubled.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Tim Wilson] “I think any spot producer, certainly any trailer producer, anyone working on bumpers, opens, title sequences, a good many folks working with graphics, ANY kind of high-impact editing, will find this a powerful toolset”
I just wanted to mention in this context, speaking as an editor who works in the fields you are describing (and I know that there are a few of us on this forum), that more often than not we will be using fades or dips rather than dissolves these days – which are obviously a variety of dissolve but which also have their own specific requirements.
Just because you’re “only” transitioning to black (or white, or a lot more rarely some other colour), doesn’t mean there aren’t issues with the way that the compositing works. You mention the “gray” quality that digital dissolves often exhibit and of course if whites are fading to black (or vice versa) you’re always going to get some form of gray – the ideal is for the transition to mask that characteristic as much as possible (I think), and that’s where you need some tricky compositing.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
A huge thanks to Tim and everyone else for your extremely (even excessively!) generous comments. And an even bigger thank you to the intrepid few who have already put down good money for this crazy adventure into the unknown. Please let us know if you have any suggestions for improvements or additional features.
I should stress that we embarked on this very much as a “proof of concept” – a way of exploring not just what we mean by a dissolve, but what it could be if you disregarded a lot of the “rules”. As such it’s still a work in progress, and we already have a few more interesting ideas of how to take it further, particularly in terms of the response curves which are one of the really key factors in my view.
One thing I would say though is that although I do harbour a certain nostalgia for what you could do on film, I certainly wouldn’t hold up film optical dissolves as an ideal – not least because they necessarily involved considerable generation loss, leading not just to loss of picture quality but also an exaggeration of film response characteristics that was not necessarily very attractive at all. (Contact-printed dissolves done in the lab fared a lot better of course because you avoided the generation loss, but there were limitations there too not least in terms of duration choices.)
So with Super Dissolve we’ve definitely not taken film emulation as a starting point – I’m always a bit suspicious of the whole notion of film emulation anyway, but that’s a whole other story. (Although I should add that you can probably achieve most types of filmic look pretty easily.) What we wanted to do was explore the widest possible range of options as to how a dissolve could be composited and I think factoring in all the variables over which we’ve given you control, you’ll see that the possibilities are multiplied to a very considerable degree. I also think that the ideal dissolve depends not just on personal taste (I know I have some very strong dislikes!), but also on the exact nature of the two shots you are combining – and that’s almost never going to be the same from one transition to another. So having a really wide range of possible approaches has to be a good thing … I hope.
Many thanks again.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Ricardo Marty] “Is it going to be just an fcpx app?”
Hi Ricardo,
Yes, we do have a Premiere version in beta, but for now we are going to wait and see how it goes.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com