Introduction The book How to Read a Film by James Monaco really covers just about everything when it comes to film and how to interpret it. Anything from the history of film, to how film has been interpreted, Monaco's book is the go-to source for a project like this. Since I love to make videos and to watch films I thought this book and performance task would work well together. Film as an Art Monaco really pushes this claim in his book, so much so that there's a whole chapter talking about it. He goes into the history of art and how the definition has changed throughout the ages. Older arts like painting, writing, or music all require immense levels of creativity in order to portray a message. To create something physical, something creative that you concocted in your own brain. When film was introduced, all hell broke loose and many started to question whether or not film should be considered an art. A great deal of effort goes into film, both physically and mentally. Much like a painter, a filmmaker needs to come up with an idea and plan how they are going to get that finished product. They have to visualize in their head what their dream product looks like and the potential steps to get there. Effort has to be put forth, time has to be invested. There is a whole creative process. Older forms of art have shaped film (purely due to the fact that they came before film and influenced film greatly) and at the same time, film has shaped these older forms of art. The fact is that film changed the game and brought in new light to some old art. Monaco really thinks that film has been impactful, saying that “Previously we were limited by our own physical abilities: the musician created sounds by blowing or strumming or singing; the painter who captured real images depended entirely on his own eye to perceive them; the novelist and the poet, although not physically engaged in their art, were nevertheless limited in describing events or characters by their own powers of observation. Recording technology offered us the opportunity of capturing a representation of sounds, images, and events and transmitting them directly to the observer without the necessary interposition of the artist’s talents. A new channel of communication had been opened, equal in importance to written language.” (pg 81) Making the Audience Feel a Certain Way One thing briefly discussed in the video is how film can make the audience feel a specific way. I use non-diegetic music as an example: a suspenseful scene should have suspenseful music to make the audience anxious. Never did I understand this clearly until my dad pointed out the sound mixing / soundtrack in the movie Mad Max: Fury Road during an intense fight scene. He mentioned that they intentionally added crazy music to ramp up the tension, making the scene more nail biting. Euphoric music is played when the movie is trying to awe the audience with a sense of beauty. Gritty, intense music is played when the movie is trying to make the audience excited for this heart-beating action scene.
Filmmakers do this type of stuff all the time. It's all about creating the mood and tone of the scene. A filmmaker's main goal is creating an effective scene that does it's job: makes the audience feel a certain way. It would be comical to have a block-buster action movie play music found in a romantic comedy as the scene just wouldn't work. Video Project In order to visualize the different parts of making a film and how everything comes together to create one coherent piece of media, I decided to make a video. Text can only try to explain visual techniques, that is why even my book is composed half and half of text and pictures. When talking about film, it makes sense to make a visual component to show what I'm talking about. With my video, I made two separate sequences and discussed the differences between them. The first sequence would be using the various techniques that were discussed in the book and during class. I tried to word everything in a way so that students from our classes can understand the lingo while my mom can keep up as well.