Interesting thoughts and points there. There is a lot to be said about old habits. To broaden it a bit, there are even old writing habits brought from the stage to the screen which are hard to die. One of those is dialogue. Why in most movies do people have to be talking all the time? Because that’s the way plays are written. Who where the first screenwriters - along with radio writers - playwrights. In radio, nothing happening unless people are gabbing the whole time.
Anyway, getting way off topic here, but.
One book I forgot to mention for anyone serious about planing shots.
loramel - thanks for the links and hope the book proves helpful.
And remember - cinema is visual!
A good film always tells the story with pictures first.
lol. yes they were silent, but stories told as a stage play just the same. And I was referring to talkies not silent film.
If you want to talk about silent film. First yes, they were filmed as stage plays primarily. DW Griffith was one of the best at this.
However what then happened was directors started getting creative with the camera during the silent era. It was during this brief time that many of the experimental visual films in Russia were made. And much of the film language that came during this time is still used today. Building on what Griffith was doing in the states, Russian directors such as Pudovkin and Kuleshov began to take it to another level - away from telling stories in long staged shots and toward telling stories with a sequence of individual shots that had significance that could be interpreted. These directors held that it was a juxtaposition of shots that could tell further meanings. And more more the camera began to move and the technology increased so that more interesting shots could be had. That all came to a sudden halt with the advent of sound which required a large box be built around the camera. Then it was back to filming stage plays for a while.
David Mamet was originally a playwright which bolsters the point. That does not make his films or screenplays great works of cinema. They are great plays that got filmed. Big difference if you are looking at the idea of the language of film and what that means.
But even with that and because of such a huge influence from the stage we are still basically in the “filmed stage play” era. There is not a wide acceptance of film as an art form in and of itself. That has yet to happen. It may never happen.
I think this subject is a good study and very relevant to this discussion on walk cycles and cinematic presentation in general.
And a note for the “younger crowd”. All of this information - as ancient as it is - is what is taught in film schools today and is the basic principles upon which all of the current great films are constructed.
you could hide the legs of the model and skip the entire walking part of the animation so as to get the body and the arms right first, then do the walk stuff afterwards
wow i’ve read the first part of this thread… truly inspiring and a really great idea, so true. this is probably a new technique i should practice with, really awesome stuff!
