Talking Movies

The most interesting of those exercises was a frame that showed a person eating soup with a gradual decrease in the size of the frame. He then went on to explain the nuances of an ‘OK’ shot,the importance of the clapping board prior to a shot,a no good (NG) shot,and the aesthetics of editing. He went into detail on how an editor needs to focus first on the man eating the soup in a long shot,and the spoon in his hand moving towards his mouth in a close up shot,to get what he called an ‘OK’ shot.

Mosquitoes and failing lights,which kept tripping on and off,much to the amusement of the speaker,made the session even more eventful. The conversations and notes then progressed to reels of the Aamir Khan-starrer 3 Idiots. The scene where Khan describes a machine had a lot of mechanics behind it. Right from the manner in which his professor used the chalk to write on the board and throw the same at him,to the angle of the throw as well as the trajectory in which it strikes his forehead,the shot had it all.

Adding to it he explained how a film cut works on a person watching the final product. It works on a narrative level,an emotional level and an intellectual level. “The three levels help the director achieve relational continuity with the shot. This makes the viewer laugh at a funny shot or cry at a sad one and even jump with joy when the hero wins a competition.” He also spoke about experiments conducted by the Russian film maker Lev Kuleshov who made compilation shots to reduce the cost of making a film. The idea was to shoot one person with similar expressions and use the same with different scenes. It could be a man sitting expressionless in one frame,while the next one showed soup boiling or a dead body. Merging the two would get two scenes without having to shoot them individually.

The last leg of the class,which had already seen students from the back benches flit in and out,was an 11-minute short film called Zoo (1959). A candid film about people in a zoo,it explained the concepts of compilation,continuity and discontinuity. More importantly,it showed how a film needs to be cleverly edited to play with the emotions of the audiences and make them cry,laugh or yell in happiness.