“Along with films there was the advent of television in
1948/49 and the hay day of really some of the best programming in the history
of American television, 1950’s. I saw a lot of television shows but also films
on television.”
“Visual literacy was what was happening at that time, to me.
I did not understand it was happening.”
“What it made me realise was that there is another kind of
intelligence that was trying to tell a story through where the director, the
writer, and the cinematographer, where they were focusing your eyes. The camera
may be an extremely low angle looking up at you, the use of the lens, the size
of the lens. I began to understand certain lenses that interpreted the story
differently. A longer lens crushed everything together and made it flat, a
wider lens stretched everything and somehow distorted it especially with camera
movement. I learned looking at certain pictures particularly Welles’s and
William Wyler. Wyler used his wide angle lens in a very strong, steady image,
but Welles used that wide angle lens, 18mm it turns out very often, to move
along walls, and I really felt as if the camera was flying, as if the story was
flying by.”
“I was beginning to understand that there are certain tools
you use and those tools become part of a vocabulary that is just as valid as
the vocabulary that is used in literature, in our language.”
“I think you need to know how ideas and emotions are
expressed through visual form. Now that form could be video or film, but it
still has the same rules and still has the same vocabularly, and it still has
the same grammer. The grammer is panning left and right, tracking in and out,
booming up and down, intercutting a
certain way, use of a close up as oppose to a medium shot, what is a medium
shot? What is a long shot? All these sort of things and how you use all these
elements and the different kinds of lighting, to make an emotional and
psychological point to an audience.”
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