Re: The Best of Both Worlds

Richard,

i hear what you're saying about trying to get past the technology and focus on the "how to tell a story" part of our work. But i do believe that filmmaking is both art and craft, and that ignoring one or the other is folly if you intend to do the best job possible.

Having said that, i do agree that a vast majority of people tend to err on the side of "gear fixation" rather than vision. Maybe because it IS less ephemeral, and easier to talk about without getting personal. "Combustion* has more transfer modes than After Effects" is something you can say with security, but "The use of non-inflected editing in About Schmidt relly helped put me in the head of Nicholson's character" is a lot more subjective and thus eaiser to assail. So i think that's why people talk about those things less - because the aesthetic and artistic aspects of our field are much more personal.

Still, i think that it is of enormous benefit to talk about these things (which is one of the main reasons i am at film school right now, and why i frequent this forum).

I will disagree about your comment on NLE's being less story driven tools than something like a moviola or a Steenbeck. That's kind of like saying a Pipe organ is a lot less melody based than a piano because it has a lot of valves and buttons for doing chord work (pardon my ridiculous metaphor). I think what you really mean is that a lot of the PEOPLE cutting on NLEs tend to not have the background or perspective on storytelling, and approach the craft as merely a mechanical exercise, and are thus given to throwing all kinds of unnecessary bells and whistles into a production that does not warrant them.

That is precisely what I want to look at - what elements that people traditionally associate with FILM work that we can bring to the world of digital shooting and editing. Because I don't believe that they are fundamentally different. The end result is an audiovisual illusion that [hopefully] transports the audience into an imaginary realm and evokes some kind or response. Everything else is a decision as to how to best get to that result.