CUT PRINT
The
Future of Web Delivery, The History of Docs
by Ray Zone
QuickTime for Filmmakers
By Richard K. Ferncase
Focal Press
328 pages, paperbound, $39.95
ISBN: 0-240-80496
In the preface to his book, Richard Ferncase recalls a seminar he attended years ago while a graduate student in film school at UCLA. A high-profile producer exhorted the students "to stop thinking about just trying to make movies and think about the entire field of entertainment." It was prescient advice. "I realized that to connect with others through your medium was foremost," recounts Ferncase, "but it was a difficult task to complete if you were strictly a â??filmmaker.'"
Technology and the Internet have now made it possible for the "filmmaker" to directly reach a worldwide audience. With the seminal book, QuickTime for Filmmakers, Fercase has championed and examined what he says is still "the best solution for Web delivery of motion pictures." Medium of choice for George Lucas and priced to move at $29.95, QuickTime Player Pro is an extremely versatile tool for editing, compression and presentation of digital motion pictures. QuickTime (QT) is multimedia architecture and many different software applications take advantage of its benefits including Final Cut Pro. QT works on both Mac and Windows platforms, surpasses the television screen in resolution, allows scalable video and provides infinitely better gamma characteristics with blacker blacks than television.
QT has embraced the new Web standard for video with MPEG-4 compression and is highly functional for designing interactive text and images. With this book the author has created a highly organized tutorial "for filmmakers, photographers, artists and others who are more concerned with creativity than technical know-how when it comes to computers."
Chapter One of Ferncase's book provides a detailed overview of QT that illustrates its wide-ranging support of different file formats and simple functionality. The second chapter, titled "From Grain to Pixels: Film, Video and QuickTime," places this innovative program in technical context relative to film, interlaced and progressive video, and high-definition televsion (HDTV). Several sidebars in this chapter clearly explain the fundamentals of these imaging technologies and review filmmaking techniques in the light of digital production. Lighting for compressed video, for example, is reviewed along with the necessity of avoiding the "film noir" look, high contrast ratios that will force cameras to increase grain levels and degrade during compression.
The QT Player and Plug-in controls are reviewed along with settings for Preferences and Playback options. Chapter Four gets down to the basics of editing with QT Pro. It's obvious from Ferncase's discussion of QT editing that he is extremely familiar with these operations. He describes how to make selections and in a section on copy-and-paste editing specifically covers how to remove and replace a clip and trimming a clip to specific duration. Saving a movie as a self-contained file, editing, extracting and replacing multiple tracks along with stretching or compressing a track to fit a different movie are covered. QT provides many options for resizing and repositioning a track as well as placing a picture inside a picture (PIP). Fairly sophisticated graphics modes are available that use masks and blended video tracks. Keyed graphics with transparent colors and the use of Alpha channels in supporting software such as Adobe PhotoShop are also reviewed.
Much of Ferncase's book includes detailed discussion of QT's compression capabilities and the many interactive modes it provides for immersive imaging with 360-degree panoramas as well as hypertext and image. A final chapter discusses options for distribution and exhibition and a highly illustrative CD-ROM is included with the book.
The
Future of Web Delivery, The History of Docs
A New History of Documentary Film
By Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane Continuum
356 pages, paperbound, $19.95
ISBN: 0-8264-1751-5
This comprehensive new history of the documentary grew out of a book published in 1989 titled The Documentary Idea, an homage to John Grierson, which addressed his concept of filmmaking that consisted of "the creative treatment of actuality." The co-authors have surveyed the entire field of non-fiction filmmaking right up to the present with the films Super Size Me and Fahrenheit 9/11.
Perhaps more than any other genre, editing plays a crucial role in documentary storytelling and shaping of the narrative. The importance of editing to documentary is most saliently seen in this volume with the chapter on "Direct Cinema and Cinema Verité, 1960-1970." It was the invention of portable 16mm cameras with sync sound that made cinema verité (CV) possible. The filming of Primary by Drew Associates in 1960 with film and sound recording by DA Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, Terence McCartney-Filgate and Richard Leacock, inaugurated CV in the United States. All of the crew on Primary worked on the editing, cutting 18,000 feet (seven and one-half hours) of film down to 2,000 feet (50 minutes).
Long takes with synchronous sound and no narration suffice to tell the story in CV. With Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer (1961), narrative links among interview sequences are made through groupings of persons and topics of conversations. The form of the narrative evolves out of choices that the filmmaker does not direct but rather discovers during the process of editing. "Virtually everything we see and hear in Chronicle is occasioned by the making of the film," the authors state.
Ellis and McLane also suggest that the new portable equipment had the effect of pulling CV filmmakers back to the aesthetics of Robert Flaherty, the creator of Nanook of the North (1922). "Still, sync sound prevents the breaking up and manipulation of shots as freely as is possible with footage shot silent and sound added later," the authors note. "Within scenes, the filmmaker is bound closely to the real time and real space of the events. With film, it is difficult to cut into a continuous soundtrack without the cut being noticeable; sound locks images into place."
At the close of every chapter in this history there are lists of films discussed along with books relative to the discussion. Several useful appendices round out this up-to-date history of non-fiction film.
Ray Zone can be contacted at r3dzone@earthlink.net.