Sunday, November 3, 2013

Visual Storytelling

     In this week's reading, Osgood and Hinshaw talks about the process of making and producing a video, specifically the importance of editing. This was so exciting to me as literally I've seen pretty much every episode of my favorite show Friends, yes, all 236 episodes of the 10 seasons that aired. Of course I watch like a trillion of other shows religiously as well (how i met your mother, big bang theory, new girl, etc) but in light of this being the first show that got me into essentially replacing life with television, I decided to use the show as my inspiration for examples of this reading.

      One of the most important things that Osgood and Hinshaw touched on was this idea of a montage, which Friends uses, as most sitcoms do, in the beginning of the show for their introduction before the actual show begins. What I never really paid attention to before is that the way that the producers filmed these actors and actresses and positioned them on screen was very strategic, in that it had to follow the rhythm of the song I'll be There For You by the Rembrandts. It follows it so closely down to when the text "Friends" come on screen, to when the actors open the umbrellas, and finally at the last minute when Monica turns off the lamp at the end of the song, in perfect harmony as the singer sings his last word.


Later, Osgood and Hinshaw talk about Continuity and the many different types including physical and technical. Immediately I thought about the scene in Mean Girls that I was watching (for the upteenth time!) with a friend, where Janis Ian and Damien watch a horror movie while Cady is at someone's Halloween party. I love this scene because Cady walks into the room they are watching the movie in, all decked out in her "runaway corpse bride" or something creepy costume, right as Janis and Damien's horror movie is at a scene where something terrifyingly suspenseful is supposed to happen. Anyways, my friend pointed out that in the first scene as Cady walks in, Damien throws up his bowl of popcorn in the air, obviously making all the popcorn spill out of it. In the cut following, his bowl is all of a sudden filled with a fresh bowl of popcorn again.





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