20 AFV Winter 2013.pub - Federation of Australian Movie Makers

BASICALLYVIDEOGRAPHYby Ian SimpsonThe Frustrations of the Amateur VideographerIn this hobby of movie making have you ever created a video that you thought, at the time, was really good only tofind that your teenage children or grand children ridicule it, or that in your club competition, the judges mark itdown? I have. Aside from the disappointment, there is the realisation that either your technical standards or yourcreativity or both are not up to that of your peers. This realisation can come to you as a shock after a poor performancein a competition or it can come to you, as it did to me, over a period of time. In my case, for years I reconciledmy poor performance in competitions as being a consequence of the genre of videos I like to make; documentaries.I rationalised that comedies, animations and dramas, if well made, would always beat a well made documentary. Ifooled myself for years with the argument that audiences like to be entertained first and informed second. This selfdeception can go on until something pierces this deception balloon. In my case it was an article in the electronicmagazine f11 Magazine. This is a web based monthly magazine that originates from New Zealand for the still photographers.One article in the September 2012 issue caught my eye. It was by Tony Bridge and it was entitled,Clarity and Megapixels. http://issuu.com/f11magazine/docs/issue14-september2012?mode=window&backgroundColor=%23222222In this article Tony began with a similar question to the one I posed above; why, with the same equipment, couldn’the produce the same startling images as a fellow photographer? His answer to this question was that he did nothave the same “clarity of vision” as the other photographer. Tony then went on to say what was NOT clarity ofvision but he wasn’t too clear on what was clarity of vision. Translating his concept of what is not clarity of visioninto the moving image domain, clarity is not the content of the video; nor is it the freshness or originality of themovie; nor is it its use of special effects, nor the slickness of editing; nor how well integrated the sound track; noris it the quality of the images; nor the power of the non-linear editing software; nor even the number of awards themovie may have won in competitions. For Tony clarity of vision is when the photographer captures an image that“resonates” with the viewer; where the image creates an emotional experience in the viewer. All of this is very subjective;evoking emotions, spiritual resonating, speaking to the inner soul, communicating to the individual “clearlyand honestly.” Can there be no quantification of this subjectivity?Does Clarity of Vision mean Unity of Content and Form?We, like our still photography brethren, often approach the hobby of photography and movie making from thewrong end. Encouraged by advertisements, we blindly hope that good movies will come from the best equipmentor the latest editing program or the best collection of special effects. We subconsciously hope that good equipmentwill make up for our poor creativity. But deep down we know they won’t and the results of each competition confirmthis. Ralph Hattersley in an article in Popular Photography many decades ago used the analogy of whatmakes us human to try to explain how a good photographis achieved or in our case how a good movie ismade. He said that although you may have all theparts that make a human being it is only when you putthem together in the correct way than you have a person.Thus for Hattersley, a great picture happens whenform (the correct ‘composition’ of the human body) isperfectly matched with the content (the parts of thehuman body). When this perfect matching of form andcontent occurs then according the Hattersley you have“unity.” So perhaps this “unity” of Hattersley is thesame as Bridge’s “clarity of vision”? The graph onthe right presents this idea diagrammatically.For us videographers form is what is assessed in most club movie judging sheets with the final video mark oftenthe sum of these form categories. So what are these form categories? Well they can be camerawork, effective use ofsound, editing and titles. The content of the video, however, rarely gets attention. Whilst the successful mixing ofform and content elements in a movie to achieve unity is never assessed or quantified. However, it is this unity thatgives meaning to a movie. It is what makes us viewers say, “now that was a great movie!”Page 20 AUSTRALIAN FILM & VIDEO—VOL 20 WINTER 2013