drag racing and fairly legal sequences

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D_cjgWsAAM (drag racing)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KVmAagBsj8 (fairly legal)

My Thoughts On Linearity

Thoughts on Linearity

Before non-linear editing started around the 1990’s, there was linear editing.

Linear video editing is defined as a “video editing post-production process of selecting, arranging and modifying images and sound in a predetermined, order sequence. Regardless of whether it was captured by a  video camera, tapeless camcorder, or recorded in a television studio on a video tape recorder the content must be accessed sequentially."

 Non-linear editing (NLE) is defined as “a method that allows you to access any frame in a digital video clip regardless of sequence in the clip. The freedom to access any frame, and use a cut-and-paste method, similar to the ease of cutting and pasting text in a word processor, and allows you to easily include fades, transitions, and other effects that cannot be achieved with linear editing.”

For the most part video editing software has replaced linear editing; software programs such as Avid and Final Cut Pro (FCP).

                Being able to juxtapose and manipulate images (NLE) helps us as editors create stories and develop characters in film. Editors are the true story tellers. Sure we have the director who directs the type of image and motions he/she wants captured on film or the camera crew that captures the image that attracts our eyes, but it’s the editors that sew together the story. With non-linear editing you are able to pick and choose which scenes or moments you want to use in your film. That way you can have multiple takes and choose which one you think fits best. Being able to pick a choose from a plethora of images, rather than taking one shot and trying to match it perfectly to the image you filmed before and hand cutting it perfectly using film, and juxtaposing them makes it easier to edit film. Plus you can create the perfect moment/scene. Say if the actor says one line great and the others not so great in one take and they say the other lines better in the other; the editor can just mesh the two together to create a great scene.

               

In films such as Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955), a documentary, and JFK (Stone, 1991), a drama history thriller, demonstrate the different possibilities linearity can create. In Night and Fog (Resnais) is a short documentary film about “The history of Nazi Germany's death camps of the Final Solution and the hellish world of dehumanization and death contained inside.” By using archived footage and juxtaposing them a certain way the editors created a powerful film. I felt myself looking away from the screen for a brief second when the scenes became too powerful. Images do speak louder than words. Sure they had a commentator for the film, but when you see the piles of dead bodies being pushed around by plows like they were garbage and the other decrepit bodies, it evokes different emotions such as sadness. Rather than a documentary film, JFK (Stone), a feature length film, a film about “a New Orleans District Attorney discovers there's more to the Kennedy assassination than the official story,” Stone created a film by utilizing actors, rather than archived footage, to create scenes that evoke different responses about a historical happening. Stone is able to manipulate time by using flashbacks, going against linearity, to create scenes that are key in the film. 

Night and Fog and JFK

      Night and Fog, a documentary about the holocaust, and JFK, a film based around true events, both display how editing plays a major role in the outcome and overall feel of a film.  For me I felt like night and fog made more of an impact on we while watching it and made me think a lot about the time period.  The footage is so raw and real it takes you to a very deep and emotional place.  Night and Fog was also much more fact based while JFK was built up with conspiracy theories.  One of the most powerful images used in Night and Fog to me was the shot of the bodies being dumped into a hole like garbage.  This film also had very light music in the background that made it seem like it wasn't going to get as graphic as it did. 
     JFK was a film made based around the assassination of John F. Kenndy.  I have seen the film before and do quite enjoy it. This film uses more actors to recreate the time period unlike Night and Fog, but there are some clips from the actual time period thrown in which I thought brought the movie to the next level.  This movie stars an amazing cast and makes you really think about the whole assassination from every angle.  It is smart and well formed, so that us as the audience remain interested. 

Night and Fog

This was my first time watching Night and Fog, and i have alot to say about this film. First off it was a very powerful by using only videos to make you understand what pain and suffering those people when through. For those who haven't seen the film, Night and Fog is a short documentary on the views inside of the concentration camps that the nazis controlled. Still from this day on i can still picture so clearly all of the most powerful scenes in that short film, and i can only imagine the terror the people that survived the camps still see. Not only were the images powerful, the way they were cut also helps power the film even more. For example when the film shows where the trains full  of crammed box cars come in to the camp in the present day and then switch over to when it actually happened. Cutting it this way really makes you feel scared just as the people who lived though it did. Aside from the cuts, the clips in general from when they pushed bodies into giant holes still are stuck in my mind forever. No matter if it was the way the editors cut the film or their clip selection, they still can get their point across in this film, and thats what they did. Night and Fog will always remind me of what happened in those horrible camps, no matter if i watch it again or not.

Night and Fog

It's unsettling to watch a movie with complete uncensored gore, but even more so when the footage is of true events. I think it's safe to say the majority of the worlds population knows something or another about the holocaust and with that said, I also think it's kind of a challenge for the filmmaker to produce the "story" of the genocide in a way that's unseen and will capture the full magnitude of the events. Night and fog depicts these events, personally for me, in a way that hasn't been told before. From past films and pictures I've encountered about the holocaust and about the concentration camps in particular, I always came away with a sympathetic outcome. You get a sense of the humanity among the people, you feel for them, and yet that's all that happens- merely feeling sorry for them and what they endured. What night and fog does, is it allows you to see actual footage from the camps when they were active, but also footage of the camps years after they closed. You see footage of living human beings in a perpetual state of fear, then all of sudden a barren field with sparse flowers is in front of you. Whether intentional or not, the editing of this film creates a foreshadowing, if you will, from physically seeing living human beings, to an empitness with zero humanity. It subconsciously prepares you for the scenes where the footage cuts back to those same people that were just breathing not 10 seconds before hand, to now, having their lifeless bodies bull dozed into a pyre- as if their physical being is no better than a pile of dirt. This is where I think the film is set apart. The non-linear editing allows to you create a sort of bond with the people, although the outcome is already known. You can sympathize with them, not showing their corpses can allow a "reassurance" that maybe they made it out- but then cut to a literal mountain of human hair, souls walking into a gas chamber and the piles upon piles of rotting corpses, you take away that sense of humanity and replace the viewers sympathy with utter horror. The magnitude of the events that took place actually become real. On another note, I think the black and white gives the film a sort of old, ominous feel. The absence of color can sort of detach the viewers reality of the scenes they're watching- add color and you get another- 'holy shit this literally happened'- moment.

http://youtu.be/j1VL-y9JHuI  - the link is to a scene from Schindlers List, if you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend. This particular scene is one where people are literally being massacred in the streets, Jews are being lined up, one in front of the other, and shot in the head to see how many can be killed at once, as a game. It's literally sickening, yet with all that going on, a little girl in red is walking through the streets and it's as if she's the only one you care about. You see her and all that comes to mind is ' PLEASE don't kill the little girl in red '. I think this is a great example of how color too, can have a monumental impact on an already grave scene.

Night and Fog

Night and Fog is a moving French documentary that moves through the concentration camps retelling the horrific events that happened inside their walls during World War II.   The film itself switches from "current" footage of the camps as they were when the film was being produced, to images and old reels showing the raw documented footage of the horrors that existed inside the barbed wire.  The documentary used the images to full portray the events that the narrator was recanting.  As with most narrated biographies or documentaries like this one, the main focus of the editors and producers were on the images themselves and not the sounds.  Through the use of images, the viewers brain saw the calm colored images of a compound with grass growing on the ground and vines climbing up the walls of the cold buildings. Then the screen would be cut and revert to different older footage from the time when the camp was in operation.  Through this non-linear way of cutting the footage, the viewer would continuously have the awareness of the emaciated people who were once walking or working through unbearable conditions in the same area filled with color and plant life.

There was also a mixture of stagnant and moving clips giving a further enhancement to the pictures.  Inevitably the picture enhanced and overshadowed the audio.  Despite it's excellent work with image use, the audio was slightly overlooked and was definitely of a lesser quality than the image.  The music is not composed as well as the video. For instance, when you first see the main gate entrance of the concentration camps the music is meant to portray horror. However, it comes of as just loud and off key, as if there was no real composition to the music clip.  Throughout the rest of the film, there was no key musical timing that was as memorable as the images and maintained a relatively depressed tone.  Even with lack luster audio, the film was brought up by the amazing quality of the footage taken.  Night and Fog was truly able to immortalize the horrors of the concentration camps from World War II through it's memorable images and well composed narration.

Blog 2 Night and Fog

This was my second time watching the documentary Night and Fog. The first time I watched it was when I was a senior in high school in my literature of the holocaust class. Watching it for the second time was just as powerful as watching it for the first time. Night and Fog was an intense documentary during the Holocaust about the world inside the Nazi death camps.  The film showed a completely different perspective with past and present images that were both haunting and graphic. It’s still so shocking to me that this actually happened; that people were starved, killed, and abused because of their views and beliefs. The film opened up to present day at an abandoned concentration camp. All of the present day shots were in color while the days in the concentration camp were in black and white. It’s so common to use black and white to indicate the past with images but it is still so influential on anybody who decides to watch. Just staring at those images and knowing that they were once filled with innocent prisoners was chilling. Then the film was so precisely edited with unsettling pictures and footage. The first image that comes to mind when someone says Night and Fog is how the deceased were treated. Their bodies never got to have a proper funeral; they were just tossed away like garbage. I don’t understand how people can treat the dead like that. It was a short documentary with a very large impact. The way the film was cut and put together was one of the main reasons I believe it is so well known and so powerful. The narration and the subtitles also helped the documentary reach its full potential.The images moved so fast but they will remain in my mind and never be forgotten.