PRACTICAL DV FILMMAKING

Practical DV FilmMaking

• Overview
• Inside video
• Films and how they work
• Pre-production
• Production tools
• Production aesthetics
• Post-production tools
• Post-production aesthetics
• Careers and distribution
• Mapping the industry
• Glossary of film and video terms

Weblinks

http://www.livejournal.com/community/french_new_wave/ Discussion forum on French New Wave films. http://www.greencine.com/static/primers/fnwave1.jsp Primer on the background of French New Wave films.

Animation studio Pixar have become master purveyors of this method in recent years in films like Shrek and Monsters Inc. In Shrek 2, for instance, the movie taunts its more grown-up peers in Hollywood by lifting iconic scenes from films like Titanic and Spider-Man, replaying them in a comic setting and thumbing its nose at their status. It is hard to imagine a more complicated set of signs within any work of art. Perhaps the most head-spinning example of this appears in Pixar's Finding

Figure 3.7 In this still from Phil Dale's commercial for Mini Cooper cars, references are made to previous sci-fi films, such as The War of the Worlds.

Films and how they work 61

Nemo (2003). A shark tries to butt his way through a gap, suddenly shouting 'Here's Johnny!' The reference was first to The Shining, where Jack Nicholson smashes his way through a door and says the same line, but also to the Johnny Carson TV show, which The Shining itself referred to.

Signs from wider culture

So these signs can be explicitly related to other films, or can be more subtle, drawing inspiration from an artwork rather than stealing it outright. When it is less obvious, it can be very rewarding, not least because not everyone in the audience will 'get it'.

David Lynch playfully uses cultural references in his films, most often from the 1950s. In Mulholland Drive (2001), Lynch places a very stylized 1950s lead character named Betty (what else?) in modern Los Angeles. The story she inhabits is melodrama, the acting more so. Film noir elements are drawn in, using conventions of storytelling and characters that we recognize from literature and cinema. Music helps set the scene, with opening credits of the jitterbugging characters. Elsewhere, Baz Luhrmann exploits our knowledge of hit records in Moulin Rouge (2001). Top-hatted Parisian men dance to Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' while a miniature Kylie Minogue, pop star and camp emblem, poses as a fairy. The aim is to collide our expectations by placing contradictory points of recognition in our minds