Last month Vudu approached us and said,
hey, we're launching a new free movie streaming service called Movies On Us.
And we're big fans of the show.
If we sponsored an ep could you guys maybe help us get the word out?
And because the only thing we like more than movies are free movies we said,
you betcha.
And their catalogue has some great flix that might well have landed on top of
a top-ten list or three.
But we all felt that an unranked, brilliant moments episode would be
the fairest way to highlight the best of their selection,
without calling into question the immense
journalistic integrity we've built up by picking, No Country for Old Men,
The Third Man, Citizen Kane, and The Mirror, over and over and over again.
So we picked three moments from their catalog we think you'll like
about characters and the visuals used to reveal them.
And the nice thing about this partnership is that you can finish this list and
then literally go binge watch all three of our choices on Vudu's Movies On Us for
free, right now.
Because you weren't actually going to get anything done today, were you?
We didn't think so.
These are three brilliant moments in the visuals of character.
(Music)
If you pick up a basic book on cinematography and
flip through its pages to its obligatory list of different kinds of shots,
odds are you might find information on the different meanings of each one.
For instance, high angle shots, they'll tell you, are for
making a character look weak and small.
Whereas, low angle shots are for making them look big and strong and powerful.
And it's kind of true.
A high angle is what it looks like to look down on someone just like a low angle
looks like looking up.
And it's not too big of a stretch to suggest that the height comes with
power and status sometimes, but it also often doesn't,.
Do these characters look weak here?
Do these ones look powerful?
Are they even supposed to?
We certainly bring visual associations in from our experience as
humans in life with eyes.
And we bring in visual associations from our history of cinema experience, too.
But there's a third source of visual association we can use to make meaning
out of what we see on screen.
And that's from within the film itself.
Smart directors in good control of their craft build associations
between images and meanings early on.
Only to cash in on them later by recalling them, remixing them, rehashing them,
or subverting them to great effect.
And filmmakers can use this kind of visual shorthand to create strong motifs that
they play with in order to reach much deeper meaning than just low shot,
strong, high shot, weak.
And one of the places this really pays off is with character.
Good characters are rich with inner life, with hidden wants and fears and depths and
secrets and history.
But we can't exactly put them on screen so easily.
Literature is great at this.
Words on a page are an excellent surrogate for an inner monologue.
Reading them can put our mind through the exact mental paces
of a character in any given state.
But with the exception of voice over,
cinema can only access that information indirectly.
You probably heard great actors praised as having expressive faces or
eyes that are windows into their souls.
And while it sounds nice, all it really means is that their
external appearance gives us lots of information about their internal world.
But image systems can be a way in, too.
Filmmakers can use the nuance and
expressivity of shifting complex imagery to clue us in to the internal landscape of
their characters that might be otherwise inaccessible.
Check it out.
Our first moment comes from Like Crazy.
A beautiful little indie romance that won the grand jury at Sundance back in 2011.
Where Anna and Jacob, played by Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin, have fallen in
love at university and spent the summer together after graduation.
But Anna's student visa expired with the school year, and
on her next trip to visit, she's detained an denied entry for the violation.
While Jacob waits helplessly on the other side of immigration control.
>> You will not be allowed to leave the airport.
Two agents from Homeland Security are going to come in here after I leave.
You will be placed back on the plane immediately and returned back to the UK.
You understand?
You have any questions?
Hi Jacob, it's Anna.
I'm sorry I missed your call again.
It's been pretty busy here.
Are you around at about 5:00 today?
>> With hardly a word these two shots tell us everything we need to know about where
Jacob's head is at and his relationship along with it.
The defeat, the fatigue, the depression, the exhaustion.
They're contained in not just his body language, staging, and lighting, but
in their visual contrast across these systematized images.
Images built with respect to each other, not just in their own little bubbles.
Imagine the sequence differently with only one of these two parallel shots.
It could play like this.
Hi Jacob, it's Anna.
I'm sorry I missed your call again.
>> Or like this.
(Music).
Hi, Jacob, it's Anna.
I'm sorry I missed your call again.
>> And while neither of those variations are exactly rays of sunshine,
they don't quite carry the same defeat as the original.
Because the image system director, Drake Doremus,
employs is like a giant real-time spot-the-difference puzzle on screen.
And the existing similarities draw all the differences into sharper relief,
forcing us to see the characters change.
But there's also something to be said about the power of the gap, too.
The span of black between the shots isn't just a side note or
useless punctuation mark,
it draws our attention purposefully to a space of time between these two moments.
And carving out some space there implies an in-between, and
it invites us to draw inferences about what happened.
And with images as clearly similar as these,
there isn't much space between them except for more frustration.
The darkness must have contained, well, a whole lot of darkness.
Compare it to this.
>> Hi Jacob, it's Anna.
I'm sorry I missed you call again.
>> Cut this way, it's almost like an instantaneous arrival, but
with the simple addition of this pause, this breath.
Jacob's defeat carries the weight of weeks or months of separation and
we feel it through how we are directed to see it.
In fact, Doremus employs a number of smart image systems like this all throughout
Like Crazy.
Like this one here and this one here.
(Music)
It all track how their relationship and emotions shift by drawing contrasts and
juxtapositions rather than just simple direct inference, and
it's everything we love about brilliant visual filmmaking.
And that's really the key to this type of visual system.
It allows us to track the nuances of change by holding most everything's static
so that the differences can spring to light in contrast.
It's like a science experiment.
You control all the variables except for one and
a clear picture of its effect emerges.
And change is very important for character.
In movies, we almost always expect them to grow or, at the very least, arc.
Of course, tracking inner change on screen is just about as difficult as accessing
an inner state, so we're turning, again, to the visual systems to lead the way.
This one comes from a little Duplass brothers mumble core film called
Jeff Who Lives At Home.
And if you know the Duplass brothers and their mumble core,
you know that neither are exactly famous for their visual precision.
The film is more found and captured in the moment than precisely constructed.
And you can see this from pretty early on where the camera has this pseudo
documentary, office like style complete with handheld searching and
quick bump zooms.
>> Are you tired of feeling sluggish?
Do you feel like life is passing you by?
Then there's a reason you're watching this right now.
Just pick up the phone and
start the new chapter to your life.
(Sound) >> Hello.
>> Yo, Kevin.
>> No, this is Jeff.
Where Kevin at?
>> And it's like this pretty much pretty much the whole way through,
mostly close ups focused on interpersonal interaction.
Actor-centric, where they kind of just point the camera and let it roll and
see what happens.
And bump zooms, lots and lots of bump zooms.
So Jeff's journey, chasing after the universe's signs and signals and
various strange men named Kevin finally leads him
to save the lives of two children and their father.
And when all is said and done, he sits down, watches the news, and this happens.
>> And coming up next.
The story of two girls, their father, and
the main who was in the right place at the right time.
>> We had lost our dad.
I just really can't even imagine it.
I'm just really thankful he was there.
>> We'll be right back with that rescue tale of local councilman, Kevin Landry and
his two little girls.
(Music)
All that and more when we come back.
(Music)
>> Did you catch that?
No, not that the guy's name was Kevin.
We all got that part, but the visual can see, the zoom.
Here, watch it again. >> We'll be right back with that
rescue tale of councilman, Kevin Landry, and his two little girls.
All that and more, when we come back.
>> Compared to every other bumpzoom throughout the entire film,
this is the only one that's slow.
It's subtle, almost too subtle.
But we think it's perceptible precisely because we're so
used to the pace of the normal bump.
It's like one deep breath compared to regular breathing.
Like the focused landing of a mindful thought compared to the everyday
scattering of attention.
It's like the filmmakers picked this one key moment for just one instant to lean in
quietly and say, this, this right here is important and real.
And with an hour and
16 minutes of build up the cumulative effect of a slow zoom vacuum built up
enough pressure to turn even a microscopic bump into a visceral experience.
And why spend so much time and effort on this?
Because it's the very moment where Jeff's worldview is confirmed.
Where his doubt is erased.
His confidence is shored up.
His arc is complete and he's able to finally go by the wood glue
that has been the maguffin driving the entire plot.
And we can feel this, because we are able to see it.
Because the filmmakers embedded the internal change in the external visuals.
And they’ve given the audience the same kind of feeling of small revelation while
watching it that Jeff has while experiencing it.
Which is precisely what makes it brilliant.
(Music)
But these visual systems aren't always in service of character change.
Sometimes they're about a lack thereof.
Where the similarity of images can help us to compare and contrast,
it can also recall us to a previous thought, emotion, or memory.
Like a visual abbreviation.
And remind us to think or feel or remember that way again.
Young Adult is a brilliant film that plays with our expectations of character growth.
It introduces us to Mavis, a seemingly vain,
depressed alcoholic teen fiction writer and we see her do this.
>> So all told, I spent a year in Southeast Asia.
>> Why?
>> Long story short, I ended up a volunteer teacher in (Foreign).
>> My god. Yikes!
>> Yeah, it was probably one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.
>> Of course,
sure, totally.
(Music)
And then over the course of the film, we watch her faced with her own flaws and
broken down by her failings.
Much like we would expect in any film about a character's growth,
until she reaches her lowest point.
The place we expect a character to be right before they decide to change.
And then she ends up here.
>> I saw you every day.
You had this little mirror in your
locker shaped like a heart.
And you looked in that mirror more than you ever looked at me and
I was at my best.
And with this single shot everything comes rushing back.
We want so badly for her to have changed, to have grown,
to have given up her selfish ways that, when the shot returns,
visually recalling us to that earlier moment, we know by association that she's
at the same decision point, and it fills us with dread.
Not again.
Be different, be changed.
And you can probably guess what happens next.
(Music)
And in that moment we see that Mavis hasn't gone anywhere.
The change we we would expect in her is non-existent.
The only variables that have changed are the sheets, the pillows, the man, but
our character, she's exactly the same.
By replaying just a single shot we reaffirm that she is in exactly the same
place as where she started.
I don't even think you really need to be aware of this shot similarity to
feel this.
I think the memory is there whether we are conscious of it or not.
The associated neurons still fire even though we don't realize why.
And that, more than anything,
speaks to the power of motifs, of visual systems, of recurring imagery.
They speak to us in ways we might not even recognize about
things that would be impossible to shoot alone.
Which is exactly why we think these three moments are brilliant.
And remember, Jeff Who Lives at Home, Young Adult and
Like Crazy are available to watch for free right now on Vudu's Movies on Us.
And the rest of the movies we used in the episode are available to rent or
buy from Vudu as well.
Follow the link in the description to head on over to Vudu's Movies on Us
to watch these three movies for free in full.
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