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ESB speech on Moviemaking by Connor Beaton.
Hello. Today I am going to be making a speech on common film making techniques and effects that are utilised by both modern and classic films. Before I do so, however, I’d like to bring to your attention that I will be providing some visual aids to help visualise what I’m trying to say as well.
I’d like to begin my speech by talking about a film’s script. The script basically tells the actors what to do. The script is usually written by the director or producer, but sometimes there’s a different screenwriter. Scripting is long, and most movie scripts end up at around 70 to 120 pages long, depending on the movie length.
Here are pages from the original Back to the Future script. If you watched Back to the Future, you’d see that there are some very big differences. This is because sometimes the director makes changes while shooting. There are also sometimes different drafts issued.
Show script pages.
Film scripts include more than just stage directions. They also contain information on special effects and camera angles. It also tells you about dialogue, sometimes with notes like OS or VO. There are plenty different types of camera angle, which I can show you.
An establishing shot sometimes introduces a new scene. It is zoomed out a lot and shows the viewer the setting and general relationship of objects and people in the scene. This is sometimes also called a wide shot, or a very wide shot.
A close up is when the camera zooms in on a particular subject. You can get close ups, extreme close ups, and medium close ups, which define how close up it is. If it were to zoom in on a character, a close up would probably show their head.
Show camera angle pictures.
The script normally also contains music cues. The script would then be passed onto a composer who would write music for the entire film. Famous film composers include John Williams known for Harry Potter and Jurassic Park, Howard Shore known for LotR and King Kong, and Yann Tiersen.
Special effects can be done a number of ways. In older days, when they couldn’t make things, they would model them and utilise stop motion animation. This is when they make a model and move it bit by bit while taking pictures in between. When they put it together at 24 pictures every second, the model appears to move smoothly. This is how the 1930s King Kong was animated.
Today, however, you have practical and computer-generated. Practical is real. A practical explosion is a real explosion. Computer-generated effects are, as the title suggests, made entirely on the computer and are not real. The new Peter J. King Kong is computer-generated.
BlitzMax
'nuff said.