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kwugirl 's review for:
Excellent, extremely instructive book. I'm glad I figured out how to request an interlibrary loan in the NYPL system for it. It was recommended in an email newsletter I think from LeahAndMark.com, one of the photographers we actually considered for our wedding and whose style I admire quite a bit. The theme of the newsletter was studying composition and they said to read this book and look to film as a place for interesting compositions and inspiration.
So even with that intent of getting educated on composition as it applies to photography, since I'm not a filmmaker (though the one film-making class I took in college where we made Super8 films was a fun experience), I was still extremely impressed with this book. It was written in a way that's still pretty accessible to non-film people and used all sorts of examples, not just artsy indie films but also Indiana Jones.
It was also very specific about the different parts that they wanted to call out in each example that demonstrated the principle or type of shot, as well as all the many many decisions made to put this shot together. Might be obvious to others but film-making is a bigger art with many decisions than I had realized before. Just the parts of pointing out where there's a certain "lighting strategy" at play were interesting to me.
The part that really won me over though was that each section also had a counterexample of breaking the rules with why and how it was skillfully done. So you're not locked in, really, and the author also discussed how storytelling effectively also means taking into account the history of how a certain technique has been used in the past. Kind of like tvtropes.org's explanation about how just because your favorite show contains an often-used trope isn't a bad thing of itself, it's a trope for a reason, after all.
So even with that intent of getting educated on composition as it applies to photography, since I'm not a filmmaker (though the one film-making class I took in college where we made Super8 films was a fun experience), I was still extremely impressed with this book. It was written in a way that's still pretty accessible to non-film people and used all sorts of examples, not just artsy indie films but also Indiana Jones.
It was also very specific about the different parts that they wanted to call out in each example that demonstrated the principle or type of shot, as well as all the many many decisions made to put this shot together. Might be obvious to others but film-making is a bigger art with many decisions than I had realized before. Just the parts of pointing out where there's a certain "lighting strategy" at play were interesting to me.
The part that really won me over though was that each section also had a counterexample of breaking the rules with why and how it was skillfully done. So you're not locked in, really, and the author also discussed how storytelling effectively also means taking into account the history of how a certain technique has been used in the past. Kind of like tvtropes.org's explanation about how just because your favorite show contains an often-used trope isn't a bad thing of itself, it's a trope for a reason, after all.