“Using DVDs as a
Self-Educational Aid for Aspiring Artists, Moviemakers, and Animators”
by Eric
Homan
Copyright 2008, Eric Homan
List of Contents
-For Director’s Commentary-
-For Understanding Computer Animation
-Understanding Filmmaking
-Understanding Editing
-Understanding Digital Video
- Understanding Cost Effective Filmmaking
-Understanding Green Screen
Compositing
-Understanding Low Budget Film Editing Techniques
-Understanding Sound Recording at
Home
-Understanding
Sound Effects
-Understanding Sound Design
-Understanding
Sound Mixing
-Understanding Camera Angles
-Understanding Storyboards
-Understanding Deleted Scenes
-Watching and Reading the Screenplay through Subtitles
-Freeze Frame and Slow Motion
-Interactive Access to Knowledge
-Interactive Movie Editing
-As Personal Statement or Director’s Defense
-Analyzing Groundbreaking Film
Techniques
-Witnessing The Digital Revolution
DVD: An Interactive Experience of Entertainment, Information, and
Education
As a college instructor of time-based media study classes
and as a major film buff, I wrote this article out of the excitement I felt
when I experience particular DVDs that strike me as unique and educational.
This article examines using DVDs as an educational aid for computer art,
digital video, or computer animation courses - or anyone in general who is interesting
in how movies are created. (And you don’t have to be a film major to be curious.) So I’d like to share and
explore with you my revelations with this technology. I hope my excitement for
DVD is contagious for those of you who still haven’t discovered the
possibilities of DVD as an interactive melting pot for entertainment,
information, and education.
I incorporate the use of various DVDs in my video and
computer animation classes as a source for showing examples of how movies are
meticulously put together through the use of the techniques we use in these
very same classes. The special features’ documentaries on disks like The
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Special Extended Edition, Finding
Nemo, and The Adventures of Indiana Jones exhibit selections on a detailing an understanding on Computer Animation,
Filmmaking, Editing, Camera Angles, Sound Design, and much more. These examples
are critical and crucial to use in an art school classroom environment when
presenting right-brained students visual and audio information in order to
learn.
For Director’s Commentary
Watching DVD’s with the director’s commentary (as on the
DVD editions of Little Shop of Horrors, Fight Club, and Antz),
the viewer can become the director’s own private student. It’s like going to
film school; but instead of paying a $30,000 tuition,
the viewer pays a $4 rental fee. The viewer becomes the director’s own private
student. The viewer gets to learn from some highly creative individuals, some
being your favorite artists and moviemakers. They are shown how they made the
movie: storyboarding, production advice, acting, pacing, camera angles, etc.
The director offers their defense of how they assembled the movie the way they
did, tiny secrets on how they got shots to work, facts on how they put the film
together, editing tips, camera advice, effective transitions, even setting how
many frames per second to shoot a scene. Instead of reading a book on how
movies work, one sees the actual
movie itself with the director commenting over their movie. It’s video and
audio doing the teaching for right brained, creative, visual-minded people - the way it should be because movies are a
visual and sensory medium. Using images and sound to teach.
For Understanding Computer Animation
Perhaps the best DVD teaching example available to the
public and schools is the supplemental features disk in The Ultimate Toy
Story Toy Box for understanding the process of computer animation. The most
prominent topic covered on this DVD is how it explains the preparation process - steps that students will usually skip over or
weren’t aware of. This disk goes over how Toy Story evolves from idea to sketches to storyboards to computer layout to
rough animation to full animation to fully rendered-and-lit animation. The
mystery of computer animation is simplified to a level where anyone can
understand it by supplying the viewer the visuals and audio commentary to
comprehend how it’s done. Several prominent supervising computer animators,
technical directors, and artists discuss specific shots from the movie and
present video imagery of the steps they went through from start to finish:
initial designs, storyboarding, research imagery, animatics (rough computer
generated animation), lighting issues, compositing (layering separate images
in), and the final rendered sequence. It’s the perfect teaching method for
animation/ movie classes: to be shown visually from the idea to paper to the
computer to a presentation screen. It’s an ideal way to teach visual literacy. A
Bug’s Life: Special Edition also excels in its own unique presentation of
how an entirely computer generated movie came to be.
The Hollow Man DVD plays like a grade
"A" computer animation tutorial. Its special features go behind the
scenes (and the secrets) to how they created the amazing visual effects of
presenting a man in various forms of visibility. The actual DVD extra features
proved better than the actual movie. There are fifteen “featurettes” on how
they did the effects for certain scenes, as in the complex, multiple pass
compositing for creating a convincingly translucent/ transparent man who
interacts with the rest of the cast.
Understanding Filmmaking
DVDs are prime assets for listening to a film essay
lecture while watching the movie in examination. For the Criterion
Collection DVD release of Seven Samurai, an audio commentary track is
offered to film expert Michael Jeck who explains and analyzes for the viewer/
student a film that has been considered one of the greatest ever made. Every
shot is explored. Every transition (fades and wipes), cut, action, lighting,
psychological relationship, camera angle, camera depth-of-field, close-up,
composition, dialogue, detail, music, sound design, weather design (!), and other
filmatic elements are revealingly touched upon. This type of insight is rare to
behold. It also makes the thought of going to film school seem like a waste of
money when a majority of the information is available on a DVD disk. And why
not learn from a film whose most ardent admirers include Francis Ford Coppola,
Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas?
Some of the greatest films are all time have terrific film commentary tracks. For Citizen Kane,
film critic Roger Ebert points and explains how powerful the lighting and
cinematography is in every scene. The things the casual viewer would never
notice are brought to light and critiqued for why they are there. When one can understand a particular film in
a greater degree, awareness breeds appreciation. Yet another
extraordinary example, Terminator 2: The Ultimate Edition DVD explains
how such a massive blockbuster movie was made. From script to casting to
costuming to acting to makeup to special effects to editing to hyper-reality
sound design - it’s like dissecting a movie. One could either pay 15,000 per
semester for film school, or pay $30 for this deluxe DVD.
Understanding Editing
DVD technology has come so far that people some special DVDs come
with features that offer a film school education on how movies are created.
Even more special, innovative, and challenging DVDs allow the viewer to become
an interactee within the creation of the film. For the Die Hard (Five
Star Collection) DVD, one can access a feature where one can actually re-edit
three different sequences from the film. Some of the choices available actually
give the option of choosing different types of camera angles (close-up, medium
shot, wide-angle). This feature visualizes
the power of where one puts the camera in a particular scene during a specific
scene of dialogue/ action. It also addressed the difference of having a moving
camera in a scene as opposed to a stationary camera. Simply reading this type
of information in film literature textbooks always made this type of
information seem a bit vague. For right-brained, visual-minded artists, this is
the ideal method of learning. By interactively arranging the shots oneself, one
can get a greater feel of how film editing works. Best of all, it allows one to
experiment with their choices. It’s the finest tool in the DVD market if you’re
a beginning video student learning the language of visual images.
The three disk
-Understanding Digital Video
“Film Is Dead” from the Once Upon a Time In Mexico
DVD: “When I was doing sound mixing at Skywalker Ranch, I was able to look at
early digital video footage that George Lucas had shot for “Star Wars II”, and
I got excited about making movies again – like when I was twelve years old. I
could work at a much faster pace and at the speed of thought. No one
really knew how to shoot with HD digital video cameras because they were so
new. But the only way you’re going to learn is by doing it. “I enjoy
shooting now in a way I never did before… You can always look back at what was
just shot using digital video on the set so you can spot mistakes as they
occur and don’t have to worry about waiting for the film to be developed
before you see what works or doesn’t work. Once again, this new technology is
giving you speed and freedom. Robert compares using digital cameras to being
like a painter, where you get instant gratification from your work while you
are making it. Several filmmakers have gone and asked him how they can have fun
making movies again. Digital moviemaking is the answer. “When the process
becomes easier, everything is easier. When the process is simplified, no one
actually feels like they’re working.” They’re all enjoying themselves the way a
creative environment should be like! He realizes that it’s okay to break
traditions and start moving into a new age of making movies. You don’t have
to make movies on film anymore. It’s pointless when there is a faster, cheaper,
easier way. Robert Rodriguez will even keep his camera rolling (since he’s also
the cinematographer) between takes because “it’s just an hour’s worth of tape
that’s being recorded. You don’t want your actors to come out of that moment
when they’re on film and not on film.” So if the camera is always recording,
you’re able to capture those little magic moments of improvisation, looseness,
and creativity that occur during the rehearsal stage that don’t often occur
when you’re consciously on camera. You don’t need to say “cut” or
“action” anymore when you’re using digital video. Just alert your actors that
the camera is always rolling and they’ll remain in character longer and you can
shoot faster while making creative decisions while you’re shooting your movie.
Once again, you had different rules and regulations while shooting with films
that simply do not have to be applied here. “You question the entire system –
and that’s a good thing to.” You see a lot of money being wasted away that
doesn’t need to be wasted if you’re a smart enough director. He made a list of
all the pros and cons between High Definition Digital Video and film, and
realized the only reason left to continue working with film is for nostalgia.
HD digital video is better for cost, creativity, speed, image preservation,
color correction, special effects…. The list went on and on and on – and he was
right. He compares the movie making business to a company that isn’t making any
money because of how expensive films are to make. And he questions, “How can
I reverse the tide?” During the question and answer session, he addresses
how shooting with digital video also frees up your cinematography and lighting
for a movie. You don’t have to use a light meter anymore. You shoot “by eye”
and simply turn on the camera. You don’t have to waste hours of time checking
where the lighting will go black by going into shadow too much. You shoot by
what you see, and you can always go back and color correct the scene later.
He’s a moviemaker making movies outside of
And Robert Rodriguez is a born teacher. He
loves to share his wealth of knowledge, energy, and enthusiasm for what he is
doing with as many people as possible. That is why he created his DVD extra
features for “Ten Minute Film School” that beautifully breaks down the best
moments of discovery and creative freedom while making each movie he’s made.
He’s open and giving to a massive audience of moviemakers, artists,
technicians, and craftspeople who are willing to listen and learn.
His former background was being a cartoonist, so now look at how he’s evolved
that craft into what he is now – an eclectic, multi-talented moviemaker. None
of his movies are based on reality. He’s always presented a surreal take on the
world around him.
“Have
fun. Be creative”: that’s Robert Rodriguez’s ideal and wise advice during the
amazing cost-efficiency documentary short called “Ten Minute Film School: ‘Big
Movies Made Cheap’”, contained on the Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams
DVD. He knows how much he can accomplish nowadays with doing things in
post-production using camera tricks, editing, innovative lighting, and green
screen photography. He’s involved with production design because it saves him
huge amounts of money that he doesn’t have to spend. And in the end, he gets
away with making an enormously larger profit through his cost effective
spending mixed with his smart, creative filmmaking. Rodriguez lives outside of
the Hollywood world in
“Ten Minute Film
School” on the Spy Kids 3-D DVD: As Robert Rodriquez puts it, he shot on
a “dream screen”, or that is, a green screen sound stage set, “because it can
be whatever you want it to be.” He was able to have complete freedom for what
he wanted to do by filming his actors on this green environment that allows him
to replace the green with any type of background that he wishes. With a limited
budget and shooting schedule, he knew that he was going to have to shoot
several of his prominent actors separately. But because they were shot
in front of a green screen set, he could easily composite them back all
together later on in the post-production editing process. So Steve Buscemi
never acted together with Bill Paxton because they came in to shot their scenes
on separate days. But in the final shot of the movie, they do through
the miracle of compositing. And because of the lower budget and the entire green
screen environment, the director and his production team were forced to be more
creative and have more fun by creating unique, cost-efficient solutions. The
challenge actually makes them more creative. They’re free to experiment
and have fun – which is the main part of making art entertainment! Consider it
a gift instead of a hindrance. The whole experience is much like
shooting an independent feature film on a “home movie” style budget. It’s the
ultimate way to make low-budget films that seem like big
-Understanding Low Budget Film Editing Techniques
“Ten
From the Once Upon a Time In Mexico DVD: The
other amazing thing about Robert Rodriguez is that he does his own music for
his own movies!! He converted his garage in
Also
on the “Ten Minute Film School” on Spy Kids 3-D is a section on how to
enhance your home movies into something cinematic and exciting by simply adding
great sound effects. Just by getting any sound effects CD from a used
music store or online, you can add these amazing samples to your home movie
footage. Rodriquez videotaped his son playing with his train set and by adding
exciting real train sound effects, he was able to
amplify the sense of urgency to that simple toy train. Once again, Rodriquez is
simply using his creativity to make something ordinary into something extraordinary.
A simple fake punch to the face by his three year old feels like a
knockout punch with the right type of aggressive punch sound effect and the
right acting.
Understanding Sound Design
Certain DVD titles offer extraordinary insight for sound
design. On the What Dreams May Come DVD commentary track, director
Vincent Ward explains a key element for sensitive sound design to help a viewer
relate to a movie. For a scene where a tree suddenly loses it blue leaves, they
mixed human sounds of crying with the natural sound of wind blowing off leaves
off a tree to psychologically suggest to the viewer a sound they would
personally identify. Similarly on the sound design special section on A
Bug’s Life DVD, for a scene where a gang of grasshoppers were leaving the
ants’ colony, they didn’t use just the sound of dozens of grasshoppers flying
off; they mixed that sound with motorcycles loudly driving away. These hidden
elements of subconscious sound design illustrate how revelatory DVD’s extra
features are to educating creative minds.
Also, some DVDs like Toy Story 2 offer the
interactive option of playing the movie with just the sound effects soundtrack
on. This offers viewers the ability to experience a movie on a purely sound
design level, with the absence of dialogue and music. Everyone one hears on
this track is what the sound designer creates. What do toys sound like when
they come alive and run around? Here’s the best change one can have in
absorbing what makes for creative sound environments.
On
the Big Trouble In Little China:
Special Edition DVD, one can view the
work print of this movie with its deleted scenes still intact for the curious
to view. But what’s even more intriguing about it is that the additional audio
mix has still to be put in: meaning soundtrack, sound effects, over-dubbing,
and any additional audio enhancements. The film is still in its raw, rough form
– just cut together so one can see how the scenes are playing together. So by
viewing a film “naked” without good sound and with a professional sound mix,
one can understand how important sound mixing is to the impact each scene has.
Understanding Camera Angles
For the Die Another Day DVD, the second disk
features a presentation of how different camera angles affect the understanding
of the action in a particular scene. The viewer is allowed to see the view of
an action scene from two positions with two different camera settings. What is
most educational is that the DVD presents each angle with its technical
information settings, such as frame rate (fps/ frames per second), lens choice,
and the exposure setting for its f-stop. The viewer can even compare the two:
angle A is shot with 24 fps, 75 mm lens, and an f-stop of T 2.8, angle B is
shot with 72 fps, 180 mm, and T 5.6. One can see how a camera angle of 180 mm
makes the actors seem closer together in a given space while an angle of 75 mm
makes them further apart even though they haven’t moved. The higher the frames
per second makes the scene look in slow motion, while rates lower than 24 fps
makes the shots look faster. Seeing these things allows one to visualize what
will work best in one’s own film work. What a better way to understand how a
camera works and looks than by witnessing the actual footage! This is
all-important material you can’t necessarily learn very easily in a
text-written manual.
Understanding Storyboards
The exposure that DVDs offer to the mass audience is one
of explaining how a movie is made. The genesis of a movie’s fruition is through
drawing out what scenes will look or feel
before the movie is shot - “storyboarding”. This allows the moviemakers to plan
out their shots and have a visualized idea. Some DVDs, like Jaws, Fight
Club, and Tomorrow Never Dies, grant the viewer the opportunity to
view the original storyboard drawings and compare them to the finished shot. More
impressively, on the Taxi Driver DVD, the cinematographer adds
extraordinary insights to understanding what makes a good storyboard by
explaining how director Martin Scorsese’s rough and expressive storyboards were
so effective. They conveyed a sense of feeling
in the shot - instead of being overly refined and concrete. The American
Beauty DVD offers the best lesson by offering an actual hour-long
discussion comparing the storyboard drawings to the final film shots by the
director and legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall. This sort of exclusive
information adds to the fact that DVDs are sources of teaching visual arts.
Understanding Deleted Scenes
Viewing the deleted scenes from a movie can be
educational in understanding why they were taken out in the first place. One
can realize that there are issues of pacing for editing out certain scenes.
Some scenes repeat the same theme or idea, but just in a different way of
presenting it. Other scenes reveal that they skewer the plot in a direction
that shouldn’t have taken, such as subplots and secondary characters that don’t
need to be part of the narrative. The average viewer can finally understand how
a movie can go from a long and laborious three to four hours to a comfortable
two hours. Those who make movies and animations will find these issues
extremely enlightening to dealing with their own work. We can enter into the
mind of the editor and understand what was taken out.
Watching and Reading the Screenplay through Subtitles
In the case of Apocalypse Now on DVD, the viewer
can turn on the closed captioning subtitles for the hearing impaired to clarify
what Marlon Brando is saying during his long, monotonous scenes of dialogue. In
this case, reading the subtitles actually allows the viewer to remain more
engaged. In fact, most of the dialogue in the film is muffled by the carnage
and battle (i.e. the “Valkyries” helicopter attack) that makes scenes of
conversation irrational and fragmented (which may be the point the director was
trying to make). But still, the viewer is missing out on what was being
communicated in a majority of the scenes. Enabling the option for subtitles was
also beneficial to be able to read the screenplay as the movie played. The
movie suddenly became a simultaneous literary, visual, and audio experience.
Once, the only dialogue one could understand was shouted. With subtitles, the
viewer can understand the story to a fuller dimension.
Experiencing
the Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut DVD with subtitles revealed the
extra depth that the thought-provoking screenplay always possessed without the
visuals overpowering it. Watching a movie with the subtitles on creates a
perfect juxtaposition of spoken screenplay and product - an excellent teaching
method for a screenplay writing class. Another prime DVD movie to be watched
while reading its brilliant subtitled dialogue screenplay is Quentin
Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
Freeze Frame and Slow Motion
Being a digital format, DVD allows the viewer or teacher
to freeze a frame as if it were a captured photograph. This offers them a
chance to observe the image’s composition and beauty without the annoying
flicker of pausing a VHS tape. The image will remain
frozen until unpaused, unlike VCR decks that automatically stop within a few
minutes. In addition, DVDs offer various speeds of slow motion depending on the
speed options on the remote control, like 1/2 speed, 1/4 speed, and 1/8 speed.
The viewer can at last examine a series of frames with greater detail and
clarity than ever before.
Interactive Access to Knowledge
Perhaps one of the stunning innovations assembled on the
groundbreaking The Matrix DVD is that the viewer has the option of
viewing the movie in the “White Rabbit” version. This means that when the icon
of a white rabbit appears on the corner of the screen during a particular
scene, the viewer can press the “enter” button and be taken temporarily out of
the movie to see a short documentary of how the did the special effects/ stunts
for that scene. As soon as the behind-the-scenes footage is over, the viewer is
returned to the scene where they left. The white rabbit appears several more
times throughout the movie, making it the perfect way for fans to learn more
about the movie. It’s interactive access to knowledge.
Interactive Movie Editing
One amazingly interactive feature to the Fight Club
DVD is that the viewer can program to watch an alternate version of the main
titles through interface options. Through a series of options, the viewer can
select the normal or alternate title score;
then the normal or a different opening titles; and finally, normal or varied versions of the opening sequence. It’s like being in control of how one wants to edit a
movie by using one’s remote control. The viewer discovers how it feels to makes
decisions like a movie director and movie editor does. The DVD becomes a tool
for teaching how to make a movie.
As Personal Statement or Director’s Defense
For the Touch of Evil DVD, the viewer gets a
classic film-noir as well as the director’s impassioned defense - Orson Welles’
58 page memo to the studio in how he personally wished
for the film to be cut back in 1958 when the studio went back and re-shot new
scenes and re-edited them with his footage. In 1998, the studio rediscovered
his memo and decided to change the film back to the way Welles intended the
film to be experienced. Welles’ memo goes over how each shot, each cut should
be the way it is for its visual flow and story tone. Editing it their way was
only doing it harm. His written defense enhances how
the viewer experiences by allowing us into what Welles intended us to see - not
just visually, but also intellectually.
Witness
within the Hulk DVD. In this surreal comic book world, the film editors
and movie director (Ang Lee) decided to have fun, be adventurous, and do
something unique with how their film is played out. Instead of tried-and-true
transitions such as fade in/ fade outs and wipes, they went with their own
approaches by inventing new ones. This movie simply explodes with creativity
from which aspiring filmmakers can learn from. Hulk is so groundbreaking
in its use of digital compositing, transitional editing, rotoscoped wipes,
freeze frames/ still images mixed with live action, drawings, and a merging of
comic book style panels and split screen techniques. Scenes bleed, morph, blur,
transform, layer, dissolve, and burst into the following sequential image. This
wildly fun and experimental style of moviemaking alone makes this movie great
and fun! There’s a freshness there that is missing from so many
other movies – a way of seeing movies differently. The DVD also has a
behind-the-scenes documentary on the people who personally labored on thinking
up and creating these techniques.
What’s
intriguing about the DVD for Jonah: A VeggieTales: The Movie is that it
has a personalized tour through their self-made production studio of “Big
Idea”, located adjacent to a mall somewhere in the suburbs outside of
Upon
watching the behind the scenes material of The Matrix Revolutions DVD, I
am more convinced than ever that more and more movies are going to be done
completely in the computer. Why use real actors or build real locations when
you can make them in the computer?!?! It will all come down to cost. What is
cheaper and easier to create one’s fantasy worlds with? Filmed movies will
always have some place, but I can now see that it will be greatly diminished in
the decades to come. Digital cinematography is the new tool of the future of
movie making. If you aren’t aware of it as a moviemaker, you better learn about
it soon. Animators and their technology are the new actors now. There are no
dangerous and costly real special effects. There is no longer any need for
human stunt doubles. Just as motion picture film was a revolutionary step in
how we are entertained, I can easily foresee how computer technology will
completely alter how such movies are now created. With Final Fantasy: The
Spirits Within, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and now this movie,
it’s already happening. There is simply more possibilities and control in the
digital realm. There will be no real need for $25 million dollar paychecks to
actors. There are no benefits to pay, no trailer for the actor, no driver, no
5% of the movie’s gross. The computer eliminates all of that. Technology has
finally caught up with mimicking reality. Now anything's possible. You can
finally motion-capture emotions by
setting up multiple cameras in front of an actor’s face. This is all new
technology that has been quickly developed and invented to suit the needs of
the script and story. Finally, the steps are being made to get an emotional,
believable performance out of a synthetic actor.