The Difference Between A Sweet Note and A Sour Note

"For a writer, it's a word. For a composer or musician, it's a note. For an editor, it's the frame, and two frames off is the difference between a sweet note and a sour note."

Quentin Tarantino

When producing a work of multimedia, there is so much that has to be taken into consideration--audio, video, text--and there is no role as crucial as that of an editor. The editor fuels the story, and has the most influential role when it comes to affecting the viewer. Their job is to get inside the viewers mind, to use transitions, image, sound, rhythm, pacing, and compositing  to create continuity and salience of a plot line. The Tarantino quote I opened my blog post with communicates this point the most effectively--"two frames off is the difference between a sweet note and a sour note."  The way that a piece is edited affects whether it is dramatic or dull, suspenseful or serene, sweet or sour. 

The post production process arguably might be the most crucial part of the creation process. In the digital age, the editor and other post production staff are responsible for bringing together all of the various elements of a work and ensuring that those elements fit, flow, and have meaning. They are the ones ultimately responsible for whether or not the message or story is communicated effectively. While a successful pre-production process is vital, and the actual production is important, the post production can make or break a piece of media.

Forces Within The Screen

In reading the article "The Two Dimensional Field: Forces Within The Screen," I was taken aback by all the complexity behind the way a viewer perceives an image, and the way in which the producer can control those effects. All of it was very psychological (I took a psychology class my freshman year and it was not my forte to say the least) and crazy to wrap my head around.

The most salient idea in my mind was that of vectors. Vectors can be both visible and invisible, explicit and implied, superficial and emotional. They affect the way we watch something by guiding us towards what we should focus on and influencing how we feel. When I was reading this section, all I could think about were movies--namely action, thriller, adventure type movies. I personally watch maybe one thriller-type movie a year, just since my sensitive psyche is inclined to nightmares. But one movie I particularly enjoy is The Italian Job. I attached one of my favorite scenes from the movie to use as an example.

The producers of this movie use a whole variety of vectors in this scene. The music cues, the motion of the actors, the motion of the camera all influence what we watch and how we feel about it. This scene always brings me to the edge of my seat, which I'm sure is largely to do with how the creators of The Italian Job used forces within the screen to grab and hold my attention.

Greenville on Brews Control

The Rhetoric of Multimedia

Rhetoric has been described as "the available means of persuasion." In the age of orality and literacy, this meant invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and literary devices. However, the available means of persuasion have greatly expanded in the digital age. With the advancement of technology, there are more tools of persuasion beyond just language. Today, as Anders Fagerjord describes in the article "Multimodal Polyphony: Analysis of a Flash Documentary," "writing, speech, music, sound effects, photography, painting, and camera movement" all contribute to a rhetorical argument. Multimedia can be used as the available means of persuasion.

There are several different ways that multimedia can be used to advance an argument. The concept of "rhetorical convergence" is the idea that when different forms of media come together, they are even more persuasive because they can affect the way the audience not only hears, but also looks at an issue.  Even the way the frame moves or the time an image is project on the screen can add meaning. Because of where these technologies show the viewer to focus, the understanding or perception of a scene can be altered. They can also relate the whole to the details and the details to the whole of an image when alternating between micro and macro perspectives.

By using multimedia, you can contextualize images, as well as direct viewers as to where they should look to catch the most important element of the image.

To create some examples, I decided to look at some of my pictures from my semester abroad. If you wanted to zoom out from a picture to the whole scene, you can contextualize a part of the photograph to the whole. This close up of one of my photographs looks merely like a picture of me and my friend Kathleen.

However, once you zoom out, the Eiffel Tower in the background reveals that this image was from our trip to Paris, adding an important element to contextualize the image.

The dialogue recorded over the image can be used to reinforce the point of focus as well. For example, as the image pans back from our faces to reveal the eiffel tower, the voice over could begin to discuss the city of Paris of the history of the tower itself, directing the attention to the background.

Back to Orality

When the radio trend swept through the world in the early 20th century, it seemed almost reminiscent of the age of orality--the realm of philosophers like Plato, Socrates, and the Sophists. It was revolutionary in the sense that it shifted away from a mainly visual and literate culture back to the art of public speaking. In Douglas's article "The Zen of Listening," he comments that radio took America "back into the realms of preliteracy, into orality, to a mode of communication reliant on storytelling, listening, and group memory." The radio, like the invention of the written word, once again caused a major shift in society.

Douglas's article suggests that radio fostered a sense of community amongst its audiences more so than a book or a painting could. Americans across the country could tune in to a program, and know that there were thousands of other people listening to the same program at that moment. There is an undeniably sense of unity and commonality developed by this phenomenon. Still today, producers of entertainment try to capitalize on this community aspect of media. Television programs will try and get users to tweet and hashtag about their show so they can be connected to the rest of the audience. This was first developed with the development of the radio.

Photographic Truth: Fact or Fiction?

Photographs often seem factual—it is a captured moment in time, a piece of visual evidence that is undeniable. Cultural weight is given to photographs because they are traces of the real. However, what people often don’t realize is in the same way that a journalist approaches an article with his own bias, a photographer approaches a photograph with bias as well, and that can seriously affect the factuality of an image.

The photographer dictates a lot of what message is being communicated by an image with the lighting, the angle, the focus, the framing, the moment he or she chooses to capture. While an image can be pretty strong evidence of what is true, they cannot always be taken at face value, in the same way that a piece of writing can not be.

With modern technology, the need to develop a critically eye for photography is escalated further. PhotoShop has revolutionized the way that photos can be digitally enhanced or manipulated to portray a desired effect. Because of this, the photographic truth is put under further scrutiny. There is no guarantee that a photograph represents unbiased truth.

Sturken and Cartwright suggest in their article "Images, Power, and Politics," that the viewer is responsible for how they view images, and the way that they engage what they are viewing. Assessing photographic truth is "one way that we, as viewers, contribute to the process of assigning value to the culture in which we live." While photographic truth is debatable, we, as viewers, can glean truth and meaning if we are critical of the ideologies that may be at play in an image.

Coffee to a Tea

Coffee to a Tea, a set on Flickr.