![]() Tilt: like a pan, but a vertical movement rather than a horizontal one. Later, a zoom and a crane shot are used in the opening sequence. The opening shot of "Psycho" is a simple pan. It can, of course, be used in various combinations with any of the other techniques below. If a shot is strictly a pan, the camera does not move from its location, it just swivels - as if you were standing still and turning your head. Pan: when the camera pivots horizontally, usually on a tripod. The editor often chooses between several takes of a given shot, and may cut them into shorter shots, or inter-cut different takes with other shots.) Sometimes the word "take" - as in continuous shot - is used interchangeably, although it is more specifically used to refer to one of several attempts to "get" a certain shot during filming. Shot: a continuous image on film, from the time it begins (when the camera is rolling) until a cut (or fade out or dissolve) takes us to the next image. ![]() (Or, if you'd care to add to the discussion of a particular shot, Comments have supposedly been enabled on certain posts - though I have to approve 'em first.)Ī few notes about terminology, just so we can be sure we're all speaking the same language: I think of new brilliant opening shots every day, so if your initial ideas have already been mentioned, keep thinking. (Quiz answers coming soon, too.) To no one's surprise, "Star Wars" (1977) has been the most popular nomination - and for good reasons. I still have plenty of excellent Opening Shots submissions to edit and post - and I'm doing my best to get frame grabs to accompany them whenever I can. For the essence of the shot is that there are two streamers in particular traversing the frame in clarity. It's only on a second viewing that these streamers may hit us like a fist in the chest. (Not that Kovacs worked on "Juggernaut": the DP is Gerry Fisher, working with Lester for the first and last time.) So out-of-focus and then in-focus streamers, no big whoop. Besides, this is 1974, five years after cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs and "Easy Rider" had made rack focus a fashionable, sometimes almost fetishistic aspect of self-consciously contemporary moviemaking. Most of their brief time onscreen, they're out of focus, because that's a gentle way of easing us from the shimmering nothingness behind the credits and into the coherent imagery of a movie we are obliged to pay attention to. Send-off streamers bon voyage and all that. There are streamers, fluttering limply and unremarkably in the breeze. And indeed, why register it? It's nothing dramatic. I say "first shots," but we won't cheat: there can be only one opening shot, and it's over with before we barely register it. An oceanliner is preparing to depart an English port and, among other things, a dockside band is tuning up. The first shots cut in after the (swiftly flashed) credits have ended, and we get our worldly bearings. In short, nothing and the essence of everything. On the soundtrack are noises similarly difficult to ascertain some suggest hammers falling, an unguessable project under construction, while in other select nanoseconds we seem to be listening to something beyond the normal range of hearing - the mutual brushing of atoms, perhaps, in an unimaginably microscopic space. The basic color is a beige-y grey, with now and then the merest hint of a diagonal band of something warmer attempting to form across the frame. Whether it's an out-of-focus image or something more elemental - say, the granules of the film emulsion itself - is hard to say. The opening credits of Richard Lester's "Juggernaut" (1974) play over a neutral backdrop that can just barely be detected as an undefined image rather than a simple blank screen. ![]() Jameson, Editor, Movietone News, 1971-81 Editor, Film Comment, 1990-2000:
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