To demonstrate the effects of different shutter speeds on moving images, I recorded 3 videos of Joe throwing a bottle in the air whilst making the shutter speed slower each time.
Fast Shutter Speed - 1/250 second
In this shot, the shutter speed is so high that you can hardly tell that the water bottle is in motion, it is slightly distorted however overall it seems as if its still. Normal Shutter Speed - 1/50 second
In this example of a normal shutter speed, you can tell that the water bottle is moving as it appears blurry in the image, however it isn't too blurry and you can still tell what the object is.
Slow Shutter Speed - 1/30 second
This example was not the best to use as the camera was slightly out of focus during the shot which made everything in the shot seem slightly blurry, however you can still see the effects of a slow shutter speed as the water bottle is so distorted in the picture you can hardly tell what it is.
in the first pull focus example, i changed the focus from aj to joe, however i changed the focus slightly too much at the end which i then changed back. in the second example i think i demonstrated pull focus better as i changed it from joe lighting his cigarette to the two people walking in the distance, i think the second one was more successful as it had a more subtle, smooth change, i made the same mistake as i did in the first one however it isn't as obvious as i adjusted into the correct focus faster than the first time.
The term auteur originates from France which translates as author, which means that a director’s film reflects their creative vision. The Auteur theory was introduced in the 1950’s by French film directors like Francois Truffaut who advocated a focus on the contribution directors made on the style and form of film, he quoted “A true film auteur is someone who brings something genuinely personal to his subject instead of producing a tasteful, accurate but lifeless rendering of the original material” An auteur is a film maker whose style and practise is distinctive which creates a signature auteur status for them. It is also a film maker who has a personal, signature style and keeps creative control over his or her work. Making any film or in this case a music video the director is the auteur but it would not be possible for them to create the whole production on their own, instead they collaborate with others and team up with; writer, cinematographer and actors but the director is still an auteur in a sense as they control everyone and everything in the production. The auteur theory is different to the genre theory as auteur draws our attention towards what is different between film, rather than what is similar. https://www.slideshare.net/staceyhall/auteur-theory-5416218
The French New Wave was a group of trailblazing directors who exploded onto the film scene in the late 1950s; revolutionising cinematic conventions by marrying the rapid cuts of Hollywood with philosophical trends. Lindsay Parnell explores how this group of young directors reshaped cinema. With an emphasis on invigorating cinematic narrative, French New Wave Cinema rejected traditional linear tropes of storytelling and created a new language of film. Inspired by both depictions of the common, lower class workers of Italian Neorealism and Hollywood’s beloved ‘Golden Age’, the French New Wave became a vibrant influence on international cinema which is still being felt today.
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/france/articles/the-french-new-wave-revolutionising-cinema/
Originating from the artistic philosophy of ‘auteur theory’; a concept that acknowledges film as a product of the director’s absolute imaginative and inspired aesthetic vision, New Wave filmmakers inspired the cult of the director as artistic icon on a par with writers and painters.
The philosophical importance of the French New Wave, and their role in the development of a theory of film, was in large part due to one of the movement’s most influential and pivotal creators, André Bazin. Bazin, a theorist of cinema and renowned film critic, was the founding father of the French movie magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.
Cahiers Du Cinema
Its initial publication in 1951 marked a crucial moment in the lives of many acclaimed French screenwriters and directors. In his belief in film as a highly intellectual art, Bazin was a meticulous academic of film who believed that cinema was far more than popular entertainment. Bazin’s emphasis on the crucial role of a director, the artistic creator who implements his or her own aesthetic and narrative vision to the screen was debated, interrogated and explored in various articles of Cahiers du Cinéma, specifically in an essay published in 1954 by François Truffaut titled, A Certain Tendency in French Cinema.
A major inspiration for the New Wave critics-turned-filmmakers came
from the writings of the French film critic Alexandre Astruc, who pub-
lished an influential article in 1948 called “Camera Stylo” (Camera-Pen).
Astruc argued that cinema was potentially a means of expression as sub-
tle and complex as written language. He argued that cinema too was a
language, “a form in which and by which an artist can express his
thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions ex-
actly as he does in a contemporary essay or novel.”2 Influenced by As-
truc, New Wave directors embraced what was then a revolutionary new
way of understanding and interpreting films. They promoted in their crit-
ical writings what Truffaut called “les politiques des auteurs” (the au-
thor policy), which the American film critic Andrew Sarris referred to as
“auteur theory.”3
An underlying assumption of auteur theory was Astruc’s idea that,
despite film’s status as primarily a commercial entertainment medium,
it could potentially be an art form as powerful in its means of expres-
sion as literature or poetry. In order to propose filmmaking as an art,
however, there had to be an artist, a central consciousness whose vision
is inscribed in the work. How was this possible in a medium that is ba-
sically collaborative, a combination of the efforts of producers, direc-
tors, scriptwriters, set designers, editors, cameramen, actors, and oth-
ers? For the French New Wave theorists, the author of the film (the auteur)
was the director.
Traditionally the “author” of the film was thought to be the screen-
writer, the author of the script upon which the film was based. The French
New Wave theorists disagreed. They believed that the written script of
a film is only a blueprint, raw material that achieves meaning or
significance only when the words are embodied in images on the screen.
As they saw it, since the director is responsible for the images, he over-
sees the set designs, cinematography, editing, and performances of the
actors, and also, in many cases, reworks the screenplay or script. Thus,
according to the New Wave critics, it is the director and not the screen-
writer whose artistic vision is inscribed onto the film.
Certain directors, to be sure, had long been understood as artists, but
only in the noncommercial art cinema of Europe and Japan: filmmakers
such as Bergman, Bresson, Ozu, and Murnau, who had a great deal of
creative freedom in the making of their works. But the French New Wave theorists believed that even in that most commercial realm—the Holly-
wood film factory, where directors were under contract to the studios
and thus assigned the works they were to direct—the works of certain
filmmakers were always marked by the director’s individual themes, psy-
chological preoccupations, and stylistic practices. They singled out and
praised such directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford,
and Orson Welles, calling them auteurs, film artists of the highest order.
Proponents of the French New Wave differentiated auteurs from met-
teurs en scène, directors who faithfully adapted the work of others and
did not inscribe their individual personalities or styles onto their films.
In Truffaut’s most famous attack on classic French film, an article enti-
tled “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” he especially criticizes
the writing team of Jean Aurench and Pierre Bost for being merely liter-
ary men and thus disdainfully underestimating the unique power of cin-
ematic language. He praised French directors like Jean Renoir, Robert
Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, and Max Ophuls (who had emigrated
from Germany to France), for making visually innovative films in their
own distinct styles and for creating their films from their own stories.4
These directors were true auteurs.
French new wave was created during the late 50's in Paris, it was one of the most important few years in film culture due to film enthusiasts discussing how to change cinema as they had little money to make their own films. There was a "lack of innovation in the industry" which caused films to feel stale, soon film makers started creating their movies in an original format that was different to others. These films purposes are to present French life during the 50's and 60's through cinema, La nouvelle vague made cinema feel more personal as the directors would use their films to show their own life and thoughts. Their films would create a true representation of their life, each film would differentiate themselves from their older outdated counterparts. This caused an alterative way of film making to be made that had a new style of presenting the narrative. The film makers showed that things can be done differently by taking already existing methods and creating new techniques for them.
A TIME-HONORED tradition: Stand outside a movie theater with a camera and microphone and poll the audience members for their reactions. What did you think of the film? A grandmotherly woman makes a face and waves her hand in disgust: Revolting! Idiotic! A middle-aged gentleman, stout and respectable, takes a more tolerant view: This is a movie about how young people live today, he says, a movie made by young people, and he is generally in favor of young people. But a sober-looking, well-dressed younger fellow demurs. “I don’t think it’s very serious,” he says dismissively.
This little scene of impromptu amateur film criticism — or market research, if you prefer — occurs in Emmanuel Laurent’s new documentary, “Two in the Wave,” about the filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, whose friendship was a driving force and a central fact (as well as, eventually, a casualty) of the French New Wave. Those people outside that Parisian cinema in 1960 have just seen “Breathless,” Mr. Godard’s debut feature, starring Jean Seberg as an American exchange student who teases, loves, protects and betrays a French hoodlum played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, who smokes and runs his thumb pensively over his lips. Some of the patrons are baffled, some enthusiastic, some noncommittal, a mixed bag of responses that seems a bit deflating. Aren’t they aware of the historical significance of what they have just witnessed?
Is it possible now, 50 years later, even to imagine seeing “Breathless” for the first time? Mr. Godard’s film quickly took its place among those touchstones of modern art that signified a decisive break with what came before — paintings and books and pieces of music that have held onto their reputation for radicalism long after being accepted as masterpieces, venerated in museums and taught in schools.
Somehow, the galvanic, iconoclastic force of their arrival is preserved as they age into institutional respectability. So even if you were not around to hear, let’s say, the catcalls greeting Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” or to unwrap a copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” smuggled over from Paris in defiance of the postmaster general, or to examine Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” or Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans when they were first exhibited, the works themselves allow you to place yourself among the brave vanguard who did. And even if you did not see “Breathless” during its first run at the dawn of the ’60s, surely every frame carries an afterimage of that heady time, just as every jazz note and blast of ambient street noise on the soundtrack brings echoes of an almost mythic moment.
Photo
Humphrey Bogart in Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place.” CreditSony Pictures Repertory
At the same time, though, such legendary status can also be a burden, weighing down what was once fresh and shocking with a heavy freight of expectation and received opinion. There is perhaps no episode in all of film history quite as encrusted with contradictory significance as the cresting, in 1959 and 1960, of the Nouvelle Vague. It was a burst of youthful, irreverent energy that was also a decisive engagement in the continuing battle to establish cinema as a serious art form. The partisans of the new — Truffaut and Mr. Godard, along with comrades like Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer — were steeped in film history. Before taking up their cameras they had been critics, polemicists and self-taught scholars, and yet, like other aesthetic insurgents before them, they attacked a reigning style they believed was characterized by unthinking and sclerotic traditionalism. And their drive to reassert the glory of French cinema was grounded in an almost fanatical love of American movies.
During World War II Godard became a naturalized citizen of Switzerland and attended school in Nyons (Switzerland). His parents divorced in 1948, at which time he returned to Paris to attend the Lycée Rohmer. In 1949 he studied at the Sorbonne to prepare for a degree in ethnology. However, it was during this time that he began attending with François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer.
In 1950 Godard, with Rivette and Rohmer, founded "Gazette du cinéma", which published five issues between May and November. He wrote a number of articles for the journal, often using the pseudonym "Hans Lucas". After Godard worked on and financed two films by Rivette and Rohmer, Godard's family cut off their financial support in 1951, and he resorted to a Bohemian lifestyle that included stealing food and money when necessary. In January 1952 he began writing film criticism for "Les cahiers du cinéma". Later that year he traveled to North and South America with his father and attempted to make his first film (of which only a tracking shot from a car was ever accomplished).
In 1953 he returned to Paris briefly before securing a job as a construction worker on a dam project in Switzerland. With the money from the job, he made a short film in 1954 about the building of the dam called Operation Concrete (1958) ("Operation Concrete"). Later that year his mother was killed in a motor scooter accident in Switzerland. In 1956 Godard began writing again for "Les cahiers du cinéma" as well as for the journal "Arts". In 1957 Godard worked as the press attache for "Artistes Associés", and made his first French film, All the Boys Are Called Patrick (1959) (aka "Charlotte et Véronique").
In 1958 he shot Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1960) ("Charlotte and Her Boyfriend"), his homage to Jean Cocteau. Later that year he took unused footage of a flood in Paris shot by Truffaut and edited it into a film called A Story of Water (1961) ("A Story of Water"), which was an homage to Mack Sennett. In 1959 he worked with Truffaut on the weekly publication "Temps de Paris". Godard wrote a gossip column for the journal, but also spent much time writing scenarios for films and a body of critical writings which placed him firmly in the forefront of the "nouvelle vague" aesthetic, precursing the French New Wave.
It was also in that year Godard began work on Breathless (1960) ("Breathless"). In 1960 he married Anna Karina in Switzerland. In April and May he shot Le Petit Soldat (1963) in Geneva and was preparing the film for a fall release in Paris. However, French censors banned it due to its references to the Algerian war, and it was not shown until 1963. In March 1960 Breathless (1960) premiered in Paris. It was hugely successful both with the film critics and at the box office, and became a landmark film in the French New Wave with its references to American cinema, its jagged editing and overall romantic/cinephilia approach to filmmaking. The film propelled the popularity of male lead Jean-Paul Belmondo with European audiences.
In 1961 Godard shot A Woman Is a Woman (1961), his first film using color widescreen stock. Later that year he participated in the collective effort to remake the film The Seven Deadly Sins (1962), which was heralded as an important project in artistic collaboration. In 1962 Godard shot My Life to Live (1962) in Paris, his first commercial success since "À bout de souffle". Later that year he shot a segment entitled "Le Nouveau Monde" for the collective film Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963), another important work in the history of collaborative multiple-authored art.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000419/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
“To make a film all you need is a girl and a gun.” Jean-Luc Godard’s oft-quoted line might have come from the mouth of any tough-talking, American movie director from Hollywood’s classic era. The fact that it was spoken by a 29-year-old Franco-Swiss intellectual from Paris says much about the cross-cultural pollination that was so crucial to birth of the New Wave and to what is often considered its flagship film: À bout de souffle. Indeed the film’s simple story resembles a classic American film noir, such as those made by Monogram Studios, to whom the film is dedicated. But Godard approached the story in ways that departed radically from past genre archetypes. His years as a critic, his immersion in both high and low culture, his philosophical explorations, all impacted on his debut feature film. As he said in an interview, the film was the result of “a decade’s worth of making movies in my head.” The fact that he was relatively inexperienced and had little knowledge of the practical aspects of filmmaking proved unimportant. What he did have were an accumulation of original ideas, which he applied fearlessly to the aesthetic and technical elements of the film. The results were nothing less than a cinematic revolution.
It was Francois Truffaut who, several years earlier, first sketched out the outline for what would become À bout de souffle. He had been inspired by a true story that had fascinated tabloid France in 1952, when a man named Michel Portail, a petty criminal who had stolen a car, shot a motorcycle policeman who pulled him over, and then hid out for almost two weeks until he was found in a canoe docked in the centre of Paris. One aspect of the story that had appealed to Truffaut was the fact that Portail had an American journalist girlfriend who he had tried to convince to run away with him. Instead she turned him into the police. Truffaut had collaborated with both Claude Chabrol and Godard on the story but had failed to interest any producers. By 1959, Godard, now desperate to catch up with his Cahiers colleagues and make a first feature film, asked if he might revive the project. Truffaut, buoyant with success after the ecstatic reception of Les Quatre cents coups at Cannes, not only agreed, but also helped to convince Georges de Beauregard to produce the film.
With a low budget of 510,000 francs (a third of the average cost of a French film at that time), Godard set about casting for the film. He suggested to Beauregard that they hire Jean Seberg, the young actress who had made an uncertain start in pictures on Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse, as the American woman. Although most critics had disparaged both films, Godard had written admiringly about Seberg in the pages of Cahiers du cinema. Unimpressed by the director at their first meeting, describing him as “an incredibly introverted, messy-looking young man with glasses, who didn’t look her in the eye when she talked,” she was, nevertheless, encouraged by her husband, a French attorney with directing ambitions of his own, to accept the role. Persuading Columbia Studios to lend her out for the film was less easy, but again her husband stepped in and managed to convince the studio to accept a small cash payment for her participation. As for Jean-Paul Belmondo, Godard had already promised him the lead role in his first film. Belmondo, who was beginning to get lucrative offers from the mainstream film industry, ignored the warning words of his agent who told him, “you’re making the biggest mistake of your life,” and accepted the part.
With his cast in place, Godard set about knocking Truffaut’s story outline into a screenplay. His original plan had been to use the outline as it was and merely add dialogue to it. Instead he rewrote the entire story, shifting the emphasis away from Truffaut’s portrayal of an anguished young man who turns to crime out of despair, to that of a young hoodlum with an existential indifference to common morality and the rule of law. Crucially, in the new version, the American woman Patricia comes into the narrative near the beginning and their love story dominates the film.
Filming took place over the summer of 1959. Behind the camera was Raoul Coutard, originally a documentary cameraman for the French army’s information service in Indochina during the war. Coutard’s background suited Godard who wanted the film to be shot, as much as possible, like a documentary, with a handheld camera and the minimum of lighting. This decision was taken for both aesthetic reasons – making the film look like a newsreel – and practical reasons – saving the time setting up lights and tripod. Flexibility was very important to Godard, who wanted the freedom to improvise and shoot whenever and wherever he wanted without too many technical constraints. He and Coutard devised ways – such as using a wheelchair for tracking shots and shooting with specialist lowlight filmstock for nighttime scenes – to make this possible. Godard’s method of directing A bout de souffle was even more radical than his technical innovations. Much to the producer Beauregard’s disapproval, he often only filmed for a couple of hours a day. Sometimes, when lacking the necessary inspiration, he would cancel the day’s filming altogether. Early on in the shoot, he discarded the screenplay he had written and decided to write the dialogue day by day as the production went along. The actors found this procedure strange and sometimes forgot their lines, however, since the soundtrack was to be post-synchronized later, when the actor’s were lost for words, Godard would call out their lines to them from behind the camera. For Godard the act of making a film was as much a part of its meaning as its content and style. Like “action painting” he felt a film reflected the conditions under which it was made, and that a director’s technique was the method by which a film could be made personal.
