To think about: Shannon Information and cataloguing ‘rushes’ from a documentary. This is not about the actual amount of entropy in any given frame of a uncompressed video. Rather the entropy of all the metadata from all the footage.
Eisenstenian film theory was an attempt to marry Marxist Dialectic with film editing. The “highest” type of film cut was “Intellectual Montage” the bone to nuclear-satellite cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps the most iconic example in film history. Eisenstein himself used the more on-the-nose approach of showed crowds of protesters being mowed down by Tsarist troops being interspliced with footage of animals being slaughtered in an abattoir.
The Dialectic of cuts, the juxtaposition between image A and image B—be it the Kuleshov experiment—the actor appearing to look at either soup or a corpse lying in state thereby changing the inferred emotion of the actor—is a critical film language technique.
Documentary Rushes of similar thematic content—i.e. “Shot 1 - mid shot children playing” “Shot 2 - mid shot different children playing” and lower entropy. “Shot 1 - mid shot children playing” “Shot 87 - close up of old man smiling”. We want to avoid homogenous sets.
The problem for a film editor, especially a observational documentary film editor or someone working with archive material (think of the films of Bret Morgan and Asif Kapadia) is every time you create a sequence you have to watch all of the material, again, hoping to find the dialectic or invent a narrative that combines at least two shots together.
Binary Search algorithms are also relevant here.
CLIP and visual Semantic Networks can automate part of the search if the editor has something specific in mind. I want to cultivate serendipity—unforseen juxtapositions.
To think about:
Shannon Information and cataloguing ‘rushes’ from a documentary. This is not about the actual amount of entropy in any given frame of a uncompressed video. Rather the entropy of all the metadata from all the footage.
Eisenstenian film theory was an attempt to marry Marxist Dialectic with film editing. The “highest” type of film cut was “Intellectual Montage” the bone to nuclear-satellite cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps the most iconic example in film history. Eisenstein himself used the more on-the-nose approach of showed crowds of protesters being mowed down by Tsarist troops being interspliced with footage of animals being slaughtered in an abattoir.
The Dialectic of cuts, the juxtaposition between image A and image B—be it the Kuleshov experiment—the actor appearing to look at either soup or a corpse lying in state thereby changing the inferred emotion of the actor—is a critical film language technique.
Documentary Rushes of similar thematic content—i.e. “Shot 1 - mid shot children playing” “Shot 2 - mid shot different children playing” and lower entropy. “Shot 1 - mid shot children playing” “Shot 87 - close up of old man smiling”. We want to avoid homogenous sets.
The problem for a film editor, especially a observational documentary film editor or someone working with archive material (think of the films of Bret Morgan and Asif Kapadia) is every time you create a sequence you have to watch all of the material, again, hoping to find the dialectic or invent a narrative that combines at least two shots together.
Binary Search algorithms are also relevant here.
CLIP and visual Semantic Networks can automate part of the search if the editor has something specific in mind. I want to cultivate serendipity—unforseen juxtapositions.