Technical codes Technical codes

• Sound
• Colour
• Camera
• Composition
• Cutting

Sound

Sound helps to tell the story in a film in two ways:

• Sounds within the world of the story (sometimes referred to as diegetic sound), eg the interior car and exterior traffic sounds in Between Us;
• Sounds outside the world of the story (sometimes referred to as non-diegetic sound), eg the music in The Monk and the Fish.

In animated films, the sound effects, dialogue and music are recorded separately.

Exactly when the dialogue is linked to the images depends on the animators, ie whether the movements and expressions of the characters are animated to fit pre-recorded dialogue, or the voice cast members use the images as a starting point for their characterisation. In live-action, most of the sound and dialogue is recorded in sync with the camera as it films the action; the music is added later. The procedure in which the picture and all elements of the soundtrack come together to produce the finished film is called the sound mix.

Just as visually the camera, colour and setting all contribute to telling the story, the soundtrack may contain several elements, each of which constitutes a 'layer'. It is possible for each of these to be used simultaneously:

• Sound effects are often added sounds, not recorded in sync with the picture. They are either related directly to the action of a particular scene (called 'spot effects'), like the bell tolling in The Monk and the Fish, or for a general atmosphere (called 'atmos effects'), eg the traffic sounds in Between Us. The acoustics, timbre and volume of sound effects can all give us clues and cues about setting: for example, the echo acoustic of the opening of Birthday Boy puts us in a strange place, between interior and exterior (it turns out to be the fuselage of a crashed plane).

• Music may be specially composed, or exist already and be chosen for its appropriateness. Sometimes sound effects can be orchestrated to sound like music, as in the drumming motif in Flatlife. The reverse of this is where music does the 'work' of sound effects, called 'Mickey Mousing', for obvious reasons. The Monk and the Fish features examples of this, where the strings get agitated as the main character leaps about gesticulating to his fellow monks. Music can be broken down further into instrumentation, tempo, key and orchestration theme - see 'Asking questions - the Tell Me approach'

• Silence can be used as a space between sounds to create a 'pause for thought' between actions or dialogue, or to add emphasis to the emotional content of the action within a scene. Silence is used in this way in Between Us to signal the ultimately unbridgeable gulf between Lucas and the girl. (Note however, complete silence tends to sound unreal, so silence is usually filled with subtle atmos effects.)

• Dialogue and voice-over is the final category of sound, and again there are different versions and dimensions in these films. There is 'dialogue' signified by characters writing to each other (Between Us) or gesturing (The Monk and Fish, any of the silent films), and there is dialogue 'written' in speech bubbles in Flatlife - though here we have to infer the content of the talk, as the type is too small to read!  The boy in Birthday Boy talks mostly to himself, except, movingly, when he 'talks' to his father during his fantasy war game.

Colour

The choice of colour contributes to how a film looks and helps to tell the story. It may contribute to:

• Overall mood, eg the bright primary colours of Flatlife, which give it its 'cartoon' flavour;
• Visual contrast, eg again in Hidden the different  uses of colour - the shades of blue in Sweden and the shades of brown in Peru - enable us to differentiate between the locations, and between the past and the present;
• Our understanding of the time frame of the action, eg the passage of the sun through Birthday Boy.

Many children believe that black and white films are boring. However, black and white can bring out strong and subtle contrasts in light and shade, and heighten facial expressions. The Mitchell and Kenyon films illustrate this. In colour the faces would be almost 'invisible' to us. The monochrome allows us to focus on the individuals looking at us from a century ago.

Camera

In a film, the camera acts almost as a 'narrator', leading the viewer through the story via sequences of camera shots. Different kinds of cameras are used for animation and live action filming, but generally types of shots are referred to as if they are the same for both formats. In reality there are no 'close-ups' in animation; the effect is achieved by drawing in different scales.

Different types of camera shots are used for different purposes.

• Extreme Close-Up (ECU), for moments of high drama: see examples in Nits or Between Us;
• Close Up (CU) is used for detail rather than emotional impact;
• Medium or Mid Shot (MS) allows us to see more of a character in his/her setting, performing actions, but still providing some detail. Much of Hidden is shot in medium shot, always holding Giancarlo in context, almost as if he is imprisoned in the frame.  The silent films are filmed in medium or long shot, as this was the only compositional frame conventionally used before about 1906.
• Long Shot (LS) offers an overview of location and/or action, or includes a crowd of people. It is often used at the beginning of a film to 'set the scene', in what is referred to as an 'Establishing Shot'.  What is extraordinary about a number of the films in this pack is how they are filmed entirely in long shot: The Monk and the Fish, in common with all of Michael Dudok de Wit's work, is filmed in long shot, even at moments of highest drama, as is Flatlife. 
• Aerial shot is a form of long shot from above; for example, the 'impact shot' of Birthday Boy, when his mother comes home, and he is asleep, is shot as an aerial, or 'top shot'.
• Point of View (POV) refers to narrative perspective rather than a conceptual 'viewpoint'; for example, Lucas's view of the girl in the car, or his view of his parents, in Between Us.

One resource available to film-makers that isn't possible for photographers is to move their camera, and use its 'durational' dimension:

• Zoom: The zoom button on a camera allows for the change of the size of the subject, used mainly to set up the shot required by zooming in or out;
• Pan: The camera moves horizontally from left to right or right to left;
• Tilt: The camera moves vertically up or down;
• Tracking: The camera follows the action by being moved on a track (often called a 'dolly shot', after the trolley, or 'dolly', the camera sits on).

Composition

Composition (or mise-en-scène) is one of the key visual resources available to a film-maker - how he or she disposes the elements of action and set within the frame. You can 'freeze frame' a shot and analyse its content, focusing on:

Aspects of actors' performance - gesture, facial expression, relation to other actors and to the space they inhabit. For example, much of the drama and emotional content of Between Us is communicated through facial expression. The children are confined in their small spaces, and not able to speak to each other, so much of the action is expressed through the 'look'.

Objects in the frame - props, dress, set design. The action of Flatlife is delivered largely through the interaction of the four characters with simple objects, which each express some aspect of character or personality: the artist's easel and paintings; the washing machine, playing cards, and television.  The source of the humour then is partly through props or objects that patently don't belong in this environment, like the panda.

Lighting in the frame - source, intensity, type (ie natural or artificial).  In animation, lighting is only implied, by changes in colour, as in the changing palette of oranges and browns in The Monk and the Fish; and early films had to use natural daylight, before sophisticated lighting rigs were developed. (One of the reasons the American film industry established itself in Los Angeles was because of the reliability of the light due to the climate).

Aspects of composition - the geometries used, lines, planes and patterns. In a way, Flatlife is all about geometry: the shape of each flat window conforms to the aspect ratio of cinema, looking like a screen in itself. There are patterns in Rescued by Rover and An Interesting Story, with characters moving from right to left across the screen, conventionally a counter-intuitive direction (as we read from left to right usually).

Moving against the expected direction of travel creates drama, and anxiety in an audience; the return of Rover comprises him mostly moving back across the screen from left to right.

It is important to remember that no shot in a film is actually static: lighting will change, people will move, the camera will shift its attention and focus. So, for each of the categories above, ask also how the elements in the shot change.

Cutting

No shot can be fully understood outside of the context of the other shots that surround it. Consider the shot sequence in Birthday Boy, when Manuk returns home and finds the box of his father's things. What he does next, is crucial to our understanding of his character: the fact that he tries on the boots marches up and down shows us that he doesn't know what we know, that his father has been killed in action. 

The examples of early silent cinema in this compilation show how principles of 'continuity editing' in narrative film evolved. Where a character leaves a frame, say at the left hand side of the shot, he/ she/ it will enter the next frame from the right. The effect is one of 'seamless continuity', but the rule is an arbitrary one.

Shots aren't only edited together to develop narrative continuity; film-makers can create juxtapositions that jolt, provoke, or confound us, often to bind us in to the story, keeping us guessing.  Love on the Wing is conceived as a continuous montage sequence - drawn animation is rarely 'edited' in a conventional sense - with the drawings (physically hand drawn on the film strip) morphing through a dizzying range of shapes (but with a helpful summation in the finale).