Tempo/rhythm/pacing/timin... dif!
Question: So I'm taking film and culture and we are going over editing right now. The book discusses tempo and rhythm but I'm just not understanding it. The rhythm and pacing that I'm talking about does not pertain to music, but instead, it relates to shots.
Can somone explain to me how exactly shots can have a tempo?
Answers: So I'm taking film and culture and we are going over editing right now. The book discusses tempo and rhythm but I'm just not understanding it. The rhythm and pacing that I'm talking about does not pertain to music, but instead, it relates to shots.
Can somone explain to me how exactly shots can have a tempo?
The tempo of shots and scenes is dictated by how long the director spends doing certain things. How long they spend showing emotional reaction, how long they spend showing non-dialog non-action scenes(such as sitting and watching an opera) and generally how long is spent on scenes which are not fundamentally important to the plot of the movie but rather add flavour to it.
How quickly dialog goes back and forth is also controlled by the director. If certain characters take longer to respond every time they have a line it will draw the movie out.
The other major way tempo exists in movies is how long it takes to cut to a seperate scene. If the camera spends a long time on a face, or on a specific image before going on to the next scene it gives the feeling of a slower tempo.
There are lots of other ways to affect tempo, these three are just the most noticable and will generally define how the viewer sees the movie: either a fast paced one or a slow paced one.