Blog Post #37 -  Montages

 A montage is a collection of camera shots, images, and scenes that are edited together and used to convey many actions or the passage of time. A montage is created by utilizing the skill to edit together and reorder different pictures, videos, and scenes, to tell a story. This allows a filmmaker to tell a great amount of information in a shorter amount of time, by compressing different shots together. 


I researched montages on studiobinder.com, in order to develop my knowledge of their uses and different forms. Montages have many different uses and can be used in many scenarios, as it is a very broad tool. The use of montages I would like to focus on is their ability to speed up time in a film— to condense the time while still getting a story across. An example of this usage of montages is shown in Pixar's movie Up, which uses a montage to show the whole life of a couple in just a few minutes. The montage is shown below.



The montage uses many different scenes across time, some containing multiple shots, in order to tell a story, and invoke a happy emotion in the audience using both the montage and score. The score and lighting of the montage then both shift towards the end, in order to invoke a more sorrowful emotion in the audience. This montage is used to speed up time and to develop the character the montage is based around.


Conclusion

Here is an example of a montage I made—




I created this by recording videos and editing them together in iMovie, with a cross-dissolve transition effect. Although it is not a very detailed narrative, it is supposed to depict the action of walking through a house and going outside. The fact that it is a montage helps to reduce the amount of time this scene takes onscreen.

In my project, I would like to use several montages to fit more of the narrative into a shorter time. More specifically, I would like to utilize montages in the driving scene, and the beginning scene where Fern is reading S.K.B.D. News. In the beginning scene, I would like to use a montage to show Fern sitting at the table for a while, drinking coffee, messing around, and reading the news in order to develop a feeling of Fern's character to the audience from the start, and to make time to show what the article he is reading is on. In the driving scene, I would like to use a montage to speed up the process of moving out of the driveway, and actually driving down the road, so as to not bore the audience— keeping a faster pace of the narrative.

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