I’ve a video coming out, possibly next week, which opens with a slow pan from left to right, taking you from a pub sign and across a lawn to the pub itself. There’s a title overlaid for bit, but roughly speaking, the sequence lasts for seventeen thousand million hours.<\/p>\n
Okay, Final Cut Pro says 11 seconds. But it has taken effort for me to not slice it down to a fifth of its current length. Somehow there is a part of me that likes this opening, that thinks it’s the right one for this video, but there is a bigger part of me that thinks I risk boring you with it.<\/p>\n
I need to work on this, I know. I need to let there be a breath from time to time, I need for there to be quiet parts of videos or low key parts of any writing I do, and if for no other reason, to give the busier scenes more punch by comparison.<\/p>\n
I am too quick to move on to the next thing, like I think if I don’t keep constantly showing you something different, something changing, you’ll lose interest. Truly, I was born for TikTok generation.<\/p>\n
But I was actually born in the last broadcast television generation instead, and I know that slow can be immensely absorbing. For instance, the opening to the BBC’s version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a quite mesmerising scene just showing various people arriving for a meeting. No one says anything, they barely look at each other, but then minutes into it, the leader of the meeting says something like “Let’s begin.” Smash cut to main titles. I could applaud.<\/p>\n
Or last night I read the script to Before Sunset<\/a>, and the evening before I watched the film. The three Before movies — if you haven’t seen them, Before Sunset is the second — are as quiet and calm and uneventful and packed with drama and noisy and uncomfortable as I remember.<\/p>\n \u00a0Yet this second film opens with a visual echo of the end of the previous one, Before Sunrise. That first film, as I very well noticed, concludes with a series of silent shots of various locations early in the morning. There are no people in sight, but it’s an irresistible look back at when the two lead characters were there.<\/p>\n Before Sunset opens with the same thing. It’s a different city — it’s Paris — but the series of unidentified locations, just one after another, is special. It’s a low key equivalent of a teaser. And I don’t remember what I thought when I first saw it, but watching again this week I realised that of course every shot was of a location we would soon see the lead characters in.<\/p>\n I also realised that this may have just been production practicality. The script says to open with some nice shots of Paris locations, you’re filming in Paris, give yourself a mo to take some extra shots.<\/p>\n Yet to me, the idea is just as fascinating as the closing moments of the first film. In both, I think you marvel at how different a city looks when the people are gone, and in both I think you see this world as a stage set.<\/p>\n What you definitely see is that this takes time and does so in every sense: it takes its time and you’re with it to the end.<\/p>\n I really need to be better at letting something breathe and not be forever cutting to the next thing and the next. Anyway, good talking to you, must dash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve a video coming out, possibly next week, which opens with a slow pan from left to right, taking you … Continue reading