Mechanics of Filmmaking: Chills and the Gravity of a Reaction Shot

Let me begin by saying, this is idea is mainly based off of my own observations, but hey, this is my blog and I get to write about what I want in it.

I've never cried during a movie. Ever. That doesn't mean I haven't felt emotionally moved by the craft, but I'm just not one to get weepy. I am, however, prone to chills.

You know... you're sitting there watching a movie you're really into and something HUGE happens in the story, and chills begin to go up and down your spine, the hair on your arms stands up... and maybe you even start to get choked up. Maybe a son just returned from war and walked into his parents' house after believing he was dead, or maybe the father showed up to the son's baseball game after saying he couldn't, or maybe a group of friends are sliding to their doom into a big incinerator and a giant claw comes and rescues them from certain doom... you know... the usual.

You're suddenly moved. Not just internally, but your body starts releasing chemicals, adrenaline starts pumping, and you have a physical reaction to the images projected on that forty foot glowing screen. It's not just you, it's a whole room full of people that experience it. I recently got to thinking... if you can achieve the same response at the same time from a whole room full of people, there's got to be some sort of science and method to the whole thing. Some sort of intentional precision of mechanics comprised of timing, performance and the culmination of events surrounding the event. But how is it cultivated and what is it that moves us? I was surprised by what I began to notice.

I really started to pay attention to when specifically the chills would come during a movie. More often than not, it's not from the big wide shot that displays the event that changes the tide of the whole story, but moreso the intimate close up reaction to the event. I believe there are a few things going on here that attribute to the chill occurring consistently.

Firstly, I've always heard people say that the best films are the ones that move you and evoke some kind of emotion from the viewer. The story needs to be captivating enough so that the audience can care about the character's journey so they are able to have an emotional reaction to it. There needs to be a grounds for emotional investment.

Secondly, I'd like to thank Rising From Ashes director TC Johnstone for articulating it this way: motion creates emotion. It's the whole reason we have cinematographers aside from lighting. I'm talking about using the motion of the camera, or blocking in some way to amplify the performance to really let that particular emotional moment sing. While I would argue that this isn't necessary for that key moment, it can enhance it tenfold.

Think of every Spielberg movie you've ever seen. A character sees/realizes the for the first time and that their world has just changed, the camera dolly does a low push in on their face reacting to it. Maybe we haven't even seen what it is yet, but DAMN it's moving. It's an emotional pinnacle for the character that is conveyed to the viewer, who responds with their own emotional pinnacle.

I would love to do a SuperCut (as they're being called these days) of as many reaction push-ins as possible in mainstream movies just to see how often it's used and how differently each one makes you feel. A slow push-in for a tender moment, a fast one for when the character sees the dinosaur or monster for the first time. It's a revealing moment that is just compounded by the motion of the camera.

Again, I apologize for relating a lot of my articles to J.J. Abrams these last few posts, but my thesis and study sort of revolves around Spielbergian techniques, and J.J. seems to be the most current filmmaker employing these techniques in that way.

In a recent interview promoting Super 8 that was conducted by Buzzine, JJ said something that sort of brought all of this together for me.

He talks about his "Little Man." Now before you all go busting up laughing, hear this idea out.

In the interview, J.J. is asked about how he approached the trainwreck sequence in Super 8 and made it such a fresh and engaging experience.

His response was this:

"There's this stupid thing I do sometimes when I'm doodling, which I'm always doing. I draw a circle and then I shade it, and then draw like a little horizon line so it goes from being this circle to being a three-dimensional circle. But then the thing is, whenever I draw little figure next to it of a certain size, maybe very small, suddenly that circle is this sphere that becomes a thing of scale. It's weird how it suddenly has this meaning and importance, only because of the person, the figure that's standing there. There's a weird thing that happens when you connect a person to an event. Suddenly the event has different meaning. It's not just the event which is maybe cool and interesting itself, but suddenly it's relatable and it's a relative experience."

(Read the full article here.)


The sequence begins with a fantastic reaction shot with a push in on Joel, and goes into a death-defying chase as these kids try to dodge an onslaught of traincars flying through the air and plowing into the earth all around them. I think J.J. is talking about here is really showing the gravity of the situation. The reactional push-in sucks you into the event. Their lives are about to change. He then keeps you engaged by keeping the camera on the ground and with the kids. From their perspective. This works out beneficially three-fold for the sequence.

Not only are you getting the benefit of seeing the emotion on their face as this event happens, but your peripheral is also chopped off as traincars are coming from both the side and top of the frame unexpectedly, and you're experiencing it with them right there, rather than as a spectator from afar. As an added bonus, you're receiving exactly what J.J. describes with the Little Man. A sense of scale and gravity of the situation. I would love to scrub through that sequence and analyze it a bit more once it comes out on blu-ray, but I can tell you there was more than one time in that three or four minute period that I got chills. It's just a really effective sequence that displays this entire idea beautifully.

Although he isn't exactly addressing the importance of the reaction shot, he is discussing how he handled revealing the gravity of the situation. And I would argue that the reaction shot also does this in its own way, but relies on the adjacent shot(s) of whatever it is they are looking at to show the contrast of that scale. One archaeologist versus a dinosaur. One boat captain versus a vicious man-eating shark. One child versus a barrage of traincars raining down around him... you get the point. Revealing scale and reaction is crucial to those iconic emotional moments of film.

This is a pretty bold statement, as I'm still in my infancy in learning this wonderful craft, but I believe this technique is one of the most moving and powerful tools in the filmmaker's toolbox. There are one or two major moments in my upcoming short film that use this technique, and each time it's used for a different affect. I'll be interested to see how it plays out on its own and how it plays in sequence next to the cause and reaction of each incident.

I'd like to finish out my thoughts on this with a couple trailers. All of which employ the reaction shot and get you excited about the film. Now as I said earlier, you really need to be invested in the character to get a total emotional response from it, but by not having an investment and just showing a series of reaction shots, you start asking yourself questions and mystery is instantly generated.

I want to start first with Spielberg's War Horse, because the efficacy of this trailer is up for questioning, but I think it shows the ideas listed above quite well. By my count, there are about six or seven major reactional push-ins throughout the trailer, intermixed with shots of scale and gravity. It creates mystery and wonderment (which as you know is what I believe to be one of Spielberg's major MO's). Very little talking in this trailer, just action and reaction. Watch it once all the way through if you haven't seen it yet, and watch it again to start paying attention to what I'm talking about. Action and reactions GALORE. Scale. Wonder. Mystery. It says a lot by saying a little. Now whether or not that makes you want to see another movie about a horse is questionable, but it's certainly interesting enough to keep you watching.



Now next up is the Super 8 trailer. I promise I'll shut up about all of it, but this is another prime and recent example of everything listed above. While this one has a lot more dialogue to string the story together, it's almost all voice over and placed under reaction shots. It's about a half and half mix of people reacting to something off screen, and the other half are events showing scale. When I saw the trailer initially, before I even had this idea to tie it into the chills, I said to myself "Wow, there is a LOT of shots that are just people looking at something off screen." But after reading the Buzzine interview with Abrams, and spinning my wheels on all of this, I think it's a perfect example of the core of this idea.





I like to watch a movie, but part of the fascination for me is also keeping a finger on the pulse of both myself and the audience as they react to the movie. When a chill comes. When the laugh comes after a joke. When people jump. Learning how people watch films is one of the most interesting and useful things when it comes to making films. It helps smooth over the learning curve on the craft when it comes to learning by making mistakes. Sure you can learn by experimenting on a dozen different films how to get a chill out of people, or you can see how the masters do it and reverse engineer it to make it your own.

An Opportunity of a Lifetime

So as some of you know, a big part of my thesis was a stem-off from a realization I had while doing my poster series. I talked about this in one of my first blog posts here.

What I never expected was that that series would come full circle and allow me to work on a project that I've been watching VERY closely; one that appears to follow my thesis to the T. A film that gets me giddy as a schoolgirl just thinking about it.

I'm talking about Super 8.

I've done probably three or four posts on Living in Cine alone on J.J. Abrams and Super 8 and sort of how it all ties in together with my work. So what happened exactly?

A couple weeks ago, I received a text from my friend saying "Make sure you answer your phone when I call you." I happened to be at a barbecue and when my phone started ringing, I politely excused myself from the table.

"Dan, I just talked to my buddy who works at Bad Robot. He remembered your poster series and... They want you to try a crack at a poster design for Super 8!"

Silence. A wave of excitement, energy, and just sheer terror flushed over me.

He continued to tell me that I may be getting a call from either his buddy or J.J.'s producer, Bryan Burk in the next few minutes, so to be available. I waited for about a half hour, a huge knot tightened up in my stomach and I began to worry.

Those of you who have ever been to Chicago know that AT&T's service here is pretty consistently terrible throughout the city. It's especially bad in my area.
Thoughts raced through my head as I waited for the call. "Had they already tried calling but my horrible service didn't connect the call?" "Had they changed their mind?" "Is this really just an elaborate trick?" "What am I going to say if he does call?" "Is it too windy out here? What if he can't hear me?!" "Does my breath smell bad? What if he smells it through the phone? SHIT!"

At this point the rest of the people at the barbecue knew what was up and they were all giving me distance so I wouldn't have a panic attack or something.

The phone rings, and it's got an Indiana area code on it. A bit of calmness sweeps over me. "Good, it's not Bryan Burk himself," I thought.

I answered it and although my reception was bad and I was struggling to decode what he was telling me like it was a World War II cypher, I got the jist of the details.

"So you think you can do this?" He asked.

"I'm going to get started on this immediately."

I excused myself and ran home. They wanted three unique ideas by 10am the next morning. It was already 9:30pm, so I got a pot of coffee going and got right to work.

I've done tons of freelance work before, and pretty much every job I've ever had has required me to work under pressure with some sort of time crunch, but this was different. This was a potential freelance job from a company I could only DREAM of working with. Literally the epitome of where I'd like to end up.

A lot of design is research. I spent a good hour and a half gathering reference material and familiarized myself with the story. Paramount and Bad Robot both kept this project under tight control, and I was no exception, so I literally had just the images from trailers and promotion released to the public to work from. I gathered the story and really tried to come up with a really iconic poster. Initially I wanted to do a sort of Shepard Fairey/propaganda style, because that is what they initially gravitated towards in my series.

My fiance Veronica, got home just as I was finishing up the basic title and credit block elements. She knew what was going on and was SO excited for me and offered to help in any way she could, because she herself is an INCREDIBLE illustration artist. By about 2am, I had hit a dead end in the design I was working on and sort of felt the style I was aiming for wasn't really right for the tone of the movie. I realized it probably wasn't going to work and stopped myself before I wasted the rest of the night.

I woke her up out of a sound sleep.

"Veronica... I think I need your help."

She got right up and we began collaborating (this is our first project do so). I had an idea for the poster, but knew she could execute it WAY better than I could. We decided to do a Struzan/ Amblin style of Joel from a few images we had found, and depending on how quickly she could draft images out, we would do the other kids' faces.

Now I need to stop right here and say, although Veronica wasn't totally unfamiliar with a Wacom before, and owned one herself, she had never really had the opportunity to do anything with it. So we got her set up, and after some basic practice strokes with the pen, she started getting the hang of it.

She did an outline drawing and used that as her color reference. After a short while, and about a pot of coffee later, she rolled out with the first draft of Joel.

I knew how I wanted to lay it out and quickly tossed it on my machine and started rearranging and placing things like a mad man. At this point, the sun was rising and I kept looking at my clock. We didn't even have one design completely done. What if they hate it??

I really started to feel the crunch as I made some final touches to the design and tweaked textures and colors to something I was happy with. Around 8am, I got a text saying "How's it going?" I gave him an update and shot off what I had been working on.

At this point, I had been up for about 26 hours and could hardly concentrate.

He quickly replied to my e-mail with just "Fuck you, that's awesome! Make it dirty and beat to shit, and add a flare of some kind on it and call that one done."

So I whipped that out really quick and sent it out. He wanted us to get at least one more design together to show Bryan Burk, who was eagerly waiting to see what we would come up with.

"So we've got the one that is this romantic Amblin style, now let's do one that is sort of a more minimalist Bad Robot style. Make it as simple as possible. Do something with the train wreck."

I spent the next hour in illustrator trying to draft up something that would echo what he was looking for. It was a SUPER low draft, and more of a conceptual thumbnail more than anything. I wasn't nearly as happy with it as I was with Joel's poster, but I sent it off anyway.

I took a quick two hour nap and woke up to a message saying "Paramount saw it and liked it. I still need to hear from Burky."

Several hours later, unable to sleep and totally wired on coffee and adrenaline, I heard back again saying Bryan had an idea and wanted us to try it with Elle and the train wreck. They got us tiff files from the film as reference and we got to work.

We worked until about 2am and finally forced ourselves to go to sleep. We both had our basic elements started and could sleep peacefully knowing what we had to do in the morning.

Sunday morning rolls around, and not only do I have to roll out with another poster by 10am, but I also have to leave at that same time for rehearsals for Your Milkman. So we wake up in sort of a panic, I blow through a rough pass on my script and get my notes together for the rehearsal while Veronica picks up right where she left off with the illustration, and the clock starts ticking.

I end up having to push back rehearsals an hour just to finish the poster and get it out for Burk to see. We send this out and I head to my meeting.

When I arrive at the office, I get a text saying that Burk is going to call me. I'm freaking out a bit, but wait for the call.

I answer and Bryan asks how I am doing. "Fantastic," I reply. He starts off by saying how much he loves what we're doing and has an idea to tweak the train poster.

"That train needs to be inches away from her. Imminent danger." he says.

He gives me a few more ideas for his concept, and I express a few concerns for making it too close because of crowding the comp and making it look less like a train and more abstract.

"Do what you can to make it look like a train and we'll go from there. Also, where in town are you located?"

"I... I'm actually not in LA, I'm based out of Chicago."

"Darn, I was going to invite you out to the screening we're hosting right now."

Drat. (Does anyone say that anymore? They should.) From the brief conversation I had with him, Bryan seems like an incredibly enthusiastic and genuine guy.

I take my notes home with me, and by this time it's around 7pm. Veronica and I start hammering out the perspective. I render out a quick 3D box as reference for depth in Illustrator. She gets started on the box car.

Around midnight we send out another comp just to see progress and make sure we're going in the right direction.

I'm pretty damn tired, and can barely focus. I go splash my face with some water and see that a blood vessel has burst in my eye. I look like hell, but I'm thinking "This is the best opportunity you've ever been given, just keep pushing." And we did.

"Love it, keep it up" they reply.

Veronica illustrates up a Railroad Crossing sign while I begin working on sparks, smoke and debris details. The sun's beginning to rise as she finishes up the highlight strokes from the sparks on everything. We each have to be out the door at our respective 9-5's in four hours. I already know I'm going to be coming in late.

Once all of her elements are done, I force her to go to sleep while I do my magic.

After an hour of tweaking, I start to save my project. At this point, it's a 27x40" poster at 300 dpi and it's got about 120 layers on it. These things take time to save. I end up passing out waiting on the save and waking up an hour later in a complete panic. BACK TO WORK!

At about 10am, I end up rendering out the file and shooting it out to them.

I head into work, anxious all day as to what they're going to say. The deadline to make a decision on using one of our prints is quickly approaching. If they want more changes, am I going to have to leave work and stay up another night?

I get a few intermittent texts throughout the day that EVERYONE at Bad Robot loved the designs. The positive feedback helped, but I was still anxious.

On my way home, I was told that Bryan wanted to try one more placement of the train, but wanted to talk to Paramount about a drop dead timeline for when these had to be in for printing. I started working when I got home and figured out a quicker way to get the new comp turned around that evening. I was laying it out for Veronica to begin illustrating when I got a text saying that J.J. finally saw them and loved them, but they went with a simpler design to give away as a freebie.

To most of you reading this, you might feel a sense of disappointment that we weren't chosen, but aside from the lack of sleep, this past weekend was one of the most exciting opportunities I've ever had. The fact that I got to collaborate and foster a relationship with a few huge people, and that one of the pinnacles of my thesis, and a filmmaker I greatly respect, saw something I worked and liked it made it ALL worth it.

If anything, this will just open doors for Veronica and me. As an artist, pushing your bounds is something that's TERRIFYING to most, but has helped take my artwork into a new direction. And most of all, my fiance and I both learned that we can work incredibly well together on collaborations under the extreme conditions of a harsh deadline. I can't wait for another opportunity to come up for the two of us to work together on another poster. Her talent is simply incredible and I am just floored by what she does.

As a treat for ourselves for the 60+ hours we put into the designs, she and I have fixed up the drafts of our two main posters. Bad Robot has given us permission to share the final posters with you as a Living in Cine exclusive.



To view a larger version, click here and here.

Lastly to round out this spectacular experience, I received a picture text from Veronica while I was at work last week saying we had received a package from Bad Robot. What was inside?!

When I finally got home, I opened it up and found a bunch of copies of the original concept posters we did of both Elle and Joel, a Super 8 camera keychain they've been giving out as swag, and a thank you note from Bryan Burk. Truly awesome!



I have seriously been in amazement the past few weeks about the entire experience, and I feel like this project has just inspired me to work even harder on this thesis, on my design work and on my films, and keep striving to make my way up this creative ladder. I'm usually not one to share stuff like this, but this has been such a fun experience for Veronica and I. I feel like it would be selfish of me not to share it with you, especially to those of you who are interested in pursuing a career in illustration. There is no tried and true path to doing something like this, but what worked for us this time around was just knowing the right people and putting yourself out there and allowing yourself to be discovered rather than forcing your work upon others.

For those of you interested, Veronica also has a blog of her fantastic work:
http://veronicalapage.blogspot.com

J.J. Abrams' Super 8 Trailer Hits Thesis Hard

Probably a half dozen blog posts ago, I talked about the thesis I've been working on. Basically it deals with nostalgia and how that can be used as a tool in filmmaking. How the greats like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Frank Capra use it in different ways but all seem to play to it.

I also talked about a list of these filmmakers that I've been composing, that all seem to chime in to this universal idea. This guy, although he was towards the bottom of my list, has just shot straight towards the top.

Rarely do I get just utterly excited over a silly little trailer, but everything in this trailer, from the set design, to the camera moves, to the color palette, to the characters and subject matter-- they all exhibit the thesis to the Nth degree.

I'm talking about the Super 8 trailer that was released earlier this week. J.J. stated early on that the production is based off of Spielberg's own work with his 1970's/1980's sci-fi works. I read somewhere that the original story was based on an old draft of an idea that Spielberg wrote over 30 years ago. I think, for a guy who is trying to emulate the master of that type of film, he's headed toward a ten-fold success. It looks and feels like a Spielberg film from that era (complete with the J.J. Abrams signature anamorphic lens flare!), and that's what I really love about it.

If you haven't seen the trailer yet, check it out here:


Now tell me that doesn't look like a Spielberg film? I can't wait to see it just for that reason alone.