2018 vividcon panel - tension
Aug. 19th, 2018 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kiki_miserychicWhat We’ve Learned: Tension
mods: Jetpack Monkey & kiki_miserychic
Theydies and Gentlethems-
There's a lot, so if you find 1 thing out of 50 that you want to try, then that's great.
- vids intensify subtleties, organize minutiae, heighten emotions, blend elements of sight and sound, a lot of times we're editing for the essence that will progress the story and emotion of the vid
- vidding tends to be unaccustomed to explanation, like its mystified and instinctual, so it can be difficult to break something down
- to create tension:
- use careful pacing
- manipulate POV
- play with time
- maximize source for visceral responses
- create body to body empathy
- push visuals
- push sound/music
- exploit common fears
- tension and suspense as affective states that
(a) are associated with conflict, dissonance, instability, or uncertainty,
(b) create a yearning for resolution,
(c) concern events of potential emotional significance, and
(d) build on future-directed processes of expectation, anticipation, and prediction
We tend to think of tension as a negative emotion, like in horror films, but tension can also be positive as with these examples:
ohvienna's Cake to Bake - Are those cakes going to turn out?!?
anoel's Through the Deep, Dark Wood - Are they gonna fuck?!?
newkidfan's Blood Makes Noise - Are they gonna kiss?!?
6 RULES OF EDITING, from Walter Murch
1. Emotion - how will the cut effect the audience emotionally at this moment? Feeling
2. Story - does the edit move the story forward? Theme, idea.
3. Rhythm - is the cut at a point that makes rhythmic sense?
4. Eye trace - does the cut affect the location and movement of the audience's focus?
For vidders this relates more to motion tracking, which lim goes into in
this excerpt from videlicet, which I deeply reccommend.
5. The axis - keep the action along its correct path of motion and maintain continuity
- use the 180 rule to maintain eyelines and reestablish or move it to signal power dynamic changes
6. 3D space - is the cut true to established physical and spatial relationships?
- emotion, story, rhythm are the main three, but creativity overrules the grammar; if we all followed rules vids would be boring
BOMB THEORY, from Alfred Hitchcock
- difference between shock and tension is the audience has information the characters don't with tension and the audience become active participants using their imagination
sweetestdrain's Empty Nest is a prime example of giving the audience information that the characters do not right at the beginning by showing a character dead at the beginning of the vid. You know what's going to happen, but how, where, when, and why?
- like Meanwhile Back at the Ranch from Orsen Welles, which is the idea that you move the stories along parallel to each other. When you reach the peak of one, you go to another, then when it reaches peak interest, flip to another, build that one, flip, reach peak interest, flip, and continue until the tension culimanates and resolves. This works best for ensemble vids, but the ideas can be used for other types. If you then go to something else or another character, you're making people's interest grow continually.
hollywoodgrrl's Flashbulb Eyes does Meanwhile Back at the Ranch well.
- Shock is like a jump scare
- for jumpscare cut long clip, cut to shock, reaction, relocation to get explanation
- play with expectations and imagination, curiosity and fear
- a lack of control, i.e., an inability to influence the course of events, often contributes to experiences of tension, like bates motel
- You have two people talking about basecall for five minutes, then a bomb goes off. You have 8 seconds of shock, but if you show the bomb under the table at the begining of the conversation, then you get five minutes of tension. If you just show the explosion, there's just shock. If you show the bomb first, the audience thinks about it the whole time.
Cutting
- cut to keep interest, which is the result of emotion
- cutting to rhythm, change to keep moving and interesting, if viewer know what happens next they don't need to pay attention because it's predictable and metronomic
- if everything is edited to the same speed then there's no ebb and flow and is a mechanical edit that's unnatural with the movement of the characters and people in the world
- match on edits are considered to be invisible edits for film editing and vidding can steal that notion. You can take two different scenes and match where the characters are within the frame. The clips don't need to be exact.
obsessive24's Keep Your Picture Clear uses great match on edits to emphasize visual and narrative continuity.
ohvienna's Who Are You, Defenders of the Universe? uses beautiful match on edits to connect separate storylines through visual similarities.
obsessive24's No Church in the Wild is another example of match on edits using visual similarities.
- double cuts are held until the end of sequence for emphasize and with vidding we can manipulate that by using a punch thrown in season two that lands with a clip from season eight. We don't have the constraints that film editing has in that respect.
Every Frame A Painting's Jackie Chan - How to Do Action Comedy can explain the effect of double cutting extremely well.
- triple cuts used mainly for final bit
- frame removal for consequences like a jump cut to increase perceived speed or strength, like cutting the pull back of punch
- velocity changes to exaggerate speed to increase power and strength, vary the percentage to be unpredictable
- in fight scene abuse the viewers expectations send them off in one direction, cut to something going in another direction if you want visual disorientation to replicate a fight
- treat a cut to be "look over here"
- close ups equal importance
- push ins signify importance
- chance of running an audience ragged showing them too many close ups meaning importance
- vary clip types, not all close ups, hold close ups for "oh fuck" reaction and use long wide shots to establish, then further the story or hold on close ups, then cut wide to give consequences
- show less because the audience will fill in the worst with their imagination
cara marie (genusshrike)'s Maeve’s Dream is a great example of cutting early and letting the audience imagine the worst
- expectation and imagination are your best friends
- create more questions and expectations for anticipation and intensity
- editing controls the duration, order, start, end points
- rhythmic editing is predictable then change makes expectations
- parallel editing is cut multiple scenes interacting suggesting connection, collision, release
- shock cut is like jumpscare with long cut to shock, then reaction, relocation to get explanation, challenge vid example
- blinks as a cut point, frame before they blink as a completed thought
- dissolves have a surreal and romantic feel
- create more questions and expectations for anticipation and intensity
- editing controls the duration, order, start and end points
- rhythmic editing is predictable, then change to make new expectations
- parallel editing is cutting multiple scenes intersecting to suggest connection, collision, release
- It's like a rubber band of temporal distance between the initiating event creating the tension and the moment in which tension resolves influences the tension experience. It has been proposed that delaying the resolution of the tension intensifies the tension experience. Christopher Nolan calls this The Suspense Snowball Effect, but it's a lot like Meanwhile Back at the Ranch.
dualbunny's God Is A DJ has excellent delaying of resolution and impact.
obsessive24's No Church in the Wild uses delayed resolution and impact as well.
Fast cuts
- jaws used short shots to get attention
- centered clips work well, like mad max fury road
- close ups with no background cut down visual information
- silhouettes are easy to recognize
- punch in and out with match on action
- keep subject moving in the same screen direction
- add digital zooms to create a false consistent motion on static clips that stand out
anoel's Through the Deep, Dark Wood
- follow dominant shape, color, or luminance
lim's Expo
- establish cause and effect between clips. Use "therefore" and "but" to connect clips, not "and then this happened"
obsessive24's No Church in the Wild
ohvienna's Who Are You, Defenders of the Universe?
hollywoodgrrl's Flashbulb Eyes
- fast cuts speed the viewers heart rate
slow cutting
- relentless length meaningless content when shot lingers the audience moves from passive viewing to active searching trying to figure out why it's holding
shalott and speranza's A Day in the Life
- vidding promises relevance and good shit
- cutting short to cut off anticipation when audience expects resolution
- dissolves can create surreal, dreamlike, romantic effect
absolutedestiny's Velouria
Empathy
- suspense snowball effect
- physical body empathy
- body to body empathy is using similar sensations like car smashing hand
- we live vicariously through media, so no striving or pain means no connection, show characters struggling
- we need the dynamics of prepare, action, recover to be with the characters, not just action action action
- rhythm cutting can simulate this by shaping cycles of tension and release
- braid lines together continually rising in anxiety for Meanwhile Back at the Ranch
- editors have a sensitivity to movement in the brain, mirror neurons fire both when someone acts and when Someone observes the action performed by another
- POV shots make you identity with them, they control the visuals and what you see
- we watch them watching which puts the audience with them for body to body empathy
obsessive24's Keep Your Picture Clear
sisabet's Hey No Pressure
- withhold information so we care and become active
Structure
- structure is created out of finding harmonies (visual and thematic) and finding them at deeper levels
- use the smallest details to show the most important themes in source
- orchestration is organizing image and sound to be interesting and digestible to audience, be mysterious when needed and understandable when needed
- research, compose, assemble, film grammar evolving new once revolutionary concepts are now internalized ways of thinking, looking, and listening to vids
- abundance of source can lead to redundant visuals
- spaghetti sauce method / maple syrup method is boiling collected material down to its essence
- procrustes is chopping and stretching the materials
- put images together so they enhance one another in resonance and by contradiction
- editing is a construction like a mosaic in 3D space and time, it can be a miniature version of the way films are made, artificially piece by piece
- supreme ambiguity makes the pain of lack of closure/explanation that creates anxiety like David lynch stuff, if you want that ambiguity
- vids can address a single question and interrogate it
- often takes the form of an implicit or explicit question (e.g., the classic “Whodunit?” in a detective story), triggering an experience of tension that resolves when an answer to the question is provided. Uncertainty can take on different forms, for example, there can be uncertainty about what will happen, how it will happen, when it will happen, or if it will happen.
Think about how sweetestdrain's Empty Nest has uncertainty over how and when because we know what will happen and we're waiting for it.
- waiting builds tension, use them to bate breath
- promises of violence that don't come
- plant hints and suspensions of violence
kiki_miserychic's Special Death
- morbid details of waiting like fingers on triggers
- scary silent waiting to build
- apprehension of what we know is coming, like a burlesque stripshow of violence with incremental promises of what's to come followed by delays
- establish patterns and subvert; intro, reinforce, subvert
- Divert or flip expectations. Fulfill them in a different way than expected.
- comedy tension needs time to laugh, then as the laugh is dying, come in with the next, if you have jokes crammed together the laughter will cover the next joke, give time to breathe and not step on each other
- maintain frame consistency for POV shots, not necessarily the same clip, but the same framing tells the audience who, what do they see, how do they feel with an ABA cutaway
- static and motion shot cuts kill flow, aim for continuation of camera movement or complete the movement then cut to static shot unless you want to break the flow on purpose to jolt or shock
Avoid Narrative Spectacle
- narrative spectacle are equal to moments that puncture narrative flow through moment of exhibition or display
- narrative pauses and we watch a flashy fight, think porn without plot, so your action fight sequences need to keep the viewer in line with the characters goals, like in mad max and Romeo + Juliet
- important scenes are:
- fights
- negotiations
- seductions
- anything else is a meeting and that's boring
Color
- red raises blood pressure, love, violence
- blue calms
- grey for balance and calm
- the reaction can be defined by the vid
- muted monochromatic is dull, good or bad depends on what you're going for
- analogous colors are side by side on the color wheel and easy on the eyes, harmonious, relaxing
- orange/teal or blue with one more dominant is popular because it creates tensions and conflict
- moving from light to dark implies danger
Visuals
- shakey cam is unstable and works for atmosphere
- hold on images and let them soak in
- quick cuts to build
- go intimate with a character to create involvement and investment for empathy
- use lurking behind shots and pov of monster shots
- imprisonment imagery like bars over shots
- cutting early can help imply and leave the view to imagine
- Dutch angles give subliminal feeling of not right
ohvienna's Who Are You, Defenders of the Universe?
- straight angle to low angle shot implies something is wrong now
- long shot to a close up gives a jolt and discomfort
- pans establish and keep tensions, cut to give a blink to the audience
- lit from below shots help sell evil tension
- Spielberg focuses on hands to give tension
- villains need power to be scary; villain takes up whole screen when powerful, protagonist looks small in the frame when weak
- threats have the upper hand with the protagonist clips in a low angle to convey weakness
Creepiness
- creepiness is anxiety aroused by the ambiguity of whether there is something to fear or not and/or the ambiguity of the precise nature of the threat
- masks are inherently creepy, truth of their nature and intentions are masked, so if it's in your source, use it.
*uncanny valley*
- sense danger without perceived threat
- humans are programmed to assume danger in unknown or ambiguous situations
- If you can tap into a common fear, use it. Wikipedia has ists of common fears, so if you're wanting to induce a tension emotion, it might be interesting to start with a fear to exploit.
- scary things mainly are categorized into 3 groups according to Stephen King:
- gross out
- horror (dark, unnatural)
- terror (vague dread)
Sound
- sound can disorient, depress, darken, and render video more edgy
- sound disrupting silence
- humans associate big things as low sounds and high sounds as small harmless things; high and low sound at the same time in music tells us something is not ok
absolutedestiny's Velouria
- creepy baby music
- musical tension correlates with finger pulse amplitude, respiration rate, blood pressure, skin conductance, and temperature
- musical chords that deviate from an established tonal key of a musical sequence are perceived as less stable, and accordingly are associated with higher degrees of experienced tension than in-key chords
- The build-up, fulfillment, and violation of listeners’ expectations has been identified as an important mechanism for the evocation of emotions in music
- get a song with crescendos that builds to mirror a narrative plot, most pop music is all big with no variance
Example pacings
- good basic structure of one long push as the kettle is boiling, 2 crescendo shots with the music, one instance of movement, then boom, boom, boom 3 bits of violence and bring it back to your main character/s to get their reaction/s
- build suspense with slow cuts, tempo increases with climax to the last round then suddenly it ends and slows down the consequences wherein the editing is equal to the force which will work as a pace when metaphor and everything else in the vid is in place too
- with vidding, the music/sounds tell you how long you can stretch the rubber band. When the music crescendos, pay off the Suspense Snowball and let the rubber band snap back.
EXERCISES TO TRY
- watch vid without music to see if it still flows and holds attention visually
- take a break for 24 hours or take a nap and come back if you're stuck on something
Vids to watch and try naming tension techniques
obsessive24's Blinding uses a large number of these tension techniques
chaila's The Sower is a great vid for tension as well.
Discussion
settiai has notes on the discussion part because my soul left my body at some point and I can't remember anything.
mods: Jetpack Monkey & kiki_miserychic
Theydies and Gentlethems-
There's a lot, so if you find 1 thing out of 50 that you want to try, then that's great.
- vids intensify subtleties, organize minutiae, heighten emotions, blend elements of sight and sound, a lot of times we're editing for the essence that will progress the story and emotion of the vid
- vidding tends to be unaccustomed to explanation, like its mystified and instinctual, so it can be difficult to break something down
- to create tension:
- use careful pacing
- manipulate POV
- play with time
- maximize source for visceral responses
- create body to body empathy
- push visuals
- push sound/music
- exploit common fears
- tension and suspense as affective states that
(a) are associated with conflict, dissonance, instability, or uncertainty,
(b) create a yearning for resolution,
(c) concern events of potential emotional significance, and
(d) build on future-directed processes of expectation, anticipation, and prediction
We tend to think of tension as a negative emotion, like in horror films, but tension can also be positive as with these examples:
ohvienna's Cake to Bake - Are those cakes going to turn out?!?
anoel's Through the Deep, Dark Wood - Are they gonna fuck?!?
newkidfan's Blood Makes Noise - Are they gonna kiss?!?
6 RULES OF EDITING, from Walter Murch
1. Emotion - how will the cut effect the audience emotionally at this moment? Feeling
2. Story - does the edit move the story forward? Theme, idea.
3. Rhythm - is the cut at a point that makes rhythmic sense?
4. Eye trace - does the cut affect the location and movement of the audience's focus?
For vidders this relates more to motion tracking, which lim goes into in
this excerpt from videlicet, which I deeply reccommend.
5. The axis - keep the action along its correct path of motion and maintain continuity
- use the 180 rule to maintain eyelines and reestablish or move it to signal power dynamic changes
6. 3D space - is the cut true to established physical and spatial relationships?
- emotion, story, rhythm are the main three, but creativity overrules the grammar; if we all followed rules vids would be boring
BOMB THEORY, from Alfred Hitchcock
- difference between shock and tension is the audience has information the characters don't with tension and the audience become active participants using their imagination
sweetestdrain's Empty Nest is a prime example of giving the audience information that the characters do not right at the beginning by showing a character dead at the beginning of the vid. You know what's going to happen, but how, where, when, and why?
- like Meanwhile Back at the Ranch from Orsen Welles, which is the idea that you move the stories along parallel to each other. When you reach the peak of one, you go to another, then when it reaches peak interest, flip to another, build that one, flip, reach peak interest, flip, and continue until the tension culimanates and resolves. This works best for ensemble vids, but the ideas can be used for other types. If you then go to something else or another character, you're making people's interest grow continually.
hollywoodgrrl's Flashbulb Eyes does Meanwhile Back at the Ranch well.
- Shock is like a jump scare
- for jumpscare cut long clip, cut to shock, reaction, relocation to get explanation
- play with expectations and imagination, curiosity and fear
- a lack of control, i.e., an inability to influence the course of events, often contributes to experiences of tension, like bates motel
- You have two people talking about basecall for five minutes, then a bomb goes off. You have 8 seconds of shock, but if you show the bomb under the table at the begining of the conversation, then you get five minutes of tension. If you just show the explosion, there's just shock. If you show the bomb first, the audience thinks about it the whole time.
Cutting
- cut to keep interest, which is the result of emotion
- cutting to rhythm, change to keep moving and interesting, if viewer know what happens next they don't need to pay attention because it's predictable and metronomic
- if everything is edited to the same speed then there's no ebb and flow and is a mechanical edit that's unnatural with the movement of the characters and people in the world
- match on edits are considered to be invisible edits for film editing and vidding can steal that notion. You can take two different scenes and match where the characters are within the frame. The clips don't need to be exact.
obsessive24's Keep Your Picture Clear uses great match on edits to emphasize visual and narrative continuity.
ohvienna's Who Are You, Defenders of the Universe? uses beautiful match on edits to connect separate storylines through visual similarities.
obsessive24's No Church in the Wild is another example of match on edits using visual similarities.
- double cuts are held until the end of sequence for emphasize and with vidding we can manipulate that by using a punch thrown in season two that lands with a clip from season eight. We don't have the constraints that film editing has in that respect.
Every Frame A Painting's Jackie Chan - How to Do Action Comedy can explain the effect of double cutting extremely well.
- triple cuts used mainly for final bit
- frame removal for consequences like a jump cut to increase perceived speed or strength, like cutting the pull back of punch
- velocity changes to exaggerate speed to increase power and strength, vary the percentage to be unpredictable
- in fight scene abuse the viewers expectations send them off in one direction, cut to something going in another direction if you want visual disorientation to replicate a fight
- treat a cut to be "look over here"
- close ups equal importance
- push ins signify importance
- chance of running an audience ragged showing them too many close ups meaning importance
- vary clip types, not all close ups, hold close ups for "oh fuck" reaction and use long wide shots to establish, then further the story or hold on close ups, then cut wide to give consequences
- show less because the audience will fill in the worst with their imagination
cara marie (genusshrike)'s Maeve’s Dream is a great example of cutting early and letting the audience imagine the worst
- expectation and imagination are your best friends
- create more questions and expectations for anticipation and intensity
- editing controls the duration, order, start, end points
- rhythmic editing is predictable then change makes expectations
- parallel editing is cut multiple scenes interacting suggesting connection, collision, release
- shock cut is like jumpscare with long cut to shock, then reaction, relocation to get explanation, challenge vid example
- blinks as a cut point, frame before they blink as a completed thought
- dissolves have a surreal and romantic feel
- create more questions and expectations for anticipation and intensity
- editing controls the duration, order, start and end points
- rhythmic editing is predictable, then change to make new expectations
- parallel editing is cutting multiple scenes intersecting to suggest connection, collision, release
- It's like a rubber band of temporal distance between the initiating event creating the tension and the moment in which tension resolves influences the tension experience. It has been proposed that delaying the resolution of the tension intensifies the tension experience. Christopher Nolan calls this The Suspense Snowball Effect, but it's a lot like Meanwhile Back at the Ranch.
dualbunny's God Is A DJ has excellent delaying of resolution and impact.
obsessive24's No Church in the Wild uses delayed resolution and impact as well.
Fast cuts
- jaws used short shots to get attention
- centered clips work well, like mad max fury road
- close ups with no background cut down visual information
- silhouettes are easy to recognize
- punch in and out with match on action
- keep subject moving in the same screen direction
- add digital zooms to create a false consistent motion on static clips that stand out
anoel's Through the Deep, Dark Wood
- follow dominant shape, color, or luminance
lim's Expo
- establish cause and effect between clips. Use "therefore" and "but" to connect clips, not "and then this happened"
obsessive24's No Church in the Wild
ohvienna's Who Are You, Defenders of the Universe?
hollywoodgrrl's Flashbulb Eyes
- fast cuts speed the viewers heart rate
slow cutting
- relentless length meaningless content when shot lingers the audience moves from passive viewing to active searching trying to figure out why it's holding
shalott and speranza's A Day in the Life
- vidding promises relevance and good shit
- cutting short to cut off anticipation when audience expects resolution
- dissolves can create surreal, dreamlike, romantic effect
absolutedestiny's Velouria
Empathy
- suspense snowball effect
- physical body empathy
- body to body empathy is using similar sensations like car smashing hand
- we live vicariously through media, so no striving or pain means no connection, show characters struggling
- we need the dynamics of prepare, action, recover to be with the characters, not just action action action
- rhythm cutting can simulate this by shaping cycles of tension and release
- braid lines together continually rising in anxiety for Meanwhile Back at the Ranch
- editors have a sensitivity to movement in the brain, mirror neurons fire both when someone acts and when Someone observes the action performed by another
- POV shots make you identity with them, they control the visuals and what you see
- we watch them watching which puts the audience with them for body to body empathy
obsessive24's Keep Your Picture Clear
sisabet's Hey No Pressure
- withhold information so we care and become active
Structure
- structure is created out of finding harmonies (visual and thematic) and finding them at deeper levels
- use the smallest details to show the most important themes in source
- orchestration is organizing image and sound to be interesting and digestible to audience, be mysterious when needed and understandable when needed
- research, compose, assemble, film grammar evolving new once revolutionary concepts are now internalized ways of thinking, looking, and listening to vids
- abundance of source can lead to redundant visuals
- spaghetti sauce method / maple syrup method is boiling collected material down to its essence
- procrustes is chopping and stretching the materials
- put images together so they enhance one another in resonance and by contradiction
- editing is a construction like a mosaic in 3D space and time, it can be a miniature version of the way films are made, artificially piece by piece
- supreme ambiguity makes the pain of lack of closure/explanation that creates anxiety like David lynch stuff, if you want that ambiguity
- vids can address a single question and interrogate it
- often takes the form of an implicit or explicit question (e.g., the classic “Whodunit?” in a detective story), triggering an experience of tension that resolves when an answer to the question is provided. Uncertainty can take on different forms, for example, there can be uncertainty about what will happen, how it will happen, when it will happen, or if it will happen.
Think about how sweetestdrain's Empty Nest has uncertainty over how and when because we know what will happen and we're waiting for it.
- waiting builds tension, use them to bate breath
- promises of violence that don't come
- plant hints and suspensions of violence
kiki_miserychic's Special Death
- morbid details of waiting like fingers on triggers
- scary silent waiting to build
- apprehension of what we know is coming, like a burlesque stripshow of violence with incremental promises of what's to come followed by delays
- establish patterns and subvert; intro, reinforce, subvert
- Divert or flip expectations. Fulfill them in a different way than expected.
- comedy tension needs time to laugh, then as the laugh is dying, come in with the next, if you have jokes crammed together the laughter will cover the next joke, give time to breathe and not step on each other
- maintain frame consistency for POV shots, not necessarily the same clip, but the same framing tells the audience who, what do they see, how do they feel with an ABA cutaway
- static and motion shot cuts kill flow, aim for continuation of camera movement or complete the movement then cut to static shot unless you want to break the flow on purpose to jolt or shock
Avoid Narrative Spectacle
- narrative spectacle are equal to moments that puncture narrative flow through moment of exhibition or display
- narrative pauses and we watch a flashy fight, think porn without plot, so your action fight sequences need to keep the viewer in line with the characters goals, like in mad max and Romeo + Juliet
- important scenes are:
- fights
- negotiations
- seductions
- anything else is a meeting and that's boring
Color
- red raises blood pressure, love, violence
- blue calms
- grey for balance and calm
- the reaction can be defined by the vid
- muted monochromatic is dull, good or bad depends on what you're going for
- analogous colors are side by side on the color wheel and easy on the eyes, harmonious, relaxing
- orange/teal or blue with one more dominant is popular because it creates tensions and conflict
- moving from light to dark implies danger
Visuals
- shakey cam is unstable and works for atmosphere
- hold on images and let them soak in
- quick cuts to build
- go intimate with a character to create involvement and investment for empathy
- use lurking behind shots and pov of monster shots
- imprisonment imagery like bars over shots
- cutting early can help imply and leave the view to imagine
- Dutch angles give subliminal feeling of not right
ohvienna's Who Are You, Defenders of the Universe?
- straight angle to low angle shot implies something is wrong now
- long shot to a close up gives a jolt and discomfort
- pans establish and keep tensions, cut to give a blink to the audience
- lit from below shots help sell evil tension
- Spielberg focuses on hands to give tension
- villains need power to be scary; villain takes up whole screen when powerful, protagonist looks small in the frame when weak
- threats have the upper hand with the protagonist clips in a low angle to convey weakness
Creepiness
- creepiness is anxiety aroused by the ambiguity of whether there is something to fear or not and/or the ambiguity of the precise nature of the threat
- masks are inherently creepy, truth of their nature and intentions are masked, so if it's in your source, use it.
*uncanny valley*
- sense danger without perceived threat
- humans are programmed to assume danger in unknown or ambiguous situations
- If you can tap into a common fear, use it. Wikipedia has ists of common fears, so if you're wanting to induce a tension emotion, it might be interesting to start with a fear to exploit.
- scary things mainly are categorized into 3 groups according to Stephen King:
- gross out
- horror (dark, unnatural)
- terror (vague dread)
Sound
- sound can disorient, depress, darken, and render video more edgy
- sound disrupting silence
- humans associate big things as low sounds and high sounds as small harmless things; high and low sound at the same time in music tells us something is not ok
absolutedestiny's Velouria
- creepy baby music
- musical tension correlates with finger pulse amplitude, respiration rate, blood pressure, skin conductance, and temperature
- musical chords that deviate from an established tonal key of a musical sequence are perceived as less stable, and accordingly are associated with higher degrees of experienced tension than in-key chords
- The build-up, fulfillment, and violation of listeners’ expectations has been identified as an important mechanism for the evocation of emotions in music
- get a song with crescendos that builds to mirror a narrative plot, most pop music is all big with no variance
Example pacings
- good basic structure of one long push as the kettle is boiling, 2 crescendo shots with the music, one instance of movement, then boom, boom, boom 3 bits of violence and bring it back to your main character/s to get their reaction/s
- build suspense with slow cuts, tempo increases with climax to the last round then suddenly it ends and slows down the consequences wherein the editing is equal to the force which will work as a pace when metaphor and everything else in the vid is in place too
- with vidding, the music/sounds tell you how long you can stretch the rubber band. When the music crescendos, pay off the Suspense Snowball and let the rubber band snap back.
EXERCISES TO TRY
- watch vid without music to see if it still flows and holds attention visually
- take a break for 24 hours or take a nap and come back if you're stuck on something
Vids to watch and try naming tension techniques
obsessive24's Blinding uses a large number of these tension techniques
chaila's The Sower is a great vid for tension as well.
Discussion
settiai has notes on the discussion part because my soul left my body at some point and I can't remember anything.
