Shotlisting, Chris Milk and the death of continuity editing

I've written the first, very rough, shotlist for the next video clip; although its closer to being an EDL than a proper shotlist with setups. I start with an EDL then deconstruct it into shots and then finally into setups. Its how I like to work - plan the cuts first, then work out the logistics of shooting it later.

Currently, its around 70 shots for all the narrative 'a-roll' footage, which only includes the band where necessary for story purposes. For a three minute clip, thats a buttload of shots [Update: Actually, its not. 100 shots is average for a music video IIRC. But this will easily pip 100 shots once you include all the b-roll band inserts] Its an average of one cut every three seconds. Include all the band inserts, and you're probably looking at a 100 shots. Which is too much - creatively and logistically.

Originally, I wanted it to be less cutty - a lot more moving shots, letting things play out in wider shots, using hand offs for transitions and to pick up new characters. The problem is, there's a LOT of story ground to cover in 186 seconds. I decided to adopt almost comic-book approach and try to only capture the key visual story elements - make the whole clip non-real time, almost pure Eistenstein... which is ironic, considering the earliest inspiration was the photography by Tarvkosky's son.

So I'm stuck in a hard place and a rock, a trap I've made for myself by coming up with a complicated story that I need to tell in a pre-established amount of time. I've thought about doing a hip hop style trick and have it open without music, allowing more time to set the scene... but I don't know if an indie band can get away with such self indulgence and whether that will really solve my problem.

Essentially, I think I need to reduce the number of plot threads so I don't have to tell so much... but I don't want to sacrifice the story either. Perhaps I need to make it more iconographic & impressionistic in my coverage? Really push my concept of the 'emotional narrative'. Uses shots to infer what is happening rather than showing it. This probably will give it far more resonance and legs as a music video too. But I'm such a narrative guy, that this feel... alien.

I keep coming back to Chris Milk's Jesus Walks clip as a great example of telling a story through iconographic montage. (I'm current counting cuts, and its up to about 40 and its less than half way through). Its pacing slows down when it establishes the world of one of its narrative threads, but once the action kicks in, then things become far 'cuttier'. A lot more inserts,... and, most significantly, a lot of "jumped" visual motivation: where wsee the before and the after, not the in between [like the car overheating, or the slave coughing]. Things happen subsequently, rather than consequentially. Perhaps that works because of the clip's themes of fate and the hand of god? Curiously, the narrative which Milk spent the least time developing visually - that of the Ku Klux Klan guy - is actually the hardiest to follow and took me a few viewings to really pick up what he was doing...

As an aside, and a kind of conclusion, the skill that I think the best music video directors have learnt - and have brought to the mainstream - is a deep intuitive understanding of pacing, particularly narrative compression. They understand how quickly an audience absorbs information and they've pushed the envelope vis a vis communicating that enevelop. David Fincher's films, especially, move swiftly. He knows that the information that an audience needs to get from a shot is X and once X is told, he moves on. Its an impressive feat of direction and is probably one of the areas in which music videos are criminally underrated vis a vis their influence on narrative cinema. They've pushed the unravelling of the continuity editing style in mainstream cinema.

[As an aside, probably the biggest flaw of the new Star Wars prequels is that Lucas is packing his frames with so much information that they're SLOWING the narrative down. He spends time 'establishing' these worlds in long, tedious shots. Probably the worst shot in AOTC is when Mace, Windu and Obiwan are walking along that hallway talking about jedi arrogance. The compositing was dodgy because the contrast was out - backgrounds should shift towards grey and lose detail - probably because someone wanted the background details to be seen! We also spend too much time holding onto the wide shot when, in the earlier original trilogy movies, Lucas would've gone straight in for the mid-shots. Its a shift in style that has been motivated by the technology rather than the content... and its draining his movies of life. A New Hope was a groundbreaking film in narrative compression; whereas the Phantom Menace is a groundbreaking film in narrative tedium. Sad.]

I could probably spend a lot more time developing this train of thought and writing about it in a more lucid style... but I can't be bothered. Sorry guys :)

(Update: I've expanded on a few ideas, tidied up a bit of language, added the aside about star wars...)