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Tag: film production

What I Learned From that Octopus

On the surface (ha), My Octopus Teacher is your typical man meets mollusk love story. But, in terms of film language (below the surface, as it were), there are some very interesting things going on: for starters, it’s almost 95% b-roll with voice-over.  The story is told - and we’ll get into the filmmaking aspects of that later - by Craig Foster, a filmmaker*, whose year-long relationship with an octopus in the wild is, basically, the whole story. * It’s interesting that he’s credited neither as a director (Pippa Ehrlich & James Reed) nor a writer (same) even though his recounting of his personal experience is the only narration/voice in…

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Corporate Film School #5: B-Roll: the Mysterious Dark Matter of the Video Universe

In this fifth episode of Corporate Film School we look at an essential element of film language, particularly in documentary, that, despite its snappy name, gets very little attention:  B-Roll.  We propose that, in fact, B-Roll is so elemental to filmmaking and yet so invisible in the discourse around it, that it is the Dark Matter of the film universe, holding everything together and determining the shape and texture of every film and video we watch.  We also get to use this phrase, “like androids in some brightly-lit dystopia” which we feel has also been too rarely deployed in connection with Corporate Video. https://vimeo.com/478961517

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