Even if you only see several short clips from a character's experience, you will be able to understand the entire thing as a whole based on the tone each one of them carries. Kind of vague, I know, but think of films that boil an entire relationship down to small snapshots from their time together, like in Annie Hall, or a road trip in which you only see the highlights. ![]() This is a theory that essentially says that if given small bits and pieces, we will form them into a complete whole. By editing them together you're able to not only introduce your audience to the worlds they live in, but you're able to compare the two, setting up a possible conflict that you can get into later on in the story. Imagine the morning routine of a wealthy heiress and her maid - extremely different. This kind of montage switches between images in an attempt to compare and contrast them. This can make each more dynamic too, so if you need to ramp up the energy, this is a good way to do it. So, instead of giving each storyline its own independent sequence which could be minutes long, you can cut them together to create a sequence that only lasts seconds. Montages help to cut time down, and one way to do that is to combine storylines in your film. Basically, they work to shorten the time it takes a character to "put on their armor": working out to become stronger, practicing to gain a new skill, etc. Not much needs to be said about this one, since even if you don't really know what a montage is, you know what a training montage is. (Some of my favorites come from Shaun of the Dead.)Ĭlassic. Filmmakers do this all the time and it's a good way to add comedy to an otherwise neutral segment in a film. This is less of a "genre" of montage - it's more like a "subgenre", since they serve a larger narrative purpose, like shortening time, etc., but they're packaged inside of a joke. Maybe you need to show the downfall of a powerful company - you could do in a series of scenes where employees frantically shred documents, FBI agents raid their offices, and interrogate its CEOs, but if you want to condense that time, you might want to use a montage in which all these things happen in mere seconds rather than minutes.Ī montage can be used to condense time and space, but they can also be used to serve up a nice punchline. Here are the many different ways filmmakers have used the montage to give information to their audiences according to CineFix's video: Today, editing has grown and evolved with new words and language being added to our cinematic lexicon. Griffith that the concept of "editing" came to light, and furthermore, it wasn't until filmmakers Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov that we had this idea that editing could have significant emotional and psychological effects on a viewer by condensing space, time, and information in the form of a series of short shots called a montage. This is called the Soviet Montage Theory. In the beginning, films were single-shot pieces - a woman dancing, a baby eating, a train arriving to a station. ![]() ![]() (More on that later.) In this top 10 list from CineFix, you'll see a wide array of different kinds of montages - ones that compress time, reveal the quirks of a character, and combine storylines - but you'll also get a meaty lesson on what montages do, as well as how and why you should implement them into your own films. Think about it - montages are wholly cinematic, born entirely from the womb of editing, and are able to elicit emotions from an audience simply by the way they're constructed.
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