I
was looking at my first draft of a Chaplin documentary that I have made. I saw
I had made a change from an image of Chaplin and Jackie Coogan sat on a
doorstep, to one of a film poster, and I thought that as I watched it the
transition seemed a bit rapid. I then wondered if it would look better if I
held the first image for a few seconds longer to let that one sink in. Like this……please look at it for about 10
seconds!
I then started wondering how long other
documentary makers hold an image, especially Ken Burns, as my Chaplin
documentary uses many still images with a voice-of-God narration, in a style
like his.
I looked at two segments from an episode of
“The Civil War” (1990)
and one from an episode of “Prohibition”
(2011),
How did he change his approach across the
years? One change was that he could use archive footage when making
“Prohibition”,
but
when he used it, he linked sections together into a common theme, like street
scenes or scenes at the docks. Three or four of these together would add up to between
10 and 19 seconds, but because they looked like they were from the same camera
on the same day, I thought about them as being like one image. He also made use
of modern interview footage, but he used L and J cuts, with speech beginning
over an image, then the speaker would be on screen, followed by another image
while the speaker continued. I was impressed that this seemed to give even more
meaning to their comments.
By watching the timings closely, and this
was most easily done by watching on You-tube with the timer at the bottom of
the screen, I also saw that there were periods where Ken Burns cut to black for
about 3 seconds. I had not noticed these before, but I realized that he was
using these as a way of changing topic, using the black screen as a sort of paragraph
break. Like this…..
When I measured the image duration, I
found for the Civil War documentary, that in one block of just under 2 minutes
he used 10 images for an average time on screen of 11.9 seconds. I selected
another segment from the same episode at random, and found in just over 2 and a
half minutes, with two periods of black of 3 seconds each, that he had 12 still
images or short periods of moving image, with again, an average duration of
11.9 seconds. The shortest still image was held for 6 seconds, and the longest
for 19 seconds.
The next bit of Ken Burns documentary I
looked at was “Prohibition”. I chose this because it uses a combination of
still and moving images, but used a good number of stills. In his later
documentaries, “The War” and “The Vietnam War” he had so much moving footage
that stills, and his classic rostrum camera effect, was used much less. I took
a random section of Episode 2 of “Prohibition” and looked at 18 images or short
movie segments. The shortest time on screen for a still segment was 7 seconds,
and the longest 17 seconds. The average of each visual section was 11.7
seconds. This figure is very similar to his earlier work in “The Civil War”. I
also noted that when he changed topic in the section I looked at that he again
used 3 seconds of black screen. So his editing techniques stayed very much the
same over the years.
Why did he use these duration's? I think
that he wants to get one main meaning across with each image, making them like
a sort of visual sentence. So the image has to be long enough on the screen to
be interesting, but not so long as to be boring. And the answer to my title
question seems to be 5 to 20 seconds, and averaging about 12.
How can I use this information?
·
I think I should try to copy
this and let images sit on screen for at least 5 seconds.
· I might need to think about a
maximum time for an image to be held on screen, but I think in my draft I have
not gone over 15 to 20 seconds.
·
I have already used L cut a
little in my draft, and will use it in the final version.
·
I will look and see if there
are some points where a bit of black screen would help in breaking the story
up.
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