Cause and Effect in Shots

joshwilliamsfilms:

I bet you didn’t know The Dark Knight was this visually inconsistent.

I push my students to think about cause and effect in their scenes and scripts. When the action we read is convoluted, we stop and go back to try and make sense of it. Yet, in a film, we are not in control of time, so our brains are trying to register poorly formed action while trying to simultaneously process it.

The cleaner the action, the easier it is to sweep a reader (or viewer) along with the story.

Jim Emerson takes it further here, and ties it up here.