Steal from the Best

Lifting secrets from previous artists is an ancient and honorable theft. Painters have done it for centuries and playwrights preserve a larcenous tradition reaching back through Shakespeare to Sophocles. Movie makers too have studied and learned from their forebears and so can you, especially since you have scads of cable channels and tapes to study.

So sit back and haul out the popcorn as we visit eight great film makers to demonstrate what you can learn from the masters.

Charlie Chaplin

In most respects, Charles Spencer Chaplin was a genius who made movies rather than a genius at making movies. Unlike Buster Keaton, he apparently had little interest in the medium for its own sake, but only for its ability to record and display the antics of Charlie Chaplin.

Though Chaplin used closeups with telling effect, he usually worked in wider shots because he performed with his entire body and wanted the camera to include most or all of it. And that, precisely, is what you can learn from this master: as Yosemite Sam commands on the mud flaps, Back Off!

A great lesson, especially if you tape activities like dance, figure skating and tennis. Sure, grab closeups to use as cutaways, but otherwise restrain your instinct to move close. Nothing infuriates a viewer like a serve, an arabesque, or a fishing cast that's half cut off by the frame. Like the master Chaplin, know when to put the whole body on screen.

Alfred Hitchcock

Speaking of the frame, Alfred Hitchcock was a genius at turning this unbreakable border around the image to his advantage.

Having started his career as an art director, he knew how to compose images within that frame; but his lesson for us is his skill at using that border to keep things out of sight--until he could use them to scare our pants off.

The (in)famous shower scene in Psycho is the most obvious example, because we never actually see Janet Leigh get stabbed. In shot after famous shot, we see flashing steel, thrusting arm, wet skin, and, ultimately, bloodstained water, but the knife that's presumably sinking into flesh is always kept outside the frame. The two-edged moral here: 1) it's more tasteful to leave violence to the imagination and 2) the imagination will make it all the more violent.

A less obvious example from the same film is Martin Balsam's walk up the gothic staircase, at the top of which he is suddenly stabbed and falls back down to his death. Hitchcock frames the actor tightly because the audience knows that menace lurks somewhere in that house. Being prevented from seeing it approach makes that menace all the more scary. Hitchcock's lesson: control what's outside your frame as well as what's within it.

John Ford

If Chaplin included everything important in the frame and Hitchcock cunningly excluded crucial things, John Ford went them one better by controlling everything in every shot so tightly that he was said to edit in the camera. To prevent producers and other subspecies from mucking up his movies he shot few extra angles and so little cover material that the editor had almost no options: he or she was forced to assemble the movie exactly as Ford had visualized it.

And there is this master's lesson for us: visualization. Like his colleague Hitchcock, Ford made the movie in his head before he rolled the camera. You too will get much better results if you build the finished video in your imagination before you shoot. That way you're more likely to capture everything you need to build an effective program. Fully half a director's job is to put the camera in the right place with the right lens framing the right subject for each and every shot. Only by pre-visualizing how each shot will fit in the finished video can you do that job effectively.