Chapter 4

Manipulating time:

The relativety depends on how you look at time.

The main catergories for Manipulating time are;

Accelerating time
This is known as speeding up time, often to used to speed up motion on what characters. If you have a room full of actors and there having a party. The audience could get real bored if you just play the whole party to them, as some parties can be endless, so if you speed it up but slow enough to get an idea of whats going on then the audience will perfer this to having the party in normal time.
It shows all the events happening quick enough for the audience to see, in normal time it would simply bore the audience.



In this trailor there are a lot of fast motion scenes and I thought it was a good example of it as well as the trailer below.



In the Fast and Furious films there are a lot of scene with accelerating time to give the audience the intense feeling and an edge of their seat exticitment.
However they also use slow motion to slow the scene down and give the audience a breath taking experience.

Accelerating time and slow motion can sometime be used within Hollywood Montage.

Slow Motion
Using slow motion can often make a scene more intense e.g. if you have an explosion you are going to use slow motion because its more dynmatic and really puts the audience on the edge of their seats. It is often used on drama scene's and the audience can get a better clue of what is happening.






Start from 40 seconds


Speeding Motion and slowing it down can be used together. In this case if you were to have people randomly dotted in a room and the editor wanted to introduce them seperatly to the audience. The editor would speed up going from character to character. Once reaching the character they would use the slow motion technique on the face and there have there name and what they do appear on the bottom of the screen. Then it would move to another person using Speeding time so the audience don't get bored.

Speeding up and slowing down motion can be used to cover mistakes whilst filming so if the footage is jerky or not very good that adding slow or fast motion can overlap that error you've come across.
However not always can use these effects to cover up mistakes, if there screen has dialogue in it that you cannot accelerate time time because you wont know what there saying, however sometimes you can use slow motion but it does blur the dialogue so you struggled to understand what they say, so in this case it wouldn't be used.

Long takes
This is known as single shots which means you film it at the same time so if you make a mistake you have go back to that scene and re film everything. The scene is taken all in 1 go, hence the name Long Take.


This is a good example of a long take scene and it seems the Children of Men are quite famous for taking long shots.

Compressed time
Compressed time is known for have a long piece compressed into a small clip so your compressing it into a small format 'clip' Compressing time is cutting the unnesseary clips out, so if I was to film someone day I wouldn't show the whole day, I would show the key elements to their day. E.G. Going to work/college/school, getting something to eat, going home, having dinner, on there laptop, then bed. I wouldn't show the audience the whole day just the key things that they would need to know about their day.