Film Directing Fundamentals – See Your Film Before Shooting

by Nicolas T. Proferes

Focal Press, 2005

7¼" x 10¼", 277 pages

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This is the kind of book about film directing that I was looking for since a long time. The other classic in film directing book is "Film Directing Shot by Shot" by Steven D. Katz. Katz book is a book I've consulted numerous times but I have yet to read it from cover to cover and then write a review about it. Still, I know Katz book well enough to make a comparison and explain why I decided to read Proferes book before Katz book.

Katz "Film Directing Shot by Shot" is an excellent book about the vocabulary and grammar of cinema. It covers the storyboarding process and the camera shooting process in a very technical way. There are numerous illustrated examples and diagrams to help explain the different techniques used by storyboard artists and cameramen. But there is very little insights about which camera angle to use in which circumstance. Katz book is all about the "how" and little about the "why". Proferes book is all about the "why" and a little about the "how".

To use Scott McCloud "six steps" paradigm for an artist development in "Understanding Comics", I would say that Katz book covers steps 6 "surface" and 5 "craft" and Proferes covers step 4 "structure" and a little of step 3 "idiom".

And I felt that in order to better apply all the cinematic vocabulary and grammar that are explained in Katz book, a good introduction about the directors methods and motivations for picking one shot instead of another, one angle instead of another or one cut instead of another was required. And there we are.

The book starts with a very short but direct to the points "introduction to film language and grammar", which, in about 12 pages, covers issues like the 180° rule and stuff like that. Right at page 3, the author explains, in a few words, what this book is all about and I quote:

"Once film became a series of connected shots, a language was born. Every shot became a complete sentence with at least one subject and one verb. (…) Like prose, a film sentence/shot can be simple with only one subject and one verb and perhaps an object; or it can be a compound sequence/shot, composed of two or more clauses. The type of sentence/shot we use will first depend on the essence of the moment we wish to convey to the audience."

In prose, each word in a sentence is chosen to communicate an idea. Same in a cinematic shot where the shot size, angle, depth of field, focal length, motion, staging, lighting, props, are all words, carefully selected to communicate an idea. The goal of the book to to teach a method to help the director select those appropriate words in the shots.

The method is based on some "detective work" the director does on the script. The first task is to assign a "spine" to the story itself and assign a "spine" to each of the main characters in the story. A spine is not like a background story but rather like a grand goal that motivates the character's actions throughout the whole story. Then the detective work goes through other discovery or elaboration steps such as describing who's film is it, what are the essence of each characters, their circumstances, their dynamic relationships, their "wants", their expectations, etc.

All the above stuff is usually mentioned in other books but Proferes not only explains what those are but shows how elaborating those is done using the patio scene in Hitchcock's "Notorious". The scene is also used to introduce the concept of "dramatic blocks", "acting beats", "narrative beats" and "fulcrum". Proferes introduces:

"A dramatic block can be likened to a paragraph in prose: it contains one overriding dramatic idea. (…) And, as in prose, when we move on to another idea we begin a new paragraph, acknowledging to the reader the progression of thought, or in the case of a dramatic film acknowledging narrative or dramatic change and/or escalation".

On narrative beats:

"Why does a director move a camera, or cut from one shot to another? Why does a director have a character move from one side of the room to another? (…) I believe it can be explained, …".

And yes, it can be explained. In this regard, I found the concepts of "acting beats" and "narrative beats" particularly enlightening. They are intertwined in the script and the director's detective work is to find them and annotate them in the script. They take on the form of action verbs that are written in the script margin. And just by doing that simple annotation to the script, it adds a whole new dimension to the visualization of the scene and the action.

For example, by adding "acting beats", the script dialogs don't just look like sentence anymore. They truly start looking like actors acting the sentence with motivated gestures. The character motivation becomes very clear and the attitude and gestures that go with that also become very clear.

The "narrative beats" annotation does to the visualisation of the camera motivation the same thing that the "acting beats" does to the visualization of the actor actions. A "narrative beat" is also an "acting beat" but it is stronger than that. It also involves the camera and the staging. The simple addition of a verb colors the whole shot. Remember the subtitle of this book is "See Your Film Before Shooting"? Well, folks, this is where the book meets its promises. And we are just at chapter 3!

And that is not all. Chapter 4 covers staging. The functions of staging are explained with examples from the patio scene from Notorious with floor plans. The notion of "dramatic movement" is particularly interesting as it helps design the staging of the scene, the characters movements in the scene and, to some extent, how the camera follows them. All those decisions sit on the previous detective work from the script. Chapter 5 covers camera usage, the motivations for using a reveal, staging the entances of the characters, using an objective vs subjective camera, where to place the camera and its height in the scene, the composition, the coverage, the style, etc. There again, the patio scene from Notorious with storyboard frames is used to show those concept as they are used in a real scene.

All of the above is supplied in the first part of the book. The book is divided into 3 parts, each using approximately 1/3 of the pages. In the second part, all the previously explained principles and concepts are put to use in a short film. The script is all there and the author does, in a step by step fashion, all the script detective work that is advocated previously is executed and explained. The staging is explained and justified with all the camera placements, actor movements, coverages, illustrated on floor plans. And this ends-up with a full storyboard. All the director's refections, motivations and design decisions are explained, even change of minds. It was the first time I saw a script annotated with camera setups.

In part 3 of the book, the author analyses, in great details, 3 films: Alfred Hitchcock's "Notorious", Peter Weir's "The Truman Show" and Frederico Fellini's "8-1/2". Seeing those directing principles analysis applied to "8-1/2" is fascinating to say the least. I'm not a big fan of this film which I've seen years ago and I only have a vague souvenirs of it. But after reading Proferes' 35 pages of analysis, I'm looking for a place where I could rent it and view it again.

This is a very good book. I think this is a must have book for anyone serious about film directing, be it for live-action films or animated films. I actually recommended it to my wife who writes novels because I thought that the concepts of "acting beats" and "narrative beats" could be helpful in novel writing as well. There are no actors and camera in a novel but scenes need to be described and characters attitude need to be described as well. Thinking in term of acting and narrative beats can help add just this little qualificative that will color a reply from a character.