How To Keep An Audience Focused (Ft. Aristotle)

in every shot there's usually a focal point without a focal point it's not really much of a focus and it's not necessarily a bad thing but eyes respond more to contrast and that's why gorillas have black eyes unlike gorillas humans have a white scera and then pupils and when you look at someone in the eyes it helps form a better connection when I look into a gorilla's eyes I feel nothing I think it wants to kill me and her eyes are usually attracted to brighter things but there' only be brighter things through contrast or some level of it and this is why people when movies and TV were only in black and white they it was possible to make things but anyways this video is about focus and there's a lot of ways that you can emphasize focus in film making by blurring the background slowly zooming in on something providing contrast so if you're interested in that subscribe only got 182 at the time of this recording and uh yeah enjoy you know spotlights brighter things are more attractive to our eye you like the thing with the eyes I was talking about you could probably figure out all the previously mentioned ones by yourself but what you didn't know was that this this is the first thing you saw before you ever saw anything this is what babies in the womb see and they turn to recognize face like shapes and that's why I can draw something like this and you recognize it as a face and cars and stuff you you look more at the front of a car than any other part of it at least when you first see it what grabs your attention it's the main part and that's where these Focus points should be placed or emphasized Focus depends on principles of art and things of the sort like use of negative space Take 2 Want A Space Odyssey For example now you could do many things to to gain Focus you could put something that fundamentally is confusing like like an optical illusion so why do we find something interesting well because it's not boring we're going to talk about conditioning conditioning in a film making show Making perspective is when you condition someone to to know the rules of your story of your world that you've built in the show in the story whatever you know what I mean and get used to those but the most important part of that is that you make them feel comfortable in it for example if you're watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and Mickey gets a boo boo and he puts on a Band-Aid you're like all right Mickey's okay but if Mickey gets a boo boo and he starts violently bleeding then you've played with their sense of comfort that's the type of thing that would get someone to stand up in their seat this also called playing with expectations make your audience underestimate so that you can ramp things up and you know just make things better so that it's like a trick that makes them think that whatever they're viewing is better than it actually is literally a trick that they use with dogs there are many ways that people do this like with plot twists or using stereotypes tropes and then twisting them or just straight up or extending a part out so that it makes you start to think and realize that you actually don't know what's going to happen next this is a technique that anime does a lot or you could pull a Breaking Bad and in the first episode and you can show how good the show does get so that people don't turn it off at the beginning instead showing Walter White driving through the desert full full speed in his RV and then immediately cutting to his family life that happened before so that the audience will watch until the point that they started with is shown and even better it happens in the same episode so you don't have to watch the second episode to get back onto that Cliffhanger because for your audience hooking them in is I mean obviously it's not too easy but you really need to hook your viewer in and the way they can do this is through aol's Poetics basically they're what Aristotle said every good story has and they are character thought dition spectacle and song If you ask any writer or filmmaker a tip that they'll probably try to give you that the audience is a character as well but that's not too direct what they really mean by that that you should keep mind of how the audience feels during a certain scene how should they feel and how they actually do feel when actually watching it and that's why that's how you can revise and change it up that's what test screenings are for to see if they feel the right way before the movie comes out but hopefully they don't leak it for the sake of keeping this video focused I'm going to not be talking about these aspects of Aristotle's Poetics and keeping it to the five parts but now we get to get into the more detailed focus of the science of focus of course there's character too you have to have a clear goal and causality have to has to be built into them we just have to know the character first they start with a literally everything starts with a character study which is basically a series of events that uncover the what how a character is so that later on in the story doesn't feel like what the character does comes out of nowhere in keeping focus in an audience also means that you can't have any mechanical breakdowns in your story which by that I mean one part of the story doesn't make sense or feels like it comes out of nowhere in a in a bad way there's a good way to that which is called causality like if a band of Travelers are out traveling and then out of nowhere a boulder hits them well it's clearly going to impact their mission and that's good for a story it makes it thrilling will they even make it to they're trying to make it who knows the long and short of it is have good clear characters have their emissions be clear so yeah it is causality baked right into it after that all you need to do to the character is put something in front of them and they will react accordingly like if you put jellyfish in front of SpongeBob Quinton Tarantino's the hateful late is a good example of this the second one is catharsis which means the emotional relief in an audience But continuing on maybe our Travelers just sort of got the boulder off and they're like oh phew got the boulder off to the like we're going to live or whatever but yeah you got the idea and then there's there's agoris hold up an agoris when a character makes a critical Discovery like oh watch out that Boulder's about to hit us like oh we're almost there uh We've almost made it to where we're going to go like in Shark Boy and Lava Girl when they say that they're they're almost there when they realize they're in a dream so they get Shark Boy to sing that Infamous song to get him to wake up there's two more of these perea is a s sudden reversal of Fortune like a I thought I lost but actually technically according to the tournament rules I won now back to the Bas Poetics thought I have never felt more thought while watching something than I have felt while watching The Matrix every piece of dialogue in this movie seems like it's asking you a direct question like to you the viewer especially that red pill blue pill scene it uses the word you a lot for example in this one piece of dialogue that morphe says when Neo meets him in the Matrix let me tell you why you are here you have come because you know something what you know you can't explain but you feel it you felt it your entire life felt that something is wrong with the world you don't know what but it's there like a splinter in your mind driving you mad is this feeling that has brought you to me do you know what I'm talking about the Matrix do you want to know what it is Neo swallows hard and nods continue there are a lot of good focal points in this text like the use of repetition of the word you or how he withholds the exact definition of what the Matrix is from Neo when asks or how he does the exact opposite thing at the top of the text before this whole Mantra where Neo says he doesn't like the idea that he's not in control of his life and Morpheus says that he he knows exactly what he means he's leading am on in a dialogue sense we're starting a sentence with let me tell you why you are here and the uses of you while also using it with language that lifts you up and then talks down to you in a pattern back and forth it keeps the viewer engaged it's like if I were to say I am the boss of you you make make your own rules a good story will keep you focused I've watched things that have one of these core traits and they were still good and the rest were mediocre but it was still good I watch I watch Cobra Kai because it's funny I don't think I really watch it for any other reason than that it's like the room not as bad as the room also but still bad but this leads into another one I guess I've covered two at once diction which basically just means good writing and then the last one is spectacle and song and and spectacle is like big explosions and Transformers and song is like when someone when a fire like really good OS plays like that one part in ants hey everybody 6:15 time to dance they're meant to be used at very emotional moments of the movie the genre of musicals is literally defined by when emotions reach a peak music starts playing and same thing with spectacle spectacle is really in everything thing it's what stops it from uh being boring and the last part is three tragic beats which is like that dumb story chart thing we all know that and who cares you know beginning middle and end we're not stupid we're going to skip over that but I will say 3x structure is not for every story it's like there's arcs and some yeah now we focus on the elements of art like line we can see this in Horizons where there's the horizon line and that type of line a horizontal line keeps you looking quite in the middle it your eyes just naturally go there now a vertical line makes you look up and down you kind of don't know where to look with the horizontal line buildings seem weird that's why skyscrapers that look more like that have a cool roof rather than just abruptly ending seem more satisfying to us and finally the diagonal line you kind of look up and down it over and over again and this is the power of line the first elements of art one of the seven don't worry this will be fast the ones we really want to focus on are shape color and form if we have a guy just standing here of course he's a focal point there's nothing else there in the painting but if we do this then he's even more of a focal point the environment is complimenting him or are they judging him actually no they're just complimenting him and obviously there's ones like texture and shape I mean because of the shape and form of him we can tell that he's a person and some arrows maybe there may have steal who knows but we're only using silhouett here but one big key thing I haven't talked about yet is movement movement and directing it's everything our eyes are attracted to movement and Beauty as well so sorry to some of you but but movement you see something move out of the corner of your eye and you think think you've seen it it seems like this there's a a subject subject could be a person or an object and it really just depends on who or what the camera follows directors use these tracking shots and these can range from a couple of seconds to full-blown hours some movies uh a couple movies are completely tracking shots The Shining in particular loves its tracking shots this is probably the most useful Focus tool that you could probably use the illusion of one thing not moving while the entire background is moving but the audience obviously perceives it as the other way around and uh you get the point really so attention is something you gain by taking advantage of the senses in order to get a person's attention I could tap their shoulder put something in front of them shout their name put something up to their nose so they spell it or if you're really freaky put something in their mouth but when the only tool for gaining attention you have is a screen you can't do all that and this video has been a bad out there I hope you've all been focused on this thank you for watching and you just watched a quad zxy special don't forget to subscribe [Music]

Channel: quadzxy

Views: 454

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Id: EAQ0QSwizBU

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Mon May 20 2024