Audiovisual language has its own rules: it has a grammar and a syntax. Every shooting, a close up or a wide shot, takes on a specific meaning. Instead, editing is the audiovisual syntax. Each film is the result of techinical and stylistic choices, which we deeply have to understand. This course aims to show how we can analyze a video (made for cinema, TV, web) and how the technique should guide us to understand it.
This is the list of the main topics covered: shooting; how a frame is composed; how to move a camera on a set; sound-track and sound off; what is an audiovisual product; standards and materials for filming; the aspect ratio; balance and dynamism in a picture; angle / reverse angle; exposure; third dimension of a frame; white balance; warm light and cold light; the time of the plot; length and rhythm; circular time, linear time and fragment of time; documentary; definition of "pathic cinema": horror, hard-core, propaganda; genre cinema, transmediality; the audiovisual flow on television and on the web. Each topic will have many examples: sequences taken from movies, videoclips, advertising, news, photographs, comics.