What does Structure and Form mean in flm and cinema?

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What does Structure and Form mean in flm and cinema?

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Postby GAP » Sat Mar 26, 2016 6:01 pm

I am not a film theorist or anything but I always wondered what form and structure mean in cinema?
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Re: What does Structure and Form mean in flm and cinema?

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Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Mon Mar 28, 2016 9:33 am

Structure is more like "How is this story gonna be arranged? What elements need to happen to support the plot?"

Form is more like "How will these story elements be presented to the viewer?"

Structure can be deceptively easy. "Tell a story that isn't boring," is the only hard and fast rule in any form of storytelling. How that can happen changes for every film genre,and even in every individual film.

Form can also be deceptively easy. Many agree that having a gritty, realism approach to your superhero movie worked for Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, but didn't work for Zack Snyder's Man of Steel movie. Having grand, over-the-top, rousing speeches works for movies like Independence Day or Pacific Rim, but would be laughed at in an Alien or Evangelion movie. Dutch angles (slanted camera shots) are nice sometimes in The Third Man or Batman Forever, but are headache inducing in Battlefield Earth.

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Re: What does Structure and Form mean in flm and cinema?

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Postby zlink64 » Mon Mar 28, 2016 12:07 pm

YOu know any good text books that teach this stuff that you would recommend? I m not into making movies or anything but sounds like a cool thing to learn about just for the sake of movie watching.
hmmm
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Re: What does Structure and Form mean in flm and cinema?

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Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Mon Mar 28, 2016 11:24 pm

Film Art: An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson details a lot of form and structure in film, but it's mostly form. How NOT to Write a Screenplay by Denny Martin Flinn digs deeper into story structure in film, being written by someone who reads screenplays for a studio rather than writing them. (This is a better book on screenplay writing than one written by someone who writes screenplays. Successful screenplay writers are too busy writing screenplays to write a book about them, and the only screenplay writer who would write a book about writing screenplays would be someone who isn't being successful at selling the screenplays, thereby needing that extra source of income. Also, this book also give you an idea as to what studios look for in their screenplays, explaining why certain specific trends are almost always seen in many Hollywood films.)

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Re: What does Structure and Form mean in flm and cinema?

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Postby GAP » Wed Mar 30, 2016 10:21 pm

I gotta take a look at those and maybe even take a film theory class.
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