Creating order out of the chaos of Mad Max: Fury Road

An informative piece by Vashi Nedomansky on the craft that went into giving the audience a clear spatial orientation of what was happening where amidst the furious action sequences in Mad Max: Fury Road.

One of the many reasons MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is so successful as an action film is the editing style. By using “Eye Trace” and “Crosshair Framing” techniques during the shooting, the editor could keep the important visual information vital in one spot…the Center of the Frame. Because almost every shot was center framed, comprehending the action requires no hunting of each new shot for the point of interest. The viewer doesn’t need 3 or 4 frames to figure out where to look. It’s like watching an old hand-drawn flip book whiz by. The focus is always in the same spot!
 
This was an edict passed down directly from director George Miller. Over the walkie talkies during every scene he could heard saying “Put the cross hairs on her nose! Put the cross hairs on the gun!” This was to protect the footage for editorial and to ensure that the entire high speed film would be easily digestible with both eyes and brain. Every new shot that slammed onto the screen must occupy the same space as the previous shot. This is by no means a new technique, but by shooting the entire film in this way, Margaret Sixel could amplify and accelerate scenes, cut as fast as possible with the confident knowledge that the visual information would be understood.

FULL ARTICLE: vashivisuals.com/the-editing-of-mad-max-fury-road/ Film Editor Margaret Sixel was given over 480 hours of footage to create MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. The final edit ran 120 minutes and consisted of 2700 individual shots. That's 2700 consecutive decisions that must flow smoothly and immerse the viewer. 2700 decisions that must guide and reveal the story in a clear and concise manner. One bad cut can ruin a moment, a scene or the whole film. One of the many reasons MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is so successful as an action film is the editing style. By using "Eye Trace" and "Crosshair Framing" techniques during the shooting, the editor could keep the important visual information vital in one spot...the Center of the Frame. Because almost every shot was center framed, comprehending the action requires no hunting of each new shot for the point of interest. The viewer doesn't need 3 or 4 frames to figure out where to look. It's like watching an old hand-drawn flip book whiz by. It's always in the same spot!

Great video: succinct, clear.

It's an under-appreciated skill, giving the audience a clear sense of arrangement amidst chaotic action, especially when so many directors just resort to lazy chaos cinema action filmmaking technique. Most filmgoers probably didn't even notice the center framing during Mad Max, but they likely felt the spatial coherence in a visceral sense.

Most photographers have probably heard of the rule of thirds, but here is one time it made sense to go away from it. Knowing when to break rules is one sign of mastery.

This is also telling:

As they prepared to shoot the film, George Miller had no script. He did have over 3500 storyboards created by Mark Sexton. The Studio of course asked for a script and George said there wasn’t one. He offered the 3500 storyboards as it had taken him more than 10 years to get the story mapped out with this precision. The Studio said they NEED a script. George apparently had one cranked out but said it was “not good”. It didn’t have to be. He already knew how the whole film would look and feel. Visually center framed and barreling right at the audience.
 

I've heard a few people say they found the movie underwhelming after all the hype. I suspect many of them found the story too lean, but that's not so surprising for a post-apocalyptic allegory, and even less surprising given that Miller was working not off a script but storyboards.

I enjoyed the muscular simplicity of it all. A Google Maps route of the movie would show Imperator Furiosa driving straight out and then making a sharp left turn, and then driving back on the same route.

When Max tells Furiosa that “out there is nothing but salt,” he's speaking literally, but he's also saying that humanity's best chance for survival is with everyone working together, and perhaps only with women at the helm. That survival is also meant literally since a group of women living together wouldn't be able to procreate and continue the human race (Nux was along for the ride, I suppose, but he seemed sick and approaching death even as the movie began).

Filmmaking craft is often under-appreciated in action movies, so here's a toast to Miller, Searle, Sixel, and the whole crew. 

The dying art of movie choreography

By employing directors with backgrounds in drama, the studios hope action-heavy films will be infused with greater depth. The catch, however, is that drama directors are usually inexperienced at, and thus incapable of, properly handling their material that is the film's main selling point, or one of them. 

The outcome isn't pretty: action that gets the point across but lacks coherence, as well as the unique personality that the director was supposedly hired to provide.

That's Nick Schager in a great piece over at RogerEbert.com titled Why Most Modern Action Films Are Terrible. He points to many recent examples including Wolverine, Skyfall, Thor, Red, and The Avengers, all examples of what Matthias Stork has termed Chaos Cinema.

 [It's very useful to read and watch Stork's text and video essay on Chaos Cinema]

It's difficult to imagine this trend of shooting and editing diminishing over time. First of all, it's very difficult to learn to choreograph actors, action, and camera in a sophisticated manner to establish spatial coherence and clean continuity. It's much easier on set just to set up a ton of cameras and then just edit it together in a montage with rapid cuts and have the whole thing land as chaos.

Second, with the cost of filming coming down with the advent of digital cameras (the cost of shooting and storing a frame of film digitally is moving ever downwards, but with film the cost is now increasing as fewer and fewer places both manufacture and process physical film), the temptation to shoot a lot and sort it out in post processing will only become more and more enticing. 

It's not just action films that have suffered, though. One of the things that independent film doesn't get dinged for enough is shoddy or simplistic cinematography. It's great that more voices can afford to shoot a movie on the cheap these days, but it also means that many people without any training in cinematography or visual grammar are pumping out indie films with some of the most uninspired framing and blocking you can imagine.

I grew up watching a lot of Hong Kong action films, and one of the underappreciated elements of early work by John Woo or the movies of Johnny To is their rich action choreography. No matter what you think of his movies, Steven Spielberg is a master of this skill; consider the assault on Normandy at the start of Saving Private Ryan as just one example of keeping the viewer spatially oriented at all times while still conveying the utter chaos the soldiers were experiencing.

Some directors today still do wonders with actors, space, and the camera. Paul Thomas Anderson and his cinematographers have pulled off some amazing shots. Not all of them have to be as showy as the single shot that opens Boogie Nights, too. Take David Bordwell's dissection of one static single shot in There Will Be Blood. So much is conveyed simply through blocking of the actors and careful positioning of the camera.

In The Master, even with the burden of shooting in 65mm, with the massive cameras that large format calls for, Anderson and cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. pulled off some wonderful shots, including one gorgeous shot in which an actress strolls languorously through a department store, a vision of retail desire.

In the past here, I've analyzed one particular sequence in Birth that plays out like a waltz, complete with a waltz in the accompanying score from Alexandre Desplat. In To The Wonder, the camera seems to be engaged in a dance with Olga Kurylenko, the two of them circling each other as Kurylenko literally dances through fields.

It takes a director and cinematographer working together, bound by trust, to pull off such shots.  When it happens, it elevates a movie to a subconscious power and clarity that burrows into your memory.

One reason I suspect this is an area that gets little attention from viewers is that the vast majority of movie critics never bother to comment on this aspect of the movies. The technical aspects of filmmaking are considered secondary to the story or the acting. It's also difficult to pull stills from movies into a review to illustrate one's points. Even if you know how to do it technically, the legality of using such images is questionable, especially for a professional critic.

It's a shame. Only with more dialogue can people come to appreciate just how skilled some of the cinematographers working in the movies today really are. If you think lighting a single still subject for an Instagram photo is complicated, try lighting an actor moving through space while being shot with a camera that's also in motion.