BillyFeldman
Supporting Actor
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2008
- Messages
- 592
- Real Name
- Billy Feldman
Thanks for that. I watched Wargames last night. Many shots, tops of heads cut off. It's not mis-framed, it's the way it was shot. It just truly baffles me, this lack of knowledge on framing. Very few people notice it when they go to the movies because they're not at home watching a DVD and analyzing every bit of minutiae that's in front of them, they're involved in the story and seeing what the DP and director want you to see. People can speculate all they want to about Welles, but they cannot speculate about Russell Metty, who would have most certainly told Mr. Welles how the film was being framed and since I'm pretty certain that Mr. Welles was looking through the camera every now and then, he would have clearly seen the 1.85:1 frame lines that are impossible not to see.
As someone points out above, in the full frame Touch of Evil, you see a camera dolly in the bottom of the frame - do people really need more proof than that? Think Welles wanted folks to see that? Those who simply will not believe what is obvious will also note that Mr. Welles wrote a fifty-eight page memo to the studio about changes he would like, based on having seen a projected print of the film. They most certainly would have screened the film in 1.85:1 since that is how they projected films at Universal. And, you know, nowhere in that memo do I read, "Hey, and you know I framed this for Academy so why are you projecting it in 1.85:1?"
But this argument goes around and around, just as it did on The Shining. Because Mr. Kubrick made a pronouncement in the late 1980s about wanting his film to be shown open matte on TV and home video that became that mantra all the way up until The Stanley Kubrick Archives was released and until the recent re-release of the film in its proper ratio, which, BTW, is framed perfectly. I remember reading a post somewhere on the Internet about the Kubrick Archives book, so I bought it, and, just as the post said, there were Kubrick's storyboards, clearly saying in his own hand, frame for 1.85:1 but protect the full frame. Protecting the frame means just what it says - keep extraneous stuff out so when it's shown on TV (all there was at the time of The Shining's release) you won't see mics or tops of sets.
Anyway, I think I'm smart enough to know that there's no convincing people so I'll shut up now.