The Technical Side of The Force Awakens

I'm a bit of a technical person when it comes to film admiration.
I've seen lots of discussions about things folks loved and hated about The Force Awakens, but heavily there is a lack of a discussion (as far as I've seen, anyway) regarding the technical characteristics of the film in comparison to the other films in the series.

A lot of folks have said that it "felt" like the old trilogy, or that it looked like the old trilogy, and I think this is true and is a result of an endeavor to accomplish that effect, which is itself a very interesting topic.

However, there are two critical differences that The Force Awakens contained from a camera blocking and composition consideration that none of the other films contain; or rather said, one of which none of the other films contain, and one of which the other films rarely use.

The first is PUSH/PULL.
Looking at the original scripts of the OT and PT is almost akin to reading a Shakespeare play script.
The only thing you are largely going to see is the scene's general description heading, dialogue, and the rare occasion of camera direction.
Mostly they are pure screenplays; void of dictating direction.
This is because George Lucas heavily depends on the storyboarding to outline these concepts and typically goes to the storyboard for the outline for direction over the script.
He is well known, at this point, for his voluminous employment of highlighters on storyboards as the main means for working through what's going to be done and what is not.

Contrarily, the script for The Force Awakens is very full of technical direction in the standard model of screenplay writing format of modern films.

This leads us to the first moment I smiled in watching the film.
I'll present it here as it's listed in the script:

POE lowers the quadnocs -- PUSH IN ON HIS UNNERVED EYES.
​

PUSH.
For the first time* in a Star Wars film, we gained the PUSH and PULL of a camera instead of just the PANNING and TRACKING of the camera.

This is a HUGE change in the tonality of conveying emotional tension in a film.

Normally Star Wars has been shot with mostly variations of MEDIUM (MEDIUM/MEDIUM LONG/MEDIUM CLOSE) shots that are static except for perhaps a PAN or TRACK movement here and there.

The only PUSH/PULL sensation that we get in the OT isn't actually a PUSH/PULL, but a consequence of CHASING/FOLLOWING the spaceships as they fly in front of the camera and zoom by objects.
The camera itself, however, is actually static during these scenes - that is, the ship stays the same distance as we "CHASE" it; as if we are on a camera mount hanging on a selfie stick hanging off of the back end of the ship.

When the camera is not fixed upon the ship or object in the OT, the camera is found to simply PAN lightly while not TRACKING as the ship flies overhead to in front of our view, or from one side of the screen to the other.

This particular case is due to the nature of how spaceships were accomplished technically in the OT, so it's understandable as to why the camera was so static in respect to the object.

However, when we get to the PT, we see the exact same treatment without a technical limitation upon the freedom of movement.
Lucas made these choices, then, not because they were required, but because this treatment of the camera was his preference.

I greatly appreciated having the PUSH/PULL flexibility of story telling finally in the Star Wars toolbox.


The second item of interest is the COMPOSITION.
In the OT, for characters, the MEDIUM shots are the go-to, and this almost never stopped.
Dialogue is typically exchanged between two characters who are speaking to each other while both are in the same shot together, typically on opposite sides of the screen from each other.
Sometimes they toggle back and forth, and in the OT this varies between the COMPOSITION being center screen, or angled shots at opposing thirds of the screen.
The angled shots at opposing thirds is not a common COMPOSITION in the OT, however.

In the PT, it is even less used.
With the PT, Lucas very specifically wanted to emulate the old "Silver Screen" methods of BLOCKING and COMPOSITION.
He has received much complaint about this by many who probably didn't realize it wasn't because he was lazy.
Often, you'll read or watch something which discusses the PT's cinematography and the person complains how lazy and unimaginative the PT was in this regard and how the sets were set up so that Lucas could just sit without doing much.

These critiques are correct in describing the sets and the BLOCKING and COMPOSITION, but their understanding of Lucas' motives for these things are missing information.
Lucas wasn't being lazy; he was very specifically emulating a style of shooting that he wanted the PT to have.
He so wanted the "Old Serial" feel and that "Flash Gordon" style that he center-screen composed everything in PT far more than he already was doing in the OT.
He also specifically placed everything on a set and stuck to the set pedantically because that was how those old films were made and the restriction gave them a portion of their feel and style because the camera was on a limited range of movement equal to the boundaries of the set inside of the studio.

So the camera was stuck on a track most of the time and moved along with TRACKING shots which kept the subjects in the center of the frame, and toggling back and forth between two people talking was often done with the subjects square in the center of the frame each.

There are a couple exceptions to this in the PT, but these are typically in CGI scenes controlled by the CGI team and even then the deviations from this plan are very slight and easy to overlook.

Objects (non-characters) in both the OT and the PT are treated very much as objects; they are each put in sequence that is not in CONTINUITY with the COMPOSITION of the Subjects (characters) which are part of the scene.
For example, if we are looking at a character who is on a MEDIUM CLOSE shot, say in a cockpit, and the subject looks up out of their cockpit and is talking about a ship which is behind them and the following shot is going to be of the ship which they are speaking about, the subsequent shot of that ship will be of independent COMPOSITION of the character in the cockpit - it will typically be center-screen, or if it is a PAN shot then it will pay no attention to which angle the character was previously shot from in contrast.

Again, this happens in both the OT and the PT alike because this is just how Lucas visually thinks - at least for Star Wars.

Conversely, The Force Awakens has a very modern film COMPOSITION approach.
The default go-to for dialogue is to toggle between two characters who are set at opposing thirds of the screen (just to be clear; this means that one shot will have one character on the left third of your screen while they look to the right at a slight angle, and then the other character will have a shot on them where they are on the right third of the screen while they look to the left at a slight angle) with interspersed MEDIUM variation shots for a sense of spacial context.

This means that, by default, The Force Awakens carries with it a more "tight" sensation to the BLOCKING than the OT or PT because it doesn't default every scene to a multi-character MEDIUM shot for most of the scene; reserving these collective subject shots for the start or end of the scene mostly, with some scattered in between as needed for action or spacial context.

It also means that TFA carries with it more of a sense of constant motion since the FRAME of the camera is constantly shuffling around to get a shot of everyone talking instead of just sitting still with multiple characters exchanging dialogue on the screen as the default.

This adds a tool for pacing that wasn't often available in the OT, and definitely was not available in the PT.
In fact, that lack of pacing in the PT to the extreme which it did - due to being stuck so strictly to center-screen COMPOSITION was a very large reason that the films often were cited as feeling slow and long, or lacking intensity.

This discussion of COMPOSITION also brings us to a related point - CONTINUITY.
As mentioned, in the OT, and as well in the PT, CONTINUITY between COMPOSITION from Subjects to Objects was mostly lacking. The CONTINUITY was between the exterior shot of a ship and the next exterior shot of the ship with no regard to the Subject shots in between.

In The Force Awakens, this is entirely opposite and it starts before the camera even rolls.
Unlike the OT and the PT, the script for TFA really treats non-entity items as Subjects; even the camera is given a relationship rather than just a series of shot numbers on a storyboard.
For example; take the first PULL shot in TFA in the script:

PULL BACK FAST to REVEAL we're inside the main control room.​

"we're"
The script for TFA starts off with forcing the reader to adopt the audience's relationship to the film.
This type of discussion is entirely absent in the OT and PT screenplays; which are very sterile by comparison due to simply listing the scene heading, whether it is INT or EXT, and then moving on to dialogue.

In regards to the CONTINUITY

BEHIND THE FALCON as it DRAMATICALLY BANKS AT AN UPWARD ARC UPSIDE-DOWN, then SWOOPS PERILOUSLY LOW across the sand. Two TIE FIGHTERS SCREAM past us!​

This scene is a great example of how opposite TFA is from the OT and PT in regards to Object to Subject CONTINUITY.

When you watch two TIE FIGHTERS fly from the LEFT to the RIGHT over the top of the FALCON, for example, the subsquent shot will be of FINN and the COMPOSITION will be that FINN is on the RIGHT THIRD of the FRAME looking BACK over his shoulder to the LEFT of the screen at an angle. Following immediately is a shot of REY on the LEFT THIRD of the FRAME looking at the control panel at an angle facing to the RIGHT.

In such, the CONTINUITY is LEFT TO RIGHT, RIGHT TO LEFT, LEFT TO RIGHT one after the other.
The Objects (TIE FIGHTERS) are treated as part of the line of CONTINUITY of the Subjects.

This has two primary impacts:
Firstly; we're playing pin-pong with our eyeballs instead of looking at a CENTERED object one after the other with only a periodic break up of a PAN shot, and as such, we feel more intensity and action than if we were only moving our eyeballs each time a PAN shot happens.
Secondly; it directly links the Objects (in this case, spaceships) to the Subjects (characters) and the ACTION of the Objects becomes equal with Dialogue of the Subjects.
Meaning; the Objects are COMPOSED to deliver their ACTIONS with the same respect that Subjects are COMPOSED to deliver their DIALOGUE.
It is more, to borrow a phrase, intimate treatment of Objects than Star Wars has created previously.



These are two things which I thought were very well done in The Force Awakens and surpassed some shortfalls of the previous Star Wars films technically, designed or consequences of limitations.

It is always impressive to me how a small shift can make such a drastic difference in cinema.
I think the compare/contrast study of Star Wars films' Blocking and Composition really highlights this topic.

 

A. Emotion that does not require exposition in dialogue. & B. Less is more
Lucas is a fantastic conceptual thinker, but his weakness is absolutely the dialogue.
"I’m notorious for wooden dialogue" - Lucas.

Mixed with the fact that Lucas doesn't very often ever engage with actors about how their characters feel, and you have some issues that can happen. Firstly; actors becoming frustrated:
"I would to talk to George about say Luke and what he is feeling … ‘Should I be jealous that this guy is hitting on the Princess?’ George would say: ‘That’s interesting. We’ll talk about it later.’ Which, of course, we never would!" - Hamill.

The times Lucas would have instructions on the expression would be for idolized motives; a good example is the now renowned Fisher scene:
"Governor Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board."

Renowned, of course, because of the cadence that caught everyone's attention, as it very much suddenly deviates from Fisher's normal cadence to one of marked enunciation.
And this was because Lucas adored the old "Silver Screen" and got invested in that scene sounding like the old standard "screen play accent".
I think if he could have, he would have had Fisher pull that accent through the whole movie, but as it was she had to re-shoot that scene scores of times over until she was about to fall apart from frustration of the repetition just to get something that was in the ballpark of what Lucas had in mind.

This, I think, is a good example of how Lucas is a big-picture guy, but not a character and dialogue fellow.
I think for this reason, ESB and RotJ's dialogues are improved by the inclusion of Kasdan to assist; over now infamous arguments that drove others mad.

I respect this flaw, however.
I myself am the same way: I can develop entire whole worlds, cultures, fictional anthropological notes of plenty, languages, architectural designs, designs for things that are used in the worlds, plots and archetypes, but as soon as I need to put the alignment to center-page and write a line of dialogue...I grab at vacancy; I don't enjoy the process, and I just want to get it out of the way.
I can edit dialogue from someone else better than I can write dialogue, even.

My wife, on the other hand, can fly through dialogue like it's a second skin; she's the actual writer of the two of us.

Lucas has a view that I also hold, and it's one that not many agree with; and I also cannot claim that Lucas, nor myself, are correct or not.
To Lucas, the visual is the important part - the words are filler.
His current project is Tone Poem films which do not have words at all, nor a standard tangent of story line, but instead function as a series of images to convey an impression, sensation, or tone - and idea - through only the visual aspect of film.

I sympathize with this; I have - in the past - done some comic work and often pressed adamantly for the series to not have words at all; to simply tell the story by nothing other than the pictures on the page.
I am the same with music, as well; remove the words, keep the melody - I'm fine with that; I wasn't actually listening to the words themselves anyway.

The problem with this, however, is that regardless of how much Lucas or myself may like things to be polarized onto the wordless values of art, cinema simply is not purely a visual medium for audiences who are eager to get to know the characters through vicarious intimacy.
ESB is probably as successful as it is, because Kershner really pushes the camera very, very close to the actor's face almost constantly.
I think had Lucas not been around, Kershner would have filled almost the entire movie with faces and cut about half of the non-face shots out of the film; at least.

In Kershner's words, "I like to fill up the frame with the characters' faces. There's nothing more interesting than the landscape of the human face."

This is very easily recognized in ESB as opposed to ANH, or any other Star Wars film for that matter.
So between Kasdan's inserted writing and Kershner's directorial alteration in blocking and composition, things changed - it would seem for the better.

For me; not so. I don't enjoy ESB nearly as much as either ANH or RotJ - it bores me.
ESB, to me, is when Star Wars becomes All Quiet on the Western Front; a slow-paced war time interpersonal drama with only a dab of action here and there as a tea break between intimately quiet long talking scenes.
However; clearly the majority of seat-goers relate better to this than I, or Lucas, do.


I think this cleanly leads into...
C. Know your audience & E. What is Star Wars?

I think one has to keep in mind that Lucas is the audience, from his perspective.
I think most people are unaware, or forget, that Lucas is an "artiste" at heart, and not a standard commercial director.
Commercial directing success accidentally happened in the case of Lucas, and the rare thing was that this time the cinéma artiste didn't run away from the commercial industry, or go down in a ball of social and professional flames after a few years.

What Lucas gets out of Star Wars; what he sees in them, and what the audience sees them as are vastly different objects.
To most of the viewing public, Star Wars is a movie and it's role is being a movie.
It's varied over the audience as to what they take from Star Wars films, but they all do start there - that they are "movies"; which means there's an implied expectation of being entertained in a "show" capacity - that a "show" will be witnessed and a "show" will entertain.

Lucas, however, sees them like art at a prestigious art gallery; socially retrospective commentary and esoteric philosophy to discuss with his artiste friends over drinks and dining.
He has openly stated, repeatedly, that he is not interested in what the audience or fans want; he's interested in what he wants - if others enjoy it too; then fine.
When asked if he was going to release the Tone Poems that he's going to be working on, he replied that he was not going to do so because the general public doesn't want them, and wouldn't even understand them.
He also considers these Tone Poems to be more of what he's always been interested in as a type of cinema than Star Wars, which he considers an accident; in that he was doing a piece of art and it happened that it was an industrial commercial success that sparked a whole franchise.
Star Wars, for Lucas, was his... eh ... œuvre d'art wrapped in a commercial blanket so that he could afford rent.

So Star Wars, basically, is as commercial and mass audience friendly as Lucas' art can possibly be (which; in my opinion, seems like that worked out pretty well).
For such an individual of this kind of mind and way of seeing their craft, I have to say that Lucas is an amazement.
Usually this kind of person is not found to be flexible into a mass industrial fashion at all.

They may be famous, but they don't often have the ability to flip their form into something that can be ingested by mass audiences even to a marginal range.

In a way, however, this is somewhat unfortunate.
What this also means is that we have never actually seen Lucas' idea of cinema fully realized.
The closest we have is THX, but this even is not quite fully developed yet in style and in form.
What we know of Lucas at this point is a filtered form of Lucas' actual vision of cinema; we have seen Lucas' vision of what he thinks we can accept of his cinematic vision. He may be right; he may be wrong. Either way, we've seen a Lucas-lite so far.

Here's to hoping his Tone Poems get leaked some how.


As to D; That's a cultural assumption; he may have been right for his films; he may have been wrong.
It's hard to say since what was done was done. He is very much a mind of the era in which he grew up in - he often calls himself a "hippy" and then retracts and creates addendum to the title (often by re-using the term as what he is not; e.g. 'I'm not a "hippy-hippy", but you know, I grew up in etc... so the hippy culture had an impact' kind of statements - that's a paraphrase by me, btw).



With all of the above written, for me: Lucas' Star Wars is very interesting and I appreciate their craft as they are.
A New Hope, with all of its little flaws, is still my favorite film of the OT, and I actually appreciate the PT for what they were - less one particular scene and that's mostly because I can't for the life of me understand why Lucas would even attempt an extended love scene while at the same time express awareness at his entire lack of character dialogue craftsmanship; it would have been more effective to run through a montage of impressions of a love scene briefly and move on; capping the montage with timeline markers at the beginning and end for clarity that time passed, etc...
Perhaps he was challenging himself; pushing to try, I'm not sure.

Aside from that one scene, however, I appreciate the PT from an arts perspective cinematographically.
I think they fail if the question is what will work as a Movie, wildly succeed if the question is whether they accomplish their artistic endeavor to emulate old serial film styles.


That said...as a Movie...I very much appreciate Lucas' ideas filtered through others, and especially through Abrams.

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 11, 2016, Original Post Date: Jan 11, 2016 ---

If I recall correctly; that's mostly true of just about all of these films.
Most film scripts are not presentable, or fixed, before shooting, but evolve.

However, I did see some in-shooting copies of the TFA script and they were very different in structure and notation than those from the OT or PT - even the set pictures are different.
If you look at pictures of the OT and PT; you'll rarely see Lucas with a script in his hands, or really anyone else. You'll see it a few times here and there, but not much.
Conversely, if you go hunting for pictures of Abrams on set; you'll see a script is often at hand.

 

I had forgotten about Kershner's alteration in that respect. Yes, there is a PUSH on Leia, however the shot of Hoth is a ZOOM and not a PULL.
Again, I think this is a part of what makes ESB popular - Kershner was obsessed with the camera representing the character's emotion and pulling every little bit from the expressions on faces as he could on top of that.

So you're quite right; there is a previous employment in ESB. I believe, aside from a couple very subtle instances in the PT's CGI moments, this is about it for the series.

By comparison, TFA has at least 15 PUSH/PULL shots; it really stands out - we're constantly in flux in TFA between LEFT - RIGHT - UP - DOWN - FORWARD - BACKWARD, and often in a mix - sometimes multiple in one shot.
TFA feels more in motion, in part, as a result of this than the previous films.

(If coming from the * in the original post, click here to return to the original post to continue reading)

 

I'm glad he didn't, actually.
The PT is about as close as we'll ever get to how Lucas purely intended Star Wars to look and feel in every way, and I think he definitely nailed that vision better than any other director could have.

I'm torn on that.
For myself; I have since long ago decided that I appreciate doing art as a "hobby" and not as a profession.
I make music, for example, but I have no endeavor to commercially make music. I allow it to be freely accepted and used however folks want, and I don't really expect much out of it in regards to an audience reply.
I mostly just make the art because it's within myself and it must be vomited out of my brain; it's a virus, or compulsion.

At the same time, I think nothing ill at all for commercially produced works that were made specifically with the audience acceptability in mind.
Some of the most amazing musicians which I know of are from the Wrecking Crew; a studio band who created nearly everything heard in the United States during the 60's through the early 80's (often without credit because they were a studio group of musicians).
I really cannot appreciate Kubrick or Lynch, either, as easily as I can appreciate Spielberg or Abrams; I cannot appreciate King as easily as I can Crichton; etc...

So I suppose, in a way similar to Lucas, I'm a walking contradiction regarding this subject.
If you ask me my thoughts about my art, I'm one perspective, but if you ask me my thoughts about other's art, I'm the opposite.

The released photos of the set are slim currently, but I think borrowing a single shot from Star Trek speaks volumes of the difference in this regard between Lucas and Abrams as directors in relationship to the script as a tool for communication.

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 12, 2016, Original Post Date: Jan 12, 2016 ---

Quite so!
Though, the editing is due to Mary Jo Markey, and Maryann Brandon; both have done almost all of Abram's editing (including Star Trek) - which is nice because that means they are a cohesive team that understand each other well at this point.
They are both amazing editors and definitely deserve recognition in their own right!