“World War II comes along, and they have to develop a camera. They develop a camera in World War II to be on the battlefield and capture the action. This was a revolution,” Says Janet Grillo.

It was a revolution in the way that newsreels were being made and showing people what was really happening on the front lines. If you went into a movie theater in those years, in the ’30s there’d be a newsreel because people didn’t have TV’s back then. You’d go into a movie theater, and there’d be a newsreel with footage of what was happening on the Western front, and then you’d watch your movie.

Things evolved even further. Those cameras were more lightweight. They could be carried and brought into the field. After World War II, a lot of filmmakers started to think ‘what if I took that camera and that technology. What could I do with it? Where could I go?’ They took these lighter cameras, and they went into the streets.

Important Italian filmmakers started the birth of Italian cinema in the 40s and 50s right after the war. They were telling very authentic, true stories about their experiences. Vittorio De Sica, the Bicycle Thieves. Open City, Rossellini. Really important, beautiful movies. Umberto D., Vittorio De Sica. They’re taking these lightweight cameras, and they’re moving into the world and the post-World War wreck that was Italy. They’re poignant, human stories, and oftentimes they’re not using actors. They’re using real people.

This knocks the film-going audience off its feet. This is a revolution in terms of what cinema is. What it can be. The French picked up on this right away, and they created the whole Cinéma Vérité. The truth. The truth of cinema. It has related to documentation and documentary film. The kinds of ways that cameras can move fleetingly, fluidly, naturalistically to capture moments and do weird things in weird places.

Then you have Auteur theory coming up, with this whole birth in the ’50s and ’60s that the French filmmakers were enthralled and respectful of the films that are made in the studio by Alfred Hitchcock. They respected what he was doing, but they were also very excited with how they could change things. The Auteur film is the author. Auteur means author. The camera is the pen, and they can use that fleetingly and quickly.

“The 1930s and 1940s were kind of the heyday of the American studio system. It was the heyday of Japanese filmmaking—many amazing filmmakers were doing so much work; however, the studio systems were still being established. And when Alrick Brown says the system, he means these things are built to just create and crank out stories. So, filmmakers became adept in storytelling because they had to constantly kick out stories,” Brown explains.
These were the filmmakers Brown first watched—Hitchcock, Orson Welles, they all came from that system. Brown continues, “Filmmakers like Ozu and Kurosawa also started their careers. It’s when I started seeing films that came before them; it was Buster Keaton, and it was Charlie Chaplin.”
Now, this new generation of filmmakers who grew up watching Keaton and Chaplin were making films. But these filmmakers functioned more independently and had a system that supported them.
Brown explains, “Films were often made while being written in these studio systems because they were just cranking out material. They put stars under contract—you are under contract; you made a certain number of films. They put directors and producers under contract.”
“And so, it was a film studio—with filmmaking machines. And in that machine system, some people were excluded. A lot of stories were excluded, as well as a lot of people who weren’t included in that part of the journey. European filmmakers who grew up on some of these American films, and were like, that’s not about them,” says Brown.
There were formulas to filmmaking. You had to believe that the French New Wave had some filmmakers trying more innovative things, that they were looking at the formulaic approach to some of the romance films that were coming out of Hollywood.
“Film noir was another popular genre in the 1930s and 1940s. This genre focuses intensely on a particular style or look. Film noir was a genre that had certain conventions it practiced. The audience always knew who the hero and villain were. They knew who the femme fatale was. This formulaic type of filmmaking, although entertaining for the masses, bred populations of filmmakers who thought of doing something different. They forgot about the narrative in the same way,” Brown states.
Brown further explains, “The filmmakers thought to loosen up the storytelling just a bit, where they were not going have this person be the hero, but instead, make them kind of a haunted hero, particularly after the war when many men came back with ailments from the war.”

The film movements were happening, and they were informing one another. A young American filmmaker who saw Godard’s work for the first time would get excited because Godard is playing with time in a way no one else had played with it.

Melvin van Peebles made independent, experimental films in the US. Then he studied and made films in France. Van Peebles was influenced by the French New Wave. He was influenced by all of those films that he saw, but he was equally influenced by what he didn’t see. Later, he became one of the first Black filmmakers to get a deal with Hollywood, along with Gordon Parks and Ossie Davis. They were the first three black filmmakers to be given an opportunity to make films in Hollywood. Hollywood needed some token people. And so they brought these three black filmmakers in, during the late ’60s and early ’70s.

These filmmakers were going to the cinema and seeing racist images that mirrored and impacted how they grew up. They wanted to change those images. They wanted to show people that there was more to the Black community than what Hollywood was representing.

In 1972, Melvin van Peebles stepped away from his Hollywood deal and made Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. In doing so, he shook up the system. It was one of the first times a person used their own money to make an independent film. His film showed police brutality and a black man taking his handcuffs and beating a police officer to death.

Given the history of film that had been created before 1972 and how the Black community was portrayed in those films, van Peebles crew was left divided. Some were not happy seeing that type of imagery. Yet these were filmmakers who were subverting Hollywood because they knew that there wasn’t a place for them. Eventually, Sweetback was a success.

That movie made money. People wanted to see the movie where this black man kills a cop, and runs away, and gets away with it, and the community protects and saves him. Audiences were eating that up.

What did Hollywood do? They saw an opportunity. Shortly after Sweetback was released, the blaxploitation movement began. Hollywood saw a way to make money off of stories where there was a protagonist who was black. For example, the initial Shaft character was written for a white man. It wasn’t until the success with Sweetback that they adjusted it, and the film was made with Richard Roundtree in the lead role.

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The lexicon of filmmaking started with editing, according to Alrick Brown. “In the early 1900s, this film thing became real,” Alrick says. “And after people started telling some amazing stories, the next big innovation was editing.”

Over time, editing evolved and became more complex. The camera did more than just capture a movement. “So now we’re like ‘What if you did this? What happens if the camera starts to move?’” explains Alrick.

From the first filmmakers to DW Griffith, cameras did what Alrick calls “magical things.” Audiences experienced film in ways they had never experienced it before.

These early editing techniques began building off of each other, and the techniques came from all over the world. “My film education was focused on what was going on in America,” explains Alrick, “but film really was going on around the world.”

Filmmakers borrowed from each other. DW Griffith, for example, watched films from Germany. Einstein’s early audiences used some of his editing techniques.

“There was this communication across cultures from Latin America to Europe, where people were telling their stories. These things evolved into the techniques you would later see in the earliest Hollywood films,” says Alrick.

DW Griffith built his techniques from things he had learned from around the world. “It’s the same way a student would make a film today,” Alrick points out. “A lot of their approaches will come from things they’ve already watched and experienced.”

Film students aren’t the only ones who use this approach. Directors like Tarantino and Scorsese have spent their careers studying other filmmakers.

“We call them geniuses,” says Alrick. “And some of them deserve that title, but it’s because they’ve spent so much time looking at the history of film. They understand what techniques to keep and what techniques to throw away.”

Compared to other art forms, film is a new medium. “Filmmakers had to lean on other art forms for inspiration,” says Alrick. “So they looked at other forms of communication to build this lexicon that would become filmmaking.”

Janet Grillo thinks that the relationship between visual storytelling art and technology is integral. The technology informs the art. The art informs the technology.
“Think for a minute about the evolution of movies,” says Janet. Back in the day, they used very big, clunky, huge cameras. You couldn’t move them very quickly. You couldn’t move them in the space. You had to position them in one spot and construct an environment to capture the imagery and the sound around it, explains Janet.
You would have created a soundstage. The environment, the lighting, and the sound could all be controlled. And you had this monstrous piece of equipment flat in the middle.
Janet says soundstages dictated the way that stories were told. You had very formal settings. You were basically moving from theater into film, so film was highly theatrical. The film tradition came from a spoken, executed tradition of the theater and the theater’s proscenium arch stage, in Janet’s view.
You can see that in the very stylized work of Alfred Hitchcock. He grew up in that system of studio filmmaking where it’s highly formal and very structured, Janet notes. And you can see it in how the actors are moving in and out of the frame and their movements are blocked. It’s almost like a stage play.
This is an excerpt from the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo (1958) which demonstrates Hitchcock’s theatrical style of filmmaking:
GALVIN ELSTER: I asked you to come up here Scottie, knowing that you’d quit detective work. But I wondered whether you would go back on the job as a special favor to me. I want you to follow my wife. No, it’s not that. We’re very happily married.
SCOTTIE FERGUSON: Well, then-
GALVIN ELSTER: I’m afraid some harm may come to her.
SCOTTIE FERGUSON: From whom?
GALVIN ELSTER: Someone dead.
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Thinking of the magic and beauty of early filmmakers, it’s like they were pioneers. They were creating the technology while capturing their stories! And they were fearless because it was an untapped territory.

The limitation of black and white film? Let me tell you: art, creativity, and film are all created within constraints. It’s these bounds that help up create, not hinder us.

In this black and white medium, filmmakers had to think about lighting differently. Their lives were (obviously) in color, but their equipment only shot black and white. Everything is going to appear different.

Let’s say I’m wearing a blue jacket and a yellow shirt. In black and white? All you see is shades of grey, no actual pigmentation.

Now, you can control the lighting and create slits and angles. By controlling light and shadows, you can make an image look more interesting. In some of the earliest films, you can see when filmmakers started understanding this dynamic.

For example, the first iterations of Dracula and Nosferatu were scarier, all thanks to careful lighting. You can see how they can make a room look vast or small by collapsing the space with an entirely black background. You can see how they could paint something on a wall and make it look like it was miles and miles away. Because they were only working in black and white, its limitations were liberating.

Particularly in the silent era, when filmmakers didn’t have to think about sound or color, they got incredibly innovative just focusing on the visual image. There’s a saying that people forgot to be cinematic again as soon as sound came into film. These early black and white filmmakers led the charge for what was possible in cinema.

It wasn’t until I saw a particular film that I had a different respect for black and white. The original Imitation of Life (1934) was a black and white film that was risque, intense, and complicated. It was deep. It was heavy.

Here you have a Black woman and a white woman working together to start a business. There were some complicated tensions, both racially and in the relationship between the characters.

But for what it was — a story about two women, with no men, building a life together — it was magical. Seeing a film like that? It was about the story.

”We use examples from classic and modern cinema to illustrate points for filmmakers about how things work,” Explains David K. Irving. “The best thing to do is find movies that themselves work. There are a bunch of classic films that we often refer to for filmmakers to study. Every great filmmaker constantly looks at films over and over again in order to see what got them excited about cinema and what works for them.”

One of the great films in cinema that Irving always encourage students to look at is Carol Rice’s film The Third Man. The Third Man is a fantastic film because the script is so tight. It’s a wonderful story that takes place in war-torn Vienna. The allies have divided the city into four distinct areas, so there’s a lot of illegal trade going on.

“What’s beautiful about the film is that Joseph Cotten comes to Vienna to find his friend Harry Lime, whom we talk about through the entire film. He’s talked about, talked about, talked about. He’s the third man, and we don’t reveal him until very, very late into the film. The arc of the story where we’re trying to find out who this third man is, who the third man finally gets revealed to be, and the twist on why the third man isn’t this wonderful character, which was cast as Orson Welles because he’s such a jolly fellow to play against type. It made for a wonderful arc in the film,” Irving says.

There are so many things about the film that are worth pointing out. One is that the final chase sequence takes place in a sewer. What better location to have a character who’s really displayed as a rat than in a sewer? The reason Irving likes to show this particular sequence is it’s a long chase sequence, but the director does such a wonderful job creating pace in this chase.

There are fast sequences, slow sequences, close-ups, long shots, breathing space, up, down. It has a rhythm that can’t be beat, and all of it takes place in the sewer. One of the other advantages of shooting in a sewer is that the camera gets this wonderful forced perspective down these long tunnels. At the end of the sequence, the character trying to escape the tunnel brings his finger up through a sewer grating, and the close-up of the hands trying to escape speaks volumes about the character.

Another scene Irving likes to show from the film when Harry Lime is revealed for the first time. Harry Lime is revealed through light. He’s hiding in a doorway. An inebriated Joseph Cotten is yelling at this character who he doesn’t know is in the doorway.

His yelling at night causes a woman on the second floor to turn her bedroom light on, which shines light down on Harry Lime. At that moment, Joseph Cotten knows that’s the main character. The use of cinematography and lighting to be able to illuminate character is very exciting for filmmakers to study, so you can apply these lessons that you learn from historical references in film, modern references in film, and what you’re going to do when you become a filmmaker.

“How do you communicate to people? How do you put that in celluloid? How do you do it? It must have style, unity, just something about it. You’ve got to wave away what’s not useful to that theme you’re focused on,” says Ang Lee.
“People look at film not like real life, but an escape from life. They go to that abstract world, where you can have a heart-to-heart with each other.”
I think filmmaking without heartfelt style and language skills—that’s pretty vain to me. I think you should have something to say, because you feel you have a need to express something.
“You don’t know why. But that’s the most precious thing,” Lee continues.
“Without communication, I cannot explain to my crew or the investors, test screen audiences, even friends and family. People will say, ‘I don’t get this. I don’t get that.’ So, you have to talk. And while you’re talking, you lose that artificiality. You must.”
“And somehow it all becomes a common thing. You just secretly hope to keep as much as yourself in there as possible. That’s my experience,” says Lee.
How Lee’s shot choices convey mood
“Then you have the key shots. Sometimes I can visualize a shot or scene, very vividly in my dream, or in my daydream. Or when I see something, I must have that shot, no matter what. So, from there, you just fill in the gaps,” explains Lee.
“Most of the shots in the movie, there are actors talking. I just find the best way to portray them. If it’s emotional, if it’s warm, usually, I place the camera a little lower. If the camera’s high, it looks more like they’re thinking. Shot that’s more face on, that’s more direct. And of course, more sideways, it’s more objective.”
Many times, I would like to take the audience out of the movie, and have them just think about it, instead of just engage in the storytelling, the emotional ride. I want them to think about it. So, at these times I’ll do a high angle also.
“You mentioned big establishing shot. That’s when it’s not emotional. Then, I want to reset before I get engaged into the next paragraph or statement or what have you. But sometimes, I think it’s good to have an audience think about it objectively and engage subjectively, emotionally. I like to combine both,” Lee ends.
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Color theory is one of the things that a film director would do when they’re about to tell a story, whether it’s a pilot or a film. It sounds pretentious, but then again, there’s no way to say this without sounding pretentious.
But basically, you get together with your partners on the film, such as your cinematographer, production designer, costume designer, and discuss color with them. Sometimes, with one department, it could go into textures of clothing, the sheen of wallpapers, and lens selection.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejob explains, “It’s always nice to assign colors. At least, I like to do that to certain characters. For instance, Rachel in Me and Earl was yellow. And there was always a little something of that around her space. And sometimes you see it, and sometimes you feel it. And by the end, when she passes away in the hospital, my idea was always to hold on to the color yellow on-screen for five, six, or seven seconds — I forget how much it was. Hopefully, by the time you got to that point in the story, you felt her presence because you associate it, maybe subconsciously, along the way. Maybe, maybe not. That’s just how I think.”
In Hunter, Gomez-Rejob assigned colors to every world. But the colors were not assigned to characters but to feelings or ideas, like revenge, or blood, the Fourth Reich, honesty, or militancy. And the film creators would then avoid specific colors in some scenes and really saturate them sometimes in others.
Gomez-Rejob further emphasizes, “I think it helps the overall design of a picture. But it also helps make decisions along the way. For instance, if you’re choosing the right tie for a character, you may be presented with five ties. Only one is right because this is who the character is. Or you find a certain wallpaper that has color in it that is just right for this scene or the color carpet.”
Color vocabulary helps in decision-making for every department. It tells them what to avoid and what not to avoid. It also explains how to be a little bit more nuanced if you’re trying to keep someone from knowing that a certain person is a Nazi, which was always assigned red. Maybe the actor’s pocket square would have purple in it.
And it’s just a little something that also helps actors, depending on who the actor is. But it is an actor’s secret sometimes that they have a lining that no one else will see. But it means something to them.
Gomez-Rejob feels joy in using color vocabulary. He says, “And it’s just something that I truly enjoy in a fine arts way. You are never alone to do something because some of the best ideas are going to come from somebody else. And then see everyone take ownership of those decisions along the way and have a feeling almost of an arts and crafts camp that you’re the leader of. I mean, I own my title, but I also love the collaborative nature of making the film.”
For people entering the film industry or TV industry, it’s important to know that directing starts with these decisions way before you ever get to set.

“Spielberg and George Lucas started to collaborate on movies together. They decided they were going to do Indiana Jones. But before they did that, George Lucas did the first Star Wars. And if you remember the first Star Wars, it was episode IV,” Thomas Mangan explains. “He had already conceived this as a series of nine movies.
In 1977 Lucas stated, “I’m going to make nine movies over two hours. I’m going to tell this story over 18 hours.” This led Spielberg and Lucas to collaborate on Indiana Jones, which was released two years later in ’79. Indiana Jones was also a trilogy. The idea of movie trilogies wasn’t perceived as sequels like they are now in today’s movies—it was considered a long-form from storytelling.
Lucas didn’t like the two-hour limit placed on films; therefore, he made a longer version of the movie by expanding them into a series of films. It changed the way the film industry made movies. However, many people interpreted it as “sequels work.”
Mangan states, “If you look at movies now, where even The Avengers still follow that model, they take the same characters and they put them in different movies. They interweave in between multiple stories, which is very akin to what Netflix has done with the binging of television shows.”

“They’ll make a show and then make it available so you can watch the whole show. But if you watch an episodic series of 10 shows or 8 TV shows—I just finished watching Killing Eve season 2 last night—it’s one long movie. Netflix copied George Lucas’s movie-making model to create this disruptive form of binge-watching TV.”