Creating stills for each shot within a scene

In this blog, I explain how to create stills for each shot within a scene – and how to manage them once you have them.

The next task was to analyse an entire scene from Hugo. I chose the scene where Hugo and Isabelle take the image drawn by the mechanical man to Mama Jeanne, which happens 55m into the film. The scene starts with Hugo and Isabelle entering the apartment and ends when Papa George arrives. This scene lasts 3m14s.

Poster from Le voyage dans la lune.

The scene represents the midpoint in the film, where mystery of the mechanical man has been solved and now our protagonists must undertake the task of revealing Papa Georges to be the famous director Georges Méliès. The scene follows a reasonably standard narrative path, where our protagonists confront Mama Jeanne with new information and are instructed not to pursue their investigations.

The reason I chose this to be my first scene for analysis is because I expected this ‘standard’ storytelling to be ‘light’ on 3D. I assumed that the filmmakers would not choose to emphasise depth in an interior scene where traditional 2D techniques may be used to successfully portray this narrative.

The mechanical man draws an image used in Le voyage dans la lune.

I analysed the scene shot-by-shot. This process required navigating the clip frame-by-frame. For ease of use, I created a clip of this specific scene; the smaller file size and shorter duration simply made it easier to navigate. It was only after much frustration working with the entire film that I realised that it would be worthwhile investing the time to create a clip!

I started by capturing stills of each shot. I did this using the Take Snapshot function in VLC. My first pass was watching the playback in real time and pressing Shift+S whenever there was a change in shot. I repeated this process, slowing the playback speed where there were rapid shot changes, until I was satisfied that I had captured one still for each shot. Having changed the VLC preferences to add the $T token to the filename, I ended up with a folder full of images with filenames such as:

vlcsnap-00_00_002016-07-22-16h16m03s905.png

vlcsnap-00_00_152016-07-22-16h16m35s445.png

vlcsnap-00_00_182016-07-22-16h16m38s389.png

etc.

The first three numbers are the timecode in the format hh_mm_ss (added by the $T token). The first benefit is that when the files are listed in the folder, the stills are in the correct chronological sequence for the scene. This 3m14s scene contains 48 shots. One soon ends up with files all over the place, so this free filing system is invaluable. The second benefit is that I have a rough guide to timecode at which each shot changes, e.g. the second shot is around 15s, the third shot is around 18s, and so on. The importance of this rough guide will be explained in my next blog.

Next, I catalogued each shot in a spreadsheet. I created a text file of the directory listing using the MS DOS command dir >text_file_of_directory_listing.txt and pasted this into the spreadsheet, as the basis of my catalogue.

Three different but similar shots.

Most of the scene involves two modes of conversation: one between Hugo and Mama Jeanne; one between Isabelle and Mama Jeanne. As such, the filmmakers have often used the technique of shot-reverse-shot. This results in a lot of shots which look very similar. To help manage these similarities images, against each row I added a short description:

vlcsnap-00_00_152016-07-22-16h16m35s445.png : "Good evening, ma'am."vlcsnap-00_00_182016-07-22-16h16m38s389.png : "Very good manners. For a thief."vlcsnap-00_00_252016-07-22-16h16m45s207.png : "I am not a  thief."

I found the easiest descriptions came from the dialogue, which I could pick up from the subtitles.

Subtitles provide a useful description for each still.

In my next blog, I will discuss how I went about capturing exact shot lengths and the successes and failures of getting depth data from my stills.