A Brute Force Opening

Today’s Daily Create submitted by Kevin Hodgson is a beauty. And it also is a hot tip to cool little bookmarklet tool that prints out a sheet of stills from a YouTube video. Turns out I watched Jules Dassin’s 1947 noir classic Brute Force for the first time last night, and the open sequence really struck me. It was so noirgeous, replete with the stark blacks and whites, an imposing institutional establishing shots, and a sense of imprisonment within the frames. Noir to the core! I looked for the opening on YouTube, and lo and behold there it was it all it’s glory through minute 6 (and you can find the whole film quite easily on YouTube as well):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvDXIrxjUDg

I gave the Print YouTube Bookmarklet a go and out came this:

bruteforce_opening_scene

Todd Conaway noted what a useful visual aide this could be for anyone discussing a particular scene in a film:

And it struck me that it is kind of like the anti-GIF, a series of shots that suggest movement but are all static. And I love the way it helps you track the different use of camera angles and colors (or lack there of) in one glance. So cool. And check out Paul Bond’s take on this Daily Create with a little Replacements music video love.

This entry was posted in 106movies, digital storytelling, movies and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

6 Responses to A Brute Force Opening

  1. Paul says:

    It would be cool if there was a way for mere mortals to do things like John Johnston did with The Wire (http://johnjohnston.info/106/chain-of-command/) so we didn’t have to go through Youtube and their content police – something like a Print MPEG Streamclip tool.

    • Reverend says:

      So this is a project I talked about with John, Grant Potter, and Tony Hirst at OER16. The idea of a SPLOT that would do this, a small tool we program online and lives as part (in my imagination) as part of a larger number of small tools—like one that can do the Supercut genius that John does as well: http://johnjohnston.info/106/a-little-slow-a-little-late/

      That is one of the Summer projects I would really love and try and tackle. Particularly because I would be punching above my weight 🙂

  2. Mariana Funes says:

    Thank you! I had not seen the usefulness of it. I only used and abstract film clip that created a pretty wall paper. I can see from reading this how it would be useful for scene analysis and how awesome to have what Paul suggests to pick a scene of a film one is watching without going through YT. Always learning. TY.

    • Reverend says:

      Yeah, John Johnston has been doing amazing experiments along these lines for a few years now, we need to make some of that available. I like the idea of a daily tool, the idea of it being a small, daily possibility inline with the SPLOT philosophy, something that Brian Lamb and Alan Levine have made such a compelling case for with their work at TRU.

  3. Chris L says:

    “Noirgeous” is going in my permanent vocabulary…

    • Reverend says:

      See, if you write thousands and thousands of terribly constructed posts sooner or later you’ll hit a little bit of poetry. Thanks for noticing this one, I was particularly proud of this rare moment of inspiration 🙂

Leave a Reply to Mariana Funes Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.