How Movies Actually Work – The Kuleshov Effect

✨another great episode of how your mind, our minds, work 🙏🏼✨. . . Having worked for quite some time in Post-Production and advertising here in Amsterdam. Mostly as a 3D animator and Motion Graphics artist. I have had the insane, and small budget opportunity to design, colour correct, post produce and yes, edit a piece start to finish. And when I do edit it strikes me how editing is such a deeply internal process. The story is so profoundly influenced by even the slightest single frame decision made. It became excruciatingly obvious to me that editing, which begins in the mind as story structure, ends in the gut as pure unspoken unbridled feeling or emotion. So much so that I had to go off and find more information on it (“In The Blink of an Eye”, Walter Murch) (also, thank you for the suggestion. Photoplay is ordered and much looked forward to) all of this to say that film and expanding that, images, are so much more than passive entertainment. Which also explains the pull of YouTube and Instagram to a great extent. But more deeply still, evoke that idea that Carl Jung expressed that they in fact connect to, and speak for, the soul. And maybe even reflect the soul. Which might only begin to start to explain this fascination from the caves of our ancestors to the phones in our hands to fall deeply into stories told, visually. It seems to be our very own internal participation, beyond our control, that keeps us glued to the medium. Or the rear window I suppose. Excellent piece!!! And as you can see, it’s got me thinking 🙏🏼✨😊 thank you 🙏🏼😊

How can you not be in love with the art of film making?

The clips you showed to demonstrate the Effect reminded me of a real-world related phenomenon. I wonder if it could be called part of the same effect? I admit the following linkage may be too theoretical, but here we go: In Hitchcock's clips, the man/actor filmed looking at the baby and then the woman in a bikini probably wasn't looking at either of those things, and the editor's juxtaposition created our judgement of him, as 'kindly grandfather 'or 'dirty old man' entirely separate from whatever real identity he has. It is the job of filmmakers to do this, of course, and we all know that such things aren't (usually) meant to reflect reality. There was research done in 2016 showing that the public's perception of danger to children is strongly dependent on the public's moral judgement of what the parent is doing when the children are left on their own. 1300 participants "thought children [in specific scenarios] were in significantly greater danger when the parent left to meet a lover than when the child was left alone unintentionally. " Actual danger doesn't care about the parent's motivations, nor does it care about the moral judgements of the public. Like the Kuleshov Effect, the juxtaposition creates apparent meaning, and apparent danger, irrespective of actual meaning (to the actor) or actual danger (to the child.) Reference: Why Do We Judge Parents For Putting Kids At Perceived — But Unreal — Risk? NPR, August 22, 2016

"HAL - friend of the channel." Brilliant!

Enjoyed learning about this concept on this scorching afternoon in mid-America! Thanks for the entirely inevitable number of rabbit holes I'll hollow.

Not something I ever would have asked for, but sooo grateful you made it and I got to watch. I'm a scientist with an amateur love of philosophy/spiritual literature, and I hadn't ever thought of those aspects in the technical execution of filmmaking. Super dope ✊😎

I was fortunate enough to take a basic film history class as an elective my senior year of college. What a revelation! I had always taken for granted certain continuity-preserving editing techniques. Wild to imagine a time when it was innovative to have your character run from left to right in one shot… and then continue running left to right in the next!

Love these videos. I started watching your YouTube channel when my daughter was born and when she was about 4 months old, for some reason she loved it. She's 9 months old now and we're still watching. My wife thinks it's because I look like you and she thinks it's me on the TV but for whatever reason it's you and Miss Rachel, the only thing she really likes.

i absolutely love how you follow your curiosity in making new content. I never know what's going to come out of your brain next, and I for one love that.