Video Production Books

This is a fascinating book. If you only know Ealing Studios for comedies such as "Kind Hearts and Coronets" "The Lavender Hill Mob" and "The Ladykillers," this book opens up the whole Ealing output from about 1939 to 1957.

Not only does Barr discuss the classic Ealing comedies, but he puts them in their context in the studio's output, and he shows how the studio's output changed over time regarding the pressures and changes that British society went through in those pivotal decades.

This book is "the rise and fall of Ealing Studios" but in an artistic, not financial, sense. It gets one to think about what movies say about "national character" yet remains enjoyable and jargon-free.

I bought a number of books on using final cut pro and found this book to be the clearest, best-written of them all. When I have questions, I always turn to this book first. It's a fairly short book (130 pages), but it's all great info with very good images.

Editing With Final Cut Pro 4
By Charles Roberts- reviewed by "Book Worm"

This is one of the best books available for learning about FCP. It is clearly written, and addresses all the issues the beginning non-linear editor faces. The illustrations (mostly screen shots) are well selected and well placed. The material is well organized and treated with sufficient depth so that the reader gains a useful understanding of how and why certain techniques work. The book covers set up, work flow and editing technique in a very clear and complete fashion. It's a great text book, and I find it is also a handy reference too (great index).

Another plus is that the book is not limited to mere technical operations, the author is willing to discuss some of the reasons that underlie an editor's choice of when and where to cut. Roberts' attention to workflow and organization is also quite helpful, as is his willingness to show more than one way to accomplish a given operation or task.

I also liked the fact that the book was not organized around a downloadable batch of clips which you manipulate according to the books instructions. This technique certainly makes the teacher's job easier since all the instructions are quite specific, but I find open-ended instruction more palatable and ultimately more useful, especially if you are already working on an editing project of your own.

The chapters about the nature of digital video and a look at storage issues are full of really useful information. One of the best things about this book is that it will grow with you; you may skip some of the more technical discussions at first, but find them useful as your skill level improves.

Also, this book has a real index, not some computer-generated simulacrum that spots all the trivial instances where a word occurs, but seems to miss the meaty parts where the actual information is.

Although this book is listed as an "intermediate" level volume, as a fairly rank beginner I found it to be accessible and very useful. If you want to get a grip on FCP this book will help you do it.

If you are teaching a course that bridges the older and newer technologies in post-production, ie linear and non-linear technology this book will give your students an opportunity to develop a working vocabulary in the linear environment.

Because all entries are submitted by industry professionals the listings are very comprehensive and numerous for all sorts of obscure and familiar items alike.

Lubitsch is one of the ten greatest filmmakers. Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy is the best analysis yet written about his films. It's a shame that it's out of print, but anybody interested in Lubitsch should try to hunt it down.

Names and stories about so called "Role Models" fall short in front of this personal memoirs of Jesus Salvador Trevino.
This book is a great collection of personal experiences and success in a society where not being "white" means to swim against the current.
I highly recommend it for teachers to share with their students.
Each page carries a message that says: Yes, it can be done!

I found the story between the two characters to be most interesting. You were learning about that particular time period without even knowing it. The sceneary was breah taking and i highly recommend seeing the flick and reading the paperback.

A great book that offers a rare glimpse at Fellini's creative proccess through a stunning collection of photographs. Visually informative, as well as verbally. A must for fans of Fellini, Tazio, or films in general.

David Bordwell is one of America's most challenging film scholars. He continually offers precisely-argued alternatives taking issue with dominant academic versions of the "institutional mode of representation" of how we should look at film. This book represents a good contribution to a key debate he wishes to continue in film education, namely the importance of an analytic cognitivist based approach based upon the concept of "solving problems." It is easy to parody this argument. Many have done so in the past. But what is important is reoognizing this scholar's intellectual integrity in arguing for a "bottom-up" approach to understanding film style rather than the "top-down" methodology that has dominated most examples of contemporary post-structuralist, post-modernist, and cultural studies approaches over the past few years.

FIGURES TRACED IN LIGHT deals with key issues of cinematic style and staging. Beginning with frame analysis of some scenes from JERRY MAGUIRE, Bordwell defines the current role of "intensified continuity" in contemporary Hollywood productions and then goes back to the past to counterpose the long-take, stylistic innovations of Louis Feullade and Kenji Mizoguchi. He follows them with detailed examinations of the films of Theo Angelopoulos and Hou Hsiao-hsien in terms of their distinctive creative approaches from different historical eras. All these directors deserve to be better known and Bordwell makes his usual cogent arguments for us to return to this lost tradition of cinematic art and specific production contexts that overshadow anything in European and Hollywood cinema today. It is, in short, an argument for precise attention to cinematic detail rather than today's current tendency to gloss over significant artistic differences in favor of monolithic theories that do not explain the creative nature of particular films.

This is a lucid, well-written book taking issue with certain concepts of cultural studies sadly in vogue today which sacrifice significant details at the altar of banal generaliies. It challenges supposedly established theories such as the role of modernity influencing cinema as a twentieth-century art form as well as other ideas such as the dominant role of a "cinema of attractions" at one particular era of film history. No matter the time and location, good filmmakers are "active agents." But this does not mean that they operate in a vacuum.

As Bordwell states. "The filmmaker creates out of the norms and forms available in the craft milieu or out of the possibilities in adjacent media that can be brought into that milieu." (257) It is a modest proposal but one helping us define what makes great art as well as factors defining any great director.

As well as challenging fashionable ideas, the book is not without humor as the author's references to contemporary "Europuddings and hypehanate productions that had neither local flavor nor radical ambitions" (267) show. In addition to dragging fashionable gurus such as Zizek down from their pedastals (260-265) and arguing for a more rigorous approach to problem solving, Bordwell often comes up with witty sentences that will long remain in the reader's mind. "If you hire a tax accountant, you will be best off with one vigorously committed to problem-solving. (You don't want one who will produce a Lacanian reading of your IRS audit notification) [251] I doubt whether academic champions of Lacan and Zizek would also when they face their yearly audits rather than university departmental Merit committees!

This is a very important work, rigorous and scholarly in every sense of the work. It not only argues for the importance of a particular type of cinema illustrated by these selected directors but for a particular type of reception making us all reponsible for what we see. "HOW we manage to see more and more depends on us."