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Hi. My name is Tony
and this is Every Frame a Painting.
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And I know exactly what you're thinking:
Why am I talking about this guy?
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— Oh my god, you're Michael Bay!
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— Oh my god, I am Michael Bay.
Because I don't like his films
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and yet I think it's crucial
to study them.
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Why?
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— ...and Paul, I think you have started
to watch WrestleMania on television...
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— Well, I...
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— Because you must not avert your eyes:
this is what is coming at us.
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this is what what television,
what a collective
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anonymous body of majority wants
to see on television.
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Like WrestleMania, like Anna Nicole Smith,
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like Jackass, Michael Bay has created
something.
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— Spectacle!
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It's what people want. The Romans new it,
Louis Quatorze knew it, Wolfowitz knows it.
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— One, two, three...
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Boom! Bayhem!!
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We may find it crass and vulgar,
but if we're going to make better movies,
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we have to understand
the images that are coming at us.
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— Hey, hey!!
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So let's talk about Bayhem.
Is it a unique use of film form?
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If you want to understand Michael Bay, one of
the best ways is to watch his copycats.
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Consider this shot from
'Battleship', which tries
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to do that circular camera
move he's famous for.
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Doesn't work here.
Why?
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It's actually really simple. First,
there's no background, except for blue sky.
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Without a background, we don't get parallax,
so the shot doesn't feel like it's moving.
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See the difference?
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On top of that, the lens is wrong. Bay frequently
shoots these shots with a telephoto lens,
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which compresses the space.
This makes the background whizz by.
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Third, the actor's just staring
and turning his head,
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but the key to the Bay version
is that the actors move vertically.
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Like here.
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And here.
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And last, the low angle is there to give us the
scale and slow motion is there to sell it.
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So what we have here in the Bay's shot
is multiple types of movement, integrated:
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movement of the camera,
movement of the background,
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movement of the actors,
expansion of time.
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Then they stand still and look
off-screen, creating stillness.
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Even though you're looking at a stationary
point in the frame, this shot feels huge.
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— Shit just got real.
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Breakdown any Michael Bay's shot
and that is basically what you will see:
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layers of depth, parallax, movement,
character and environment
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to give this sense of epicness.
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None of these techniques
is particularly unique.
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In fact, most cinematographers
will naturally create depth in their images
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and parallax, whenever the camera moves.
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And the Hero Shot is everywhere.
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What makes Bay unique is how many layers
and how complex the movement is.
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That doesn't make his shots
better, it just makes
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them more complicated
than the competition.
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That's why his frames seem to have
a lot of stuff going on.
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Lots of dust, dirt, smoke
or explosions between the layers.
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Also, lamp-posts.
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Lots of lamp-posts.
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If you go back to the first Bad Boys, you
can watch this from the opening credits.
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Here, the car moves one way,
the plane another,
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the lamp-posts are in frame for scale
and the camera is on a telephoto lens.
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Later in the film, you can see
the same compositional techinique.
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And when the explosions happen...
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Once you see this, it's much easier
to deconstruct his imagery
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and to see its limits.
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For instance, Bay doesn't distinguish
between when to do a shot
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and when not to do it. He'll
use the same camera movement,
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whether the charachter's
saying something important...
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— You have any money here in the States?
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... or total gibberish...
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— What did I say?!
Did you hear what I said?
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I heard what I said
'cause I was standing there when I said it.
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Every shot is designed for maximum visual
impact, regardless of whether it fits.
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But the Bay style also leads
to some fascinating visual ideas.
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How can you make something feel big?
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Well, you put lots of things
of varying size in the same shot
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and then you move the camera to emphasize.
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This is something "Jurassic Park" also
did very well.
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— Ah!
— It's... It's a dinosaur.
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Just as important is off-screen space.
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Notice here, this actor isn't looking
at the planes we see in the background.
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That means there's even
more planes we can't see.
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So while the shot feels huge,
it implies even more scale.
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How does a filmmaker come up
with images like this?
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In the case of Michael Bay, let's look
at one of his favorite films.
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"When you're a Jet,
you're a Jet all the way
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From your first cigarette
to your last dying day"
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There's a great New York Times interview
where he watches "West Side Story"
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and talks about how
this is a great shot
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and this is a great cut.
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He can't articulate why they're great,
other than "they're dynamic".
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But I think that's it:
when you put shots from West Side Story
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back to back with his work,
you can feel the similarities.
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I think Bay's goal is to create
what he thinks are good shots
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and connect them with
what he thinks are good cuts.
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If Howard Hawks defined a good movie
as three good scenes and no bad ones,
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Michael Bay seems to
think a good film
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is three thousand dynamic shots
and no static ones.
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Apart from West Side Story, Bay's biggest
influence is actually other blockbusters.
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He frequently borrows the same basic
vocabularies and other sequence.
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So something like this...
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... becomes this.
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You'll notice the tight shots
of the character become tighter.
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And the wide shots become wider.
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Everything gets more layers of motion,
but the basic vocabulary's the same.
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- I got him!
- Great, kid! Don't get cocky.
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And it's not just other people
he borrows from.
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Bay cannibalizes himself just as much.
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So this...
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... becomes this.
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You'll notice every motion
in the original shot.
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For instance, the camera
turning counter-clockwise,
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while the bomb turns clockwise —
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it's just cranked up in this version.
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— Autobots, I'm in pursuit.
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So what is Bayhem?
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It's the use of movement, composition
and fast editing
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to create a sense of epic scale.
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Each individual shot feels huge, but also
implies bigger things outside the frame.
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It stacks multiple layers of movement shot
either on a very long lens or a very wide one.
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It shows you a lot for just a moment
and then takes it away.
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You feel the overall motion,
but no grasp of anything concrete.
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And yet, it requires a lot of people
and integration to do this.
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But it's basically a variation on the
existing vocabulary of the action scene.
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Individual shots are a little dirtier, a little
shakier, more complex, few more layers.
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Then you cut it together faster
than the brain can register,
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but not faster than the eye can move.
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It's not revolutionary,
just the past with a bit of stank on it.
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If you want to see a more
etxreme version of similiar ideas,
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you can look at late-era Tony Scott.
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And if you wanna see a less cluttered
version, you can look at animation.
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Someone like Glen Keane.
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This is way more legible than what Bay does,
but the basic idea is the same:
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character, environment,
many layers, one epic sweep.
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The world feels huge.
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One of my favorite adaptations of the
Michael Bay style is actually shrinking it down.
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Ironically, Bayhem - which seems to have
developed from a kid blowing up his train set -
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is actually kind of charming when it's tiny.
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Instead of blowing up the world,
how about a small English town?
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— Swan!
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But in the end, I think the popularity of
this style is hugely important.
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Whether we like it or not,
the interesting thing here
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is that we are really
visually sophisticated
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and totally visually illiterate.
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We can process visual information
at a speed that wasn't common before,
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but thinking through what an image means...
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— This is not necessary!
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... not so much.
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And as Wernor Herzog put it:
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— You do not avert your eyes.
That's what's coming at us.
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This might sound a little weird, but
the person who loses the most here
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is actually Michael Bay.
He is a slave to his own eye.
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He has a need to make
every image dynamic, even
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when it runs contrary to
the theme of his movie.
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— Some people just don't know a good thing
when it's staring them in the face.
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— It really is the simple things in life...
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Yeah, the little things,
like a big house,
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a dock, a view of the water
and a speed boat.
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What happens when two great storytellers
tackle this exact same theme?
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— Heck, Norm, you know,
we're doing pretty good.
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— I love you, Margie.
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— I love you, Norm.
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— Two more months.
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— Two more months...