Interior.
Night.
Smash cut to a young man or young woman—you—watching the Super Bowl. Even though you think football is boring. Even though you’d rather be reading a book or watching a movie or playing Subway Surfers. Even though you totally don’t get why everyone is so fascinated with all these distended giants chasing around an oblong ball.
If you find yourself unwillingly stuck at a Super Bowl party this year, you should know that there will still be plenty of extracurricular hoopla to hold your attention. Foremost among all this hoopla, of course, is the majesty of all the Super Bowl commercials. You can even turn watching Super Bowl commercials into a fun little academic exercise. A lot of Super Bowl commercials are essentially short films—entire comedies, epics, or dramas compressed into thirty or sixty seconds. When it comes to learning some of the ins and outs of how moving images tell stories, I can think of worse places to start than a Super Bowl commercial.
When I taught Introduction to Film Studies at the University of Chicago, I assigned my students something called a sequence analysis. They’d study a short movie scene from a longer film and carefully map out every shot, taking note of how long each shot lasts (duration), how the camera moves, how close the camera is to the person or object on screen (camera distance), whether the camera is looking up or down at the character (camera angle), which parts of the image are in focus (depth of field), how one shot transitions into the next, etc. It’s a little bit like dissecting a frog in science class—minus the smell of formaldehyde. How do all the tiny little parts of the scene add up to a larger whole? How do all the carefully crafted still images run together to create an emotionally moving moving image?
Consider the above commercial. This understated epic comedy, simply called “Cat Herders,” is a perfect object lesson in how editing, cinematography, and mise-en-scène come together to create the art of a movie. (Mise-en-scène is a French term that refers to how the scenery is arranged in front of the camera.) An ad agency in Minnesota created this commercial to help a little-known information technology company called EDS reinvent its image in the early 2000s. (Minimally fun fact: EDS was founded by two-time presidential candidate Ross Perot.)
Look at this sequence analysis chart. Yes, it’s a silly amount of data to devote to a funny commercial about cats and cowboys, but it nevertheless reveals a lot about how a sixty-second commercial can turn into an epic narrative.
Just take a look at the duration column. The numbers here show us how a movie scene can move through time like a roller coaster. At the beginning, we’re rolling slowly up the first hill with some relatively lengthy shots (4 seconds and 5 seconds) to establish the scene. And then: whoosh! We’re flying down the first hill, as five of the next six shots are just 1 second in duration. By shot 9, we’re slowly climbing back up another hill, with shot 11 clocking in at a snail’s pace of 6 seconds. From there, though, a series of 2-second shots flies past, shooting us through the final stretch until we roll slowly into the finish with two lengthy shots. These lengthy shots, 7 and 9 seconds, respectively, serve as a resolution and give us time to piece together everything we’ve just seen and heard.
And look at the camera movement column. For most of the shots, the camera doesn’t move at all; it’s “locked down” on the tripod. But by the time we’re going down the second hill on our editing roller coaster (shots 12–16), we’re hit with a barrage of camera movements. The camera dollies to the right (or slides smoothly on rails) as a cat fords the stream in close-up. A shaky handheld camera shows a cowboy courageously carrying two cats across the water. The camera then stays on the move with two more dolly shots. This series of movements acts as the commercial’s climax: the combination of a moving camera, a rapid succession of different camera distances (close-ups, medium shots, and long shots), crescendoing music, and inspirational dialogue signals the height of our emotional connection to these cowboys and cats.
Why is shot 17 so impactful? It’s not just because of the dialogue. It’s because shot 17 is the last of the quick burst of short-duration shots, because it’s a still shot following four straight moving-camera shots, because it’s one of only two direct-to-camera dialogue shots that shows no background activity, because it’s a medium-close shot following directly from a long shot, because its focus is more shallowly set on the cowboy than the landscape, because of lots of things.
While Super Bowl commercials might serve primarily to convince us to buy cars and colas (and, apparently, the services of information technology companies), they also teach us that moving images are more than just filmed theatrical plays. The information conveyed in our sequence analysis chart represents just a tiny fraction of all the technical and creative decisions that contribute to a moving image’s narrative roller coaster. We haven’t quite answered the age-old question of movie-making: “How did they do that?!” But we’ve made some headway.
Be forewarned, though: as soon as you start looking at movies and television with an analytical eye like this, a little piece of the magic of movies will disappear. After all, we did just grossly over-explain a commercial about cat herders. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Ivan Ross is TIP’s Media Coordinator. He has a PhD in cinema and media studies from the University of Chicago.
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