Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Tony, and this is Every Frame a Painting. So today I'm going to talk about a director whose work I love. But before that, let me be upfront. I think comedy movies today, especially American ones, have totally lost their way. I don't hate the jokes, or the actors, or the dialogue, or the stories, though there's plenty of issues there. My real qualm is that the filmmaking, the use of picture and sound to deliver jokes, is just... Look, everyone's taste is different. What you find funny is what you find funny. So I'm not saying these movies suck, or you suck if you like them. What I am saying is that these movies aren't movies. They're lightly edited improv. Everyone stands still and talks at each other in close up. Almost none of these jokes come visually. They're overwhelmingly sound. And not even the full range of sound, it's just dialogue. And this is really sad, because that's just a fraction of what's possible in cinema. Apart from animation and some commercials, visual comedy is actually moving backwards. And that's why, if you love this kind of stuff, I cannot recommend Edgar Wright enough. He is one of the only people working in the genre using the full range of what is possible. And because of that, he can find humor in places that other people don't look. Here's an example. Let's say you need to move your character from one city to another to get your story going. How do you shoot it? How do you make a joke out of it? Well, no. Not if you send out a second unit to do it, every shot pans from left to right, you include really obvious landmarks and signs, you mix in generic helicopter footage, and you put upbeat music under it so the audience doesn't get bored. This is just lazy filmmaking. And boring. We've seen it a million times. What would happen if you were truly inventive with this type of scene? There we go. And this isn't just a series of quick cuts. There's a lot of good visual storytelling here. These two taxi shots tell you exactly where we came from and where we're going. These two shots emphasize the move away from civilization. Your main character always faces forward or to the right, so screen direction is respected. Turning the music down and the sound effects up is funny because each cut is jarring. And there's even some nice performances from Simon Pegg and Ryan Gosling. Okay, that was one example without context. You're right. Totally unfair. Well, what if you had a movie where a horrible apocalyptic event happens and you want to foreshadow it earlier, maybe by having the characters not notice something important on TV? How would you show it? Would you just throw it in the edit for two seconds and two frames and none of the shots

Speaker 2: shows the relationship between the characters and the TV? Or would you do this?

Speaker 1: Okay, still unfair. Well, what if you had a movie where one character has stopped drinking, but the other characters are disappointed in him and you want to get a joke out of it? How would you do it?

Speaker 2: Would they just stand around and talk about his drinking?

Speaker 1: Or would you do this? This is what separates a mediocre director from a great one. The ability to take the most simple, mundane scenes and find new ways to do them. Great directors understand that you can get a laugh just through staging. Here's an example I cribbed from David Bordwell.

Speaker 2: Things popping up in the frame are funny, and it's not just things entering frame

Speaker 1: Consider the opposite.

Speaker 2: You can get a laugh from a zoom.

Speaker 1: You can get a laugh from a crane up. You can get a laugh from a pan. As Martin Scorsese put it, cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's not in the frame. So think about the frame. And this isn't just a matter of smart or stupid comedy. Really, if it works, it works. So with that, here are 8 things Edgar Wright does with picture and sound that I want to see other comedy filmmakers try out. People entering the frame in funny ways.

Speaker 2: People leaving the frame in funny ways.

Speaker 1: And people entering the frame in funny ways.

Speaker 2: Matching scene transitions.

Speaker 1: The perfectly timed sound effect.

Speaker 2: Action synchronized to the music.

Speaker 1: And super dramatic lighting cues. And you know what, let's throw in number 9. So if you're a filmmaker, work on this. The frame is a playground, so play. And the next time you go to a theater and you pay $15 to see a comedy, don't be satisfied with shit that is less inventive than Vine.