We recently posted about how the simple exercise of counting a movie’s shots can help improve your own directing. Now, thanks to film editor Vashi Nedomansky, you can take the exercise a step further by taking a bird’s eye view of some popular David Fincher films and analyzing every single shot used.
Nedomansky, who helped Fincher’s team create the post-production workflow for Gone Girl as they made the transition to Adobe Premiere Pro from Final Cut 7, shares some general stats about Fincher’s work before presenting the shot breakdowns. The average of Fincher’s average shot length (ASL) is 3.87 seconds (as opposed to, say, Spielberg’s 6.5 seconds) and, thus, his films have a higher number of shots than most. Nedomansky notes that “the average feature film has approximately 1,200 individual shots,” whereas Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has 2,964.
Despite that fact, Nedomansky insists that “his films never feel rushed. In my opinion, they bloom and play out at a sublime pace that suits each individual film.”
See the rest at NoFilmSchool.
