Author: Brae Troutman, Student Technology Consultant

When looking at a film and analyzing its elements, it’s super helpful to understand how you can break down what’s on the screen visually and auditorily on screen: the film into scenes, scenes into shots, shots into frames. In my experience, this ability to break down and work through what you can observe in a film is critical to any film analysis.

    At the moment I’m in an East Asian Cinema class, and we submit an analysis of one of the two films we watch each week every Monday. This past week we were presented with the option to analyze a clip from the film by reverse-engineering the storyboard for the clip at hand. By screenshotting frames of the film at critical moments, you can capture and annotate a placeholder in the scene in which to pinpoint important cinematographic elements: the start of diegetic music perhaps, or a specific shot and angle highlighting the mise-en-scene and their stasis or dynamicity on screen.

I often find that when watching foreign language/culture film it can be difficult to capture and understand everything that’s happening plot-wise. Breaking down important scenes in a film like this really helped me to understand the thought-process behind the choices made on set both actorially and directorially. It’s also a fun challenge and exercise to see how much motion and meaning you can capture in a still image from a scene, and it’s amazing to see how much meaning a film can hold in even just one frame juxtaposed with the context of the entire movie.

I’ve incorporated this process into all of my film analyses now. Even if these screenshots are not a part of my final submission of an analysis, they play a vital role in organizing my thoughts and observations about a scene. I suggest reverse-storyboarding to anyone who needs or wants to look deeper into the cinematography and meaning behind a film!