As the first step towards revising your understanding of film techniques, it’s important to think about the whole range of techniques that you might want to talk about when you are analysing a film.
To do this, we will first consider what are often called “production elements”, which are techniques used during the film’s production in order to elicit a response from the audience.
The production elements that are most important to the study of film are the use of CAMERA, SOUND, EDITING, and MISE-EN-SCENE. If you haven’t heard the term before, ‘mise-en-scene’ means everything you can see within the frame of a shot, and how things within the shot have been arranged in relation to each other.
In order to help you to think about all of the different potential techniques that fall under each of these four production elements, download and complete the task in the Introductory PowerPoint on Production Elements. All you need to do in this task is to identify what production element each film technique is related to.