Directing Book - Film Directing Shot By Shot

Directing Book - Film Directing Shot By Shot
By: Steven D. Katz
Michael Wiese Productions
1991

A book as old as this (the year I was born) can't possibly be all that good compared to recent book right? Wrong! It's a unique book in that it's different than other books in directing I've read. 

It deals with a whole host of directing principles from camera placement, editing, visualising, camera lenses and among other things, it focusses very closely on storyboarding and the whole business of planning the shots visually.

“It is the director’s job to create and environment in which the actor can connect with his adventurous impulses and find the unexpected and unpredictable in their work together.”

What this book taught me:-

It has taught me a great deal, just as On Film-Making has. In this book, I found invaluable information about how to present what you want in storyboards from using arrows instead of 19:9 frames, using 3D boxes around subjects to show spacial orientation or even by drawing a long sequence such as a chase in one long picture instead of multiple repeating frames. It also teaches how rules such as the line of action and the 180 degree rule can be broken if it serves an aesthetic purpose. It was great for teaching the purposes of perception and how we can manipulate reality or the audience's perception in order to create a film that perhaps wasn't filmed the way it looked. It also helped me understand the responsibilities and duties of the director such as the staging of camera angles and shot sizes (in accordance with the working relationship with the cinematographer) and their uses and powers. 

“It’s the filmmaker’s job to evaluate what portion of the whole event he or she wants to feature and from what vantage point to view the action.” 

Should you buy this book?

Like with On Film-Making, this book was invaluable in my quest to better understand the craft of directing. It is a must buy, not even for directors, but for people looking to work as a storyboarder and even editors on how to better understand the film making process.


“By creating fully rounded characters with pasts, writers can create the present more easily, predicting in a sense the behaviour of characters whose history they know.”

Link to buy: (Copy&Paste) 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Film-Directing-Shot-Visualizing-Productions/dp/0941188108/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421171787&sr=8-1&keywords=shot+by+shot