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Composers are fond of saying that their music for a film should serve the story so well that the audience doesn’t notice it. For
Collateral,
Mann needed help from James Newton Howard to score the climax so as to not build too quickly to a high pitch of excitement. According to Howard, “Michael was very clear about the climax taking place in three movements.” “Movements” as an artistic term is usually applied to the parts of a symphony, a concerto, or a sonata. Thus the idea was that the score for this last part of the film should play a major role in shaping the progression and rhythm of the action.

The climax involves Vincent trying to kill a character who is important to Max and Max trying frantically to save both himself and this other character. Howard and Mann called the first movement “The Race to Warn,” since Vincent gets ahead of Max in running to the building where the potential victim is located. Despite the fact that both men are running and the situation is suspenseful, Howard avoids very fast rhythms. He begins with long-held string chords over a deep, rumbling sound, then adds sustained brass chords with a strong beat accompanying them. The accompaniment is dynamic but doesn’t reach a high pitch of excitement.

The second movement, “The Cat and Mouse,” involves Vincent getting into the building, turning off the electricity, and stalking his victim in near darkness (
1.3
). Again, the chords are slow, with ominous undertones, dissonant glides, and, at a few points, fast, eerie high-string figures as Vincent nears his goal. During the most suspenseful moments in the scene, when Vincent and his prey are in the darkened room, strings and soft, clicking percussion accompany their cautious, hesitant movements.

Finally, there is a rapid chase sequence, and here Howard finally makes the music louder and faster, with driving tympani beats that ratchet up to a very quick rhythm as the danger grows. Once the final climactic events occur, the percussion ends, and slow, low strings create a sort of coda to accompany the final quiet shots.

As the making of
Collateral
demonstrates, the technological basis of filmmaking plays a crucial role in bringing the artistic plans of its makers into reality. With the recent proliferation of digital tools for production, filming teams have more choices than ever to make.

These decisions and many others that Mann and his team made during their work on
Collateral
affect our experience of the film. The unfamiliar look that the digital cameras and innovative lighting give Los Angeles may draw our attention to the settings and give us a more vivid sense of the world through which the characters move. The music accompanying the fast-chase/slow-stalking/fast-chase progression of the climax helps heighten the suspense and build the excitement.

Films are everywhere now, almost as widely available as print or music. But how do they get made in the first place? “Making a movie” means two very different things. First, people make films with machines. Anyone with a pen and paper can write a novel, and a talented kid with a guitar can become a musician. Movies require much more. Even the simplest home video camera is based on fiendishly complex technology. A major film involves elaborate cameras, lighting equipment, multitrack sound-mixing studios, sophisticated laboratories, and computer-generated special effects. Making a movie also involves businesses. Companies manufacture the equipment, other companies provide funding for the film, still others distribute it, and finally theaters or other venues present the result to an audience. In the rest of this chapter, we’ll consider how these two sides of making movies—technology and business—shape film as an art.

Moving-image media such as film and video couldn’t exist if human vision were perfect. Our eyes are very sensitive, but they can be tricked. As anyone who has paused a DVD knows, a film consists of a series of
frames,
or still pictures. Yet we don’t perceive the separate frames. Instead, we see continuous light and movement. What creates this impression?

No one knows the full answer. Many people have speculated that the effect results from “persistence of vision,” the tendency of an image to linger briefly on our retina. Yet if this were the cause, we’d see a bewildering blur of superimposed stills instead of smooth action. At present, researchers believe that two psychological processes are involved in cinematic motion: critical flicker fusion and apparent motion.

If you flash a light faster and faster, at a certain point (around 50 flashes per second), you see not a pulsating light but a continuous beam. A film is usually shot and projected at 24 still frames per second. The projector shutter breaks the light beam once as a new image is slid into place and once while it is held in place. Thus each frame is actually projected on the screen twice. This raises the number of flashes to the threshold of what is called
critical flicker fusion.
Early silent films were shot at a lower rate (often 16 or 20 images per second), and projectors broke the beam only once per image. The picture had a pronounced flicker—hence an early slang term for movies, “flickers,” which survives today when people call a film a “flick.”

Apparent motion
is a second factor in creating cinema’s illusion. If a visual display is changed rapidly enough, our eye can be fooled into seeing movement. Neon advertising signs often seem to show a thrusting arrow, but that illusion is created simply by static lights flashing on and off at a particular rate. Certain cells in our eyes and brain are devoted to analyzing motion, and any stimulus resembling movement apparently tricks those cells into sending the wrong message.

Apparent motion and critical flicker fusion are quirks in our visual system, and technology can exploit those quirks to produce illusions. Some moving-image machines predate the invention of film
(
1.10
,
1.11
).
Film as we know it came into being when photographic images were first imprinted on strips of flexible celluloid.

At all stages of a film’s life, machines move the film strip one frame at a time past a light source. First, there is the
camera
(
1.12
).
In a light-tight chamber, a drive mechanism feeds the unexposed motion picture film from a reel (a) past a lens (b) and aperture (c) to a take-up reel (d). The lens focuses light reflected from a scene onto each frame of film (e). The mechanism moves the film intermittently, with a brief pause while each frame is held in the aperture. A shutter (f) admits light through the lens only when each frame is unmoving and ready for exposure. The standard shooting rate for sound film is 24 frames per second (fps).

The projector is basically an inverted camera, with the light source inside the machine rather than in the world outside
(
1.13
).
A drive mechanism feeds the film from a reel (a) past a lens (b) and aperture (c) to a take-up reel (d). Light is beamed through the images (e) and magnified by the lens for projection on a screen. Again, a mechanism moves the film intermittently past the aperture, while a shutter (f) admits light only when each frame is pausing. As we’ve seen, the standard projection rate for sound film is 24 fps, and the shutter blocks and reveals each frame twice in order to reduce the flicker effect on the screen.