SOUND MONTAGE DEFINITION SERIES

The last shot in the series is slow motion, which is usually one of those film techniques used to emphasize a particular moment or emotion. Whether he’s getting punched in the gut or smacking around hanging slabs of beef, over the course of these events we understand that this character isn’t a quitter. Rocky runs by trains and bridges in his black beanie and sweatsuit all across Philadelphia.Įvery shot highlights his determination. Since we’ve already mentioned the well-known montage in Rocky, we can dig a little deeper to see how these series of shots provide insight into the subject, the setting, and subsequent events in the film.Īs soon as the music starts and the trumpets sound, the audience starts getting pumped.

SOUND MONTAGE DEFINITION HOW TO

Let’s go ahead and make our way through a few movies that mastered the montage so we can learn some of the ins and outs of this editing technique.īonus: How To Setup A Home Music Studio A Montage Medley: Famous Films that Employ this Film Editing Technique Sometimes a sequence can achieve all of the above. Often a montage provides a fun little break after a tense scene. Sometimes an editor cuts together scenes for dramatic effect or to convey that a character is putting in the work needed to set up the next shots in the story. We already have our fill of such nonsense masquerading as entertainment, so let’s all give thanks for the montage. That sounds more like a reality show nightmare mash-up…stay tuned for an insufferably long season of a What Not to Eat meets So You Think You Can Box. Can you imagine if we had to watch Sylvester Stallone consume raw eggs and run up and down stairs for months on end? A montage makes use of the willing suspension of disbelief that we bring with us to the theater (or to the couch at home) as we enjoy a movie.ĭo we really need to watch every single minute of a couple’s 17-month engagement to understand that they have moved from “just friends” to married? No, it turns out that we do not, and luckily filmmakers don’t dumb it down for us.Ī montage can be a fun and creative way to show that things are progressing without dragging the viewer through every moment along the way. So, what is “montage” in the Hollywood sense of the word? Well, the above definition does a good job describing the term, but we can definitely provide a lengthier definition and more details. See Related: What Is Production Design in a Film? More About the Montage: Where and Why We See this Style & Technique of Editing From the sound stage to the cutting room, his camera work and editing skills will still be the subject of film school essays for a rather long time, and editors have been building on that form ever since.

The quick cutting that the director Eisenstein employed in his films is no longer the only style that is used for montages in movies today. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism provides some film history along with its definition:Īs an aesthetic principle, montage, defined as the assemblage of disparate elements into a composite whole often by way of juxtaposition, is most often associated with the Soviet cinema of the 1920s, and with the theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in particular. As far as film editing, though, montage has a more complex and conceptual definition. The term montage comes from the French verb monter, which means “to assemble” and is related to the term collage. Wikipedia offers the following definition for the term montage:Ī film editing technique in which a series of short shots are sequenced to condense space, time, and information. You may have noticed that Hollywood films sometimes cut together sequences to tell a story in an economic and poetic fashion rather than spelling out every detail of what has transpired. Storytellers take advantage of this ability in their film editing. Our beautiful brains are capable of deducing all manner of things from partial pieces of information or a simple series of images.

Sound montage definition