Visual Arts – The Idea
Visual Arts, because the name suggests, is an art form that’s visually perceived. These days, the term contains Fine Arts, Decorative or Applied Arts, and Crafts.

The History
In the turn in the 20th century and prior to the Arts & Crafts Movement in Britain, the term ‘Art’ or ‘Artist’ referred only to the field of Fine Arts (like painting, sculpture, or print making), and not Craft or Applied Media. After the European Renaissance Movement (14th-16th century), Visual Arts was included as an academic subject at educational institutions.

The Types

o Traditional Plastic Arts

Drawing – This genre, aging back to Paleolithic Caves (16,000 years ago), refers to making an image using any techniques and tools both, manual (graphite pencils, crayons, charcoals, & pastels), and digital (line drawing, cross drawing, scribbling, blending, hatching, random drawing, and stippling). The professional is called drafter.

Painting – This most important pillar of Visual Arts involves the application of colored pigments (mixed in a suitable medium), on a surface, such as paper, cloth, body, metal, plastic, or canvas, with the help of a binder. Originated in France around 32,000 years back, in the Lascaux caves & rocks, first paintings of human figures were found in Egypt, in the temple of Ramses 2, with Greece being an immense contributor to the field. The expert is called painter. Western Painting world saw the following key phases:

European Renaissance (13th-16th century) – Painters: Giotto di Bondone (Italian-1267-1337), Jan Van Eyck (Belgian Dutch – 1395-1441),Leonardo Da Vinci (Italian-1452-1519), Hans Holbein the Younger (German – 1497-1543), and Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Dutch – 1525-69)

Dutch Golden Age (17th century) – Painters: Rembrandt (1606-69) and Vermeer (1632-75)

French Impressionism (19th century) – Painters: Claude Monet (1840-1926), Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), and Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

French Post-Impressionism (late 19th century) – Painters: Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Vincent Van Gogh (Dutch – 1853-90), and Toulouse Lautrec (1864-1901)

European Symbolism (late 19th century) – Painter: Edward Munch (Norwegian – 1863-1944)

German Expressionism (early 20th century) – Painters: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) and Erich Heckel (1883-1970)

French Cubism (early 20th century) – Painters: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963)

Surrealism (1920s) – Painters: Salvador Dali (Spanish – 1904-89) and Magritte (Belgian – 1898-1967)

Printmaking – In art, it involves making a picture on a matrix and transferring it to a two-dimensional (flat) surface through any form of pigmentation. Key techniques include line engraving, lithography, woodcut, etching, and screen-printing, including some digital methods.

Sculpture – It is a three-dimensional artwork, requiring shaping, or combining hard or light material, commonly stone, wood, glass, or metal. The expert is called sculptor.

Miscellaneous – Ceramics and Architecture are the other important genre here.

o Modern Visual Arts

Photography – This involves creating images with the help of time controlled light alterations. Mechanical, chemical, or digital cameras are used for the purpose. The expert is called photographer.

Filmmaking – It is the process of making a motion picture through scriptwriting, shooting, animation, editing, music work, and market distribution. The expert is called filmmaker.

Computer Arts – This is an art form entailing the digital processing of art elements (image, sound, video, CD-ROM, illustration, algorithm, or performance) for finally desired output and display. The expert is called computer or digital artist.

o Design & Crafts

o Applied Arts

Industrial Designing
Graphic Designing
Interior Designing
Fashion Designing
Decorative Arts

You can find 3 stages from the production method:

1. Pre-Production (the organizing stage) in which you may anticipate to invest roughly 1/3 of one’s total time.

two. Production (the shooting stage) in which you may anticipate to invest roughly 1/6 of one’s total time.

three. Post-Production (the editing stage) in which you may anticipate to invest around 1/2 of one’s total time.

These time estimates are really loose and will differ based on your production.

Excellent organizing ensures that the pricey production stage runs smoothly and that every one of the footage that is certainly necessary gets shot.

Post-Production can be a very creative stage and you need to have time to edit, screen and re-edit exactly where essential.

Pre-Production consists of:

Making the organizing paperwork, deciding on places, hiring cast and crew, booking gear and post facilities, coping with legal paperwork, making a spending budget, accounting for ancillary rentals and services, and so on.

Production Contains:

Shooting the needed footage, reshooting exactly where needed and recording place sound.

Post-Production consists of:

Screening and logging your footage, recording or accessing music, recording voice and sound effects, generating animations, illustrations & text graphics, editing the various visuals and soundtracks, adding transitions and effects, mixing, color correcting, producing time coded copies for preview, making masters and sub-masters.

You can find 3 main production documents:

- The proposal

- The script

- The shot list, scene list or storyboard.

The Proposal contains: The working title, medium, scenario (incl. story outline and treatment), technical considerations and the spending budget. Treatments can be commercial, dramatic, documentary or educational. It is used to educate potential investors or production companies on what your project is about before reading the script.

The Script contains: A detailed story development, written for screen action, with dialogue and visual information. Various formats exist, but usually the script does not contain camera angles, lighting information and other technical information. It’s just a description from the story.

The Shot List / Storyboard contains: An area for noting shot/scene number, visual content, technical descriptions and approximate time for the shot. In a storyboard a diagram augments the written shot description. This is exactly where the technical shooting information is.

Shot Distances listed in the shot list relate to the perceived distance between camera (audience) and subject. While you will find often many definitions for shot distances there a really only five basic ones:

1. Extreme Long Shot (ELS) exactly where there is actually a significant area of space around the subject. The subject appears to be distant.

two. Long Shot (LS) exactly where the subject comfortably fills the frame from top to bottom with adequate head room and room underneath the subject).

three. Medium Shot (or Mid) Shot (MS) exactly where around 2/3 to 1/2 from the subject is seen in the frame. Make sure to never allow the bottom in the frame to cut a person off at a natural joint.

4. Close Up (CU) exactly where around 1/3 to 1/4 from the subject is framed. This may possibly be your typical “head and shoulders” shot.

5. Extreme Close Up (ECU) which is usually a head shot of a person. As long as it shows the eyes, nose and mouth in the frame it can still be considered a shot of a person (as opposed to a medium shot of an eye, for instance).

Sequencing

Basic sequencing means that we design a series of shots for one scene or sequence in our movie. They should be designed so that the audience is shown the action in a way which is easily understood, visually stimulating and that no subject is shown which is not intended to be part with the scene.

For this reason several shots will be designed and each should be slated for ease of editing.

While each sequence of shots is designed based on the action to be shown to the audience (action sequences, monologues, multi-camera stunts, and so on.) a dialogue scene between actors will often be shot using the Master Scene technique.

Shooting a dialog sequence in the Master Scene technique contains several camera angles, shooting overlapping or repeating action so that the editor has several choices.

If, for example, we are shooting two people facing each other while holding a conversation we would shoot the entire sequence in a master two-shot. Then we may shoot a close up of just one from the people for the entire sequence. Lastly we may possibly shoot the other person in close up for the entire sequence. Thus, we have a two-shot to introduce the scene, close-ups of each person when they speak and also close ups of each person just listening as the off-camera person is speaking (these are called reaction shots). The two shot can be used any time bouncing back and forth between the close ups may well become tiring to the viewer.

This sequencing should be included in your shot list.

I’m Mike Hughes and I’m about to enter my fourth decade as a professional producer of film and video programs. I make corporate videos, commercials and documentaries. I’ve also worked on dramas and music videos.

In addition, I have been teaching eager students how to make videos in film schools for over 30 years.

I have written a textbook on how to make videos which has everything you need to learn how to plan, shoot, edit and package exciting and stimulating PROFESSIONAL digital video programs.

This book contains tons of information that I have gleaned from actual digital video production experiences. I designed my courses and taught my students from this wealth of experience, but this book contains scads more information than I could ever have taught in my live classes.