Definition
The general plan ‘s main purpose is to describe a place, a city, a landscape or a field of battle. It shows all of the decor to create a context around the action. The characters may from time to time be integrated, but they will be very small, such as drowned. The general plan must last long enough to provide all the information that the director wanted to give the viewer. It allows you to give the atmosphere, the atmosphere of the film or sequence.
Many directors choose to start their movies or new movies with a general plan in order to prepare the viewer to the plot by providing a variety of information. It can also be used at the end of a sequence to show a last time or is the action before switching to a new place. In this case, the general plan serves to provide information to the viewer, but rather to give him air, create a cut.
More atypical and in time, developers may use the general plan for anything other than describe. Thus, it can be very successful in expressing the loneliness the loneliness of a character, which, however, is an emotion, through a general plan.
The angle of view is most often in diving or ordinary.
A few examples
The mountainous landscape and snow-capped evokes distant lands. It is night, the moon is plain. All the codes of the genre are there to create the specific atmosphere of the films of épouvantes, that is not really the film of Roman Polanski.
We discovered the area of Manhattan, in place of the film as a whole. This plan has a dual meaning as it also presents one of the themes important in the film, the city of New York, one of the subjects fetishes of Woody Allen
Unlike the two plans presented above, it is not located at the beginning of the film. It is towards the end of the film, when the main character has finally reached his goal, the Alaska, but feels desperately alone. Despite the inability to see the emotions, the emotions of the actor, it is the loneliness and despair that come out of this plan when one views the film.
To go further
If you want to deepen your knowledge on this subject, develop your knowledge, you can get the books “plans for the cinema : the big effects movie that every filmmaker needs to know” and “Carry out his films shot by shot“, two books that are both comprehensive and complementary in their approach.
Keywords: plan general plan general film