Week 26.08 - META FRAMES Socials Roundup
16 Feb - 22 Feb 2025: Legends of Tomorrow; Kiki’s Delivery Service; Fight Club; Gravity Falls; Andor
Week 26.08 posts involve the frame in meta ways! including shots from Legends of Tomorrow (2016-2022) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989); Fight Club (1999) Gravity Falls (2012-2016); and Andor (2022-2025).
Legends and Kiki
Legends of Tomorrow is live action and Kiki’s Delivery Service is animation; Legends’ scene is more comedic while Kiki’s moment is more of an emotional down beat; but both involve a THUD and a camera shake to make us feel IMPACT.
Kiki’s Delivery Service
Afraid she may be losing her ability to fly, Kiki tests her broom . . . when she lands with a THUD! the whole screen shakes, as though the camera is jarred by her hitting the floor.
More than merely a joke or sight gag, the jarring motion makes us sympathetically *feel* how Kiki’s world is shaken when she hits the ground.
Legends of Tomorrow
There’s a lot going on here — one stage performance, and one brawl, intercut.
In the stage performance, the colours are brighter and white-and-blue-er, and the camera stays still.
In the brawl, colours are yellow-and-green-er, and the camera is moving moving MOVING, even when it’s not giving us the meta-shake [more on that below].
So that’s how the direction helps distinguish scenes during the edit; now how does the use of frame make us feel the impact in the brawl?
by shaking on impact, just like Kiki’s did!
We’ve slowed it way down here, the better to see (and enjoy):
Fight Club
This moment in Fight Club involves a ‘cigarette burn’ in the frame we’re watching; it looks like it’s in our frame, but the characters talk about and point to it like it’s in their world.
That the narrator refers to it as Tyler (Brat Pitt) points to it is a meta way to signal they both have full knowledge of the movie we are watching . . . which is something Stu and I did an entire podcast episode on, over on Draft Zero.
Andor
The leadup to get Vel (Faye Marsay) and Cinta (Varada Sethu) into this frame-within-a-frame is very deliberate, as we looked at in depth.
But the way they’re arranged is entirely for us the audience, a meta moment of commentary about the characters and where they have been emotionally.
We look at some more of Andor’s incredible blocking and framing
and scene-transitioning from “Narkina 5”
Gravity Falls
When Bill Cipher tips his hat to Dipper, the whole frame flips around them; at first it may feel like only the camera is flipping, but then Dipper skids down the roof, and we realize Bill has flipped reality around himself.