Thread by @HeadExposure

30 shots:

14 inserts
7 close-ups
5 medium to close shots
3 cutaways
1 wide shot

Distilled action can work. No master shot, overlapping editing, stretched out timeline. And yet, still awesome because:
-Clear causality
-Sustained visual momentum
-John Woo

The only wide shot here is used because Woo needs to pass on new spatial information. One character has changed position relative to the others, which leads to an action that would be incomprehensible without a shot establishing that fact. Less than a second long is enough.

Visual momentum depends on a dialogue between images. That means creating visual sentences that give rhythm to the scene. This is one such sentence: 3 shots, 1 general direction. The *feeling* of kinetic unity combined with the clear *understanding* of their diegetical meaning.

The way Woo stretches out time is seamless in that it never feels like he does on initial viewing. Here, Gina Gershon turns her head to avoid a bullet. 10 shots and maybe 7 bullets later, she's still completing her move. But it's never shocking.

The beauty of it is that we can never know for sure when Woo is showing us a new bullet being fired, or when he is showing us again the same one being fired from a different angle. It stimulates the senses but doesn't overwhelm. It makes it more exciting, grabs the attention.

This is a 26-second clip made up of 30 shots, and since the last shot is 5 seconds long, it's a 21-second action scene in 29 shots. It's never about how long the shots are. Always about how well they're framed, composed, blocked, and edited together.