How Spielberg Directs Your Attention

Steven Spielberg is the the highest-grossing director in movie history. And now you'll learn his secret!
A master of composition, blocking, movement and camerawork, Spielberg combines all these techniques to make you, dear viewer, an attentive observer of every image he presents.

We'll talk about Reframing and COATs (my invented term for the Center of Attention) and how Spielberg uses them to make you pay attention to the screen for 100% of the running time, no matter if his subject is dinossaurs, the holocaust, aliens, amendment-ratifying, espionage, slavery or singing and dancing street gangs. Wow, this man has an expansive range.

We'll distill the precise Spielberg technique by going through perfectly arranged and blocked shots from "Schindler's List", "Munich", "West Side Story" and "Catch Me If You Can", with some room for "Lincoln", "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Jurassic Park", "The Color Purple", "Amistad", "War of the Worlds", "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".


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Copyright free music from Bensound.