This is a bit more technical, so I decided to post it in this blog.
Because I am going to talk about writing and filmmaking, so I think I have to say this: I don’t have an education in those fields. What I know I learned either by analyzing things myself or via reading/watching videos from people who have an education in those fields. While I have attempted to write stuff, so far I’ve thrown everything in the garbage.
Writing process
This obviously changes from a writer to another, but it usually goes something like this: outline (which can be more or less complete or skipped, if you’re one of those), writing, editing, editing, editing. Editing is the phase where one and others read what they wrote and perfect it. A ton of stuff either is cut or is rephrased, entire scenes can be cut, others are put together, etc. Seriously, the first draft and last usually look nothing alike. The number of edits is dependent on the time and experience of the writers. And yes, I know CRWBY isn’t great handling time, so I understand maybe they don’t edit as much as they should or do it in a more superficial way, nonetheless that phase exists.
Kuleshov effect
Kuleshov was a Soviet filmmaker who defended viewers deride more meaning from two sequential shots than one. He did his own experiment, shooting a man with a neutral expression and intertwining these shots with different things: like a plate with food and a dead child. Hitchcock also did a variation in which he showed a close up of a man, then a woman with a baby, cut to the man smiling. In this case, the man is a sympathetic figure.
Then, he changed the middle shot to a woman in a bikini, so it was: close up of a man, woman in bikini, man smiling. And the conclusion is: the guy’s a pervert.
This is the power of editing in filmmaking: create meaning. And to quote Dan Olson (whose video on the Kuleshov effect is linked below): “Because this meaning becomes inherent to the sequence, a careful consideration of placement, order and timing is necessary to both create desired meaning and to avoid undesired meaning”.
Let’s look at RWBY’s “Heroes and Monsters”:
“Love doesn’t have to mean romance”. Sure, but to use such a loaded word in that context is to put romantic meaning undoubtedly on the table, not just as a possibility, but due to the stakes and how the entire scene is edited as likely. It seems like a pretty deliberate choice since the writers could have chosen to phrase it differently like “I’ll destroy everything you care about”, but they didn’t. And they confirm this was indeed deliberate in V5, when Sun does fight Adam for a while yet, when choosing a word to connect him with Blake via Adam, they went for… “classmate”. Remember the writing process? Editing – still a thing in there too.
The entire scene is done in a way that Adam not only understands the importance Yang has to Blake, but also for the audience to associate the word “love” with those 2, even if Adam only discovers they are in love in V6.
After the fall of Beacon, Sun looks at an injured Blake and Yang while the first apologizes to the latter with tears in her eyes. That shot exists for Sun to realize the connection between the 2 girls, not for him to see Blake injured, otherwise it would have been better if Yang had been kept out of the frame, not to mention that he had already seen her injured.
No, this shot doesn’t exist to show Sun seeing Blake injured, because he already knew that. When Weiss arrives and sees Yang and Blake injured, he’s already there. Plus, he was the one who told Ruby Yang was going to be OK.
If the point was to make him notice Blake’s injuries, it makes no sense for their hands to appear. Yang would have been kept out of the frame, instead of taking up more space than Blake. If the point was to show him notice an injured Blake, it would have made much more sense to use a sequence like this:
Sun’s expression should be a bit different in the last to emphasize concern. Or they could have had the entire like the one they showed, but with a different angle in a way to cut Yang out of the frame.
In the original RWBY, the shot of Blake is seen through the perspective of Ruby, not Sun’s. Instead, we only got a shot of him with both girls. No close ups, no particular importance placed on Blake, their hands near the middle of the shot, with Yang taking up more space than Blake.
To me, this is the moment where Sun realizes Blake’s feelings for Yang, which is why he brings up Yang in V4 after his injury.
CRWBY could have done the same with their hands: Sun – BB hands – Sun again, but this way they left it more ambiguous which was probably the intention. It would have made no sense for them to go for subtlety if it was meant for Black Sun, because the audience was more than aware he was interested in Blake since V1 and subtlety had never entered the equation when it comes to them. For example, when they first meet, it was even used slow motion with him winking at her. I’d say BS was intended to be a red herring from pretty early on.
Other post on RWBY:
Faunus and the White Fang: The Portrayal of Racism
Kuleshov effect:
Folding Ideas (Dan Olson – watch his videos. He’s great): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy2Vhnqtu8I
Hitchcock explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNVf1N34-io
Kuleshov effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGl3LJ7vHc
Nerd Side of the Media 