Chris Raschka Quotes

As a visual storyteller, a lot is learning what to include so you're not being redundant between images and text.

Cinema is a visual medium one has to communicate through visuals, and therefore, dialogues should be less.

As much as I love creating entertaining visuals, I love toying with the pace of a movie and trying to perfect that. It's imperative to the impact: faster cuts, cuts at the right moments that meld with the tenor of a scene. Creating and maintaining that feeling.

A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.

Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story.

It's such a delicate business, the structure of film, isn't it? What happens if a scene is not there but two minutes later? It's an eternal, never-ending search, actually, which is very exciting. It really is.

If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don't make sense and that they wouldn't have happened that way.

At any filmmaking class, you learn the power of the visual medium and are always trying to minimise the words.

For me, the filmmaking has to be about the dramaturgy.

I'm a filmmaker, so I always think: When is the breaking point? Sometimes you've got to go beyond the breaking point, and then you catch it. When is long enough? It's one of those things you have to look at, walk away, and go home and find out what it is.

It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words.

Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.

Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn't there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can't.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

A special effect is a tool, a means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

With moviemaking, the audience always has to keep asking, 'What happens next?' If you have the wrong piece of music over a scene, people aren't going to get the scene. If you have the wrong camera angle, people aren't going to pay attention. That's as much a part of the process as getting people to talk to you.

There's always the pressure on the director of how to transition from one scene to another, especially when it can really be oblique on 'Game of Thrones.'

A shot is only as every as good as how well it tells the story.

I don't think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures - I don't illustrate the story with the pictures.

What's great is that each medium has a unique set of things that it does and does well. Film is a visual medium, and obviously, you can't fit a whole book into two hours unless you're really economical about it. Obviously, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and on some level, it's sort of true.

I fell in love with film and its potential. The idea of putting one image next to another image and creating meaning blew my mind.

I've storyboarded for things other people have shot. So thinking in shots and orchestrating shots is not foreign to me at all.