Bayhem

Michael Bay super succesful, but not that interesting, why?

People love spectacle.

Bay's cirular zoom in:  (battleship is an example of a copycat failing at it)
   need a background so you get parralax, a bigger sense of movement
   telephoto lense to compress the space to make the background zip by
   actors move vertically
   low angle to give the scale
   slow motion to sell it

movement of the camera movement of the actors movement of the background, expansion of time, then they look off screen creating stillness, making the scene feel huge

bay epicness= layers of depth, parralax, movement, character, and environment

not unique, Bay just layers it deeply and has complex movement

complex movement in lots of directions

Bay doesn't distinguish importance of shots, every shot is designed for maximum visual impact regardless of if it fits, so sometimes emphasizes gibberish unimportant dialogue.

Bay makes things feel big by putting lots of things of various size and then move the camera to emphasize it. Also offscreen space, having the actors look offscreen to stuff we're not seeing, which makes us feel like the stuff we do see in the background is really extensive.

Bay seems to think that a good movie is 3000 dynamic shots and no static ones.

Bayhem, the use of movement, composition and fast editing to create a sense of epic scale, each individual shot feels huge but implies even bigger things outside of frame. It stacks multiple layers of movement shot on either a very long lense or a very wide one. It shows you a lot for just a moment and then takes it away, you feel the overall motion but no grasp of anything concrete. Basically traditional action movie vocabulary, but faster and dirtier shot.

We can process visual information at a speed not common before, but thinking through what an image means we don't have time. We're visually sophisticated but visually illiterate, we can follow (and can't look away for fear of missing anything) but we don't have time to process it to understand it clearly.