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Film School: ‘The Move To Stanford’ Montage in ‘Hot Fuzz’ (2007)

A case study in storytelling through composition, repetition and sound effects – in 30 seconds.

In action comedy Hot Fuzz (2007), director and co-writer Edgar Wright moves police officer Nicholas Angel (co-writer Simon Pegg) from the big city to a small town – and through careful shot selection, tight editing and sound design, we’re told a whole bunch of character and story in just half a minute:

Every single shot in this sequence helps to tell the story, both in content and composition.

If you were to storyboard each shot, you’d see that whenever a shot is “repeated”, the changes in its details tell us the progression of the character, both geographically and emotionally.

Cinematographer Jess Hill breaks down how the types of shots are part the cinematic language of the films which Hot Fuzz references – or how playing with genre conventions means playing by genre rules (via Cooke Optics TV):

Every Frame A Painting breaks down the creativity and sophistication of Edgar Wright’s visual storytelling (the analysis of this scene from Hot Fuzz starts at 1:16):

“Sound design drives an edit,” asserts The Discarded Image in this look at How Edgar Wright Uses Sound:

Further Viewing

Edgar Wright explains the “tooling up” montage, and how he subverts it in Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (clipped from the full podcast episode, via HBO):

All the Right Movies recaps the making of Hot Fuzz – and Edgar Wright adds a few annotations along the way:

Who do the greats revere? Edgar Wright’s Top 40 favorite films (via Eyes on Cinema):

Edgar Wright uses different yet equally effective techniques in ‘The Plan’ Montage in Shaun of the Dead (2004):

Film School: ‘The Plan’ Montage in ‘Shaun of the Dead’ (2004)