Until you ask someone who does.

Bear with me. It’ll makes sense in a minute.

I had a weekend of watching foreign language movies. It wasn’t deliberate, it just happened to turn out that way. But the ones that I watched all happened to be really very good. Apocalypto on Friday night, The Lives of Others on Saturday afternoon then The Orphanage on Saturday night. The opening of Apocalypto works particularly well. Perhaps they were trying to get over the language barrier (its in Yucatec Mayan), but there’s no dialogue at all for the first five minutes or so. Without dialogue or explanation the editor, John Wright, conveys a huge amount of information simply through judicious shot selection. We spend our days striving to use visual imagery to reinforce our client’s message however it is always worth checking out how our Hollywood cousins do it.

Fortunately we have people here who do that sort of thing for us too.