File:American Beauty gymnasium.ogv

Clip from American Beauty (DreamWorks: 1999). Lester fantasizes about Angela during a half-time dance routine.

American Beauty, The Awards Edition (October 2000): [DVD; Disc 1/2], DreamWorks. Self-made video using HandBrake, QuickTime Pro, and OggConvert conversion and transcoding tools [Chapter 4, 16:15–17:15]

American Beauty (1999 film)

Entire image (2.35:1 aspect ratio) to preserve the film's cinematography and avoid misrepresenting the work in any way.

Low: the video has been compressed and downscaled to 480 x 240 pixels, less than .1 megapixels in size for each frame, downgraded from the original resolution of anamorphic 853 x 480 pixels. Assuming a frame rate of 24p, the 60 seconds contained in this video contains roughly 1440 frames out of a total of roughly 175104—0.08 percent of the total motion picture. The file has been encoded three times and the video has been compressed to a bit rate of roughly 1.9 MBps, much less than the source file, as well as a reduction in audio bit rate. Copies made from this video will be inferior to the original DVD, preserving commercial opportunities, and unsuitable for illegal uses being such a small portion of the film.

The clip is used to illustrate the themes and how the film scores first-person perceptions of time. As described in the article, the music and visuals create an effect that represents the main character's fixation on the girl in front of him by turning the traditional narrative underscore into a nondiegetic composition that lacks melody or progression. The score not only reflects the narrative stasis of the sequence but is a fundamental component of its creation, continuance and sudden end—an intent that would be difficult to covey using words alone, as the emotional tenor is defined by the visuals and music acting in conjunction. The scene is representative of the types of repetitive motion sequences, the double-and-triple cut-backs, that feature throughout the film; it is also representative of the way the score and visuals change to let the viewer know when the film is entering a fantasy sequence. In this way, the clip presents a broader insight into these effects than a description of this scene alone would provide.

This video's publisher has not released any free images or made shots from the film available under a compatible license. There are no known shots that are of a free license and could adequately replace this one.

© 1999 DreamWorks; use of the video in the article complies with Wikipedia non-free content policy and fair use under United States copyright law as described above.