The Secret of Life, Pt. 2: Space for Improvement and Research
Today’s blog post will be separated in two parts, dealing with my personal improvement and truthful research. And as you will see in the course of this post, Paulo Coelho's quote above will hold true for both of them. So let's get on!
For the first, our class reviewed the short dialogues we prepared, filmed and edited (with greenscreen!) and in order to improve our understanding and (hopefully soon) also our craft.
It turns out that I still have a long way to go despite my previous studies. But that only goes to show that theoretical knowledge and practical implementation are entirely different things. Looking back at the round of criticism I earned, I surely do have to learn and implement more. But I am grateful for the faults I committed, for I can now dust myself off and set about to improve upon them.
In order to not lose much more time, here is a condensed version of what I have learned from that session. Turns out that creating an visually exciting dialogue is actually extremely difficult:
Get closer to the actors and use the varieties of angles at hand. Don’t make your film look like a theatre piece watched from the cheap seats!
Headroom for the characters is important, but even ¼ of the frame is too much already!
If you want to (re)direct the audience’s gaze, do it subtly, by the use of slight camera movements and depth of field.
Avoid rough cuts and quick edits in a dialogue scene at all cost!
Moving shots are herd animals. They look awkward if only used once in otherwise static imagery.
Never use a crossfade in a dialogue scene! Crossfades are commonly used in montage to express the passing of time.
If you get green splash from the greenscreen on your actors and you cannot fix it in post, try using an otherwise green scenery.
Watch out for character height, position and eyelines on screen! On the twodimensional plane of the frame, it is key that the characters don’t seem to jump height- or position-wise and that their eyelines always match. Also, try to let the eyes occupy approximately the same place on screen to smooth out transitions. Don’t situate both characters in the middle of the screen like I did, since it visually confuses the audience. The characters will seem to pile upon each other which inhibits the understanding of the cinematic space. Instead, assign them to their specific side of the screen, as dialogue demands, and make sure to leave enough viewing space for the characters in the frame.
If you include a frontal shot of an actor, have him
Not look directly into the camera and
Try to move the camera slightly forwards or backwards to indicate that the camera has, in fact, occupied the POV of another character.
While the first point directly feeds into the unwritten rule that you cannot keep the illusion of the story alive while simultaneously breaking the fourth wall, I personally suspect that this is rooted in the theory film cognitivist Torben Grodal repeatedly posed in his work. Grodal claimed that the neuronal blueprint of our brains (what he calls the PECMA flow – namely Perception, Emotion, Cognition, Motivation and Action) is highly attentive and constantly applying not only to reality but to fictional events as well. This blueprint itself is closely wired tot he direct gaze. Even though our viewing habits have since long accepted visual fiction, our neuronal blueprint is still designed to look out for cues to discern fiction from reality, the most reliable one being the direct gaze that directly activates different behavorial patterns in our brain, distracting us from the illusion the filmmaker tries to create. As you can see, research is important.
No, but honestly. Research is key. Which brings me to the second part of our blog:
All GOOD stories have backgrounds, and your background needs to be very well researched to make a story believable and to ease the suspension of disbelieve with the audience. If I write about an autistic adolescent who can communicate with aliens, then I should better know how autism can express itself and what the known causes or symptoms are before I write a script about it (which is an entirely new blog post in the making).
But this obviously means that you need to be able to ask the right questions when researching ideas and need to cover an issue or an topic from as many perspectives as possible.
With more advanced scriptwriters, it means that you must be able to plant the necessary pieces of information (hints) within your script or film but still fashion them in a way, that the audience is not able to easily guess the reveal and/or the conclusion of a film but that they have to work it out for themselves.
For nothing is more dissatisfying being presented everything on a silver tablet. Or having to guess what the character’s motivation or moral of the story is. Or did you ever like to sit through a film that tells you it's most important parts as if you could not figure them out for yourself. Which brings me back to our mantra of 'show, don't tell'.
To make it short, thorough research – be it background information, character profile and development or the science behind a certain area of study – is needed if you want to create a story with depth, and a ring of truthfulness to it. And this most likely means grinding through a lot of sources, constantly refining your work and improving upon the errors of thought you committed along the way.
Which makes me realise that I still rely too much on the 'what if'-paradigm of storytelling instead of trying to settle my stories in the real world and let the truth speak for itself.
References:
N.N. (n.d.) The Secret of Life. Quote by Paulo Coelho Image taken from: https://quotefancy.com/quote/618/Paulo-Coelho-The-secret-of-life-though-is-to-fall-seven-times-and-to-get-up-eight-times [Accessed on 27 November 2017]
Grodal, T. (2009) Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film Oxford University Press