Teacher Central: Of Production Meetings, Script Changes, and Engaging Editing
Today’s production meeting for Teacher Central was the first non-tutor-led production meeting that we held on our own. So straight after lunch, we all sat down and discussed the first draft of the script that Craig has sent out previously to all crewmembers to get as much input as possible.
Thus, yesterday evening, I did a read-through of the digital script in my role as an editor and annotated as well as noted down the issues I had with it in Word, as you can see in the images below:
I sent the annotated version of the script back to Craig giving him a head’s up before the scheduled meeting the next day. Since the first draft had a couple of issues, we addressed them in the meeting in order to be able to proceed with the project.
The Plot
The basic idea for story deals with an off-screen narrator teaching the audience on how to create a story by narrating various scenes on screen. These scenes entail a young actress on a film set, who acts out the narrator’s cues, while magically being transported to Disneyland, the Himalayan’s and a mediaeval town by the help of a green screen.
My Thoughts on the Plot and Script
While I liked the light tone and speed of the script, as well as the off-screen narrator’s relationship with the actress, the most apparent issue that – to my mind – popped up was the copyright issues surrounding the use of a Disneyland image. Disney has been renowned to either charge fortunes if you wanted to piggyback on their name and brand or to file lawsuits in case one didn’t even bother asking them for permission.
Furthermore – from an editor’s point of view – I enquired whether any cuts were planned on behalf of the scriptwriter. Because, from what I gleaned from the read-through, the entire script of six pages seemed to be a single long shot without any (hidden) cuts whatsoever, which would render the film shoot more complicated (and a lot of my work kind of superfluous, I felt).
Another issue I felt we would have was the language and the age range of the projected target group. Craig wanted to aim the educational video at 7 to 11 year old primary students, which I felt was too much of a stretch content-wise, since 7-year-olds would definitely learn story writing at a different level than 11-year-olds. And I didn’t feel that the content of the script would cover that age range.
Similarly, I felt that the language within the script was much too advanced for 11-year-olds, never mind 7-year-olds. Also, I felt that the narration was very much directed at independent, adult learners that would access tutorials on script writing online on platforms such as Skillshare and the like, and much less directed at primary school children just starting out to write a story. While it might be a nice gesture and maybe even helpful to hear the narrator’s final dialogue as an autodidactic learner, I also felt that it would fail to interest and engage primary students as a target audience:
‘Now it's over to you. At the end of this video, your teacher will provide you with a template. Where you must come up with a character, the setting which they inhabit and the conflict that they find themselves in. Additional help sheets will be given to you and once your template is filled in, you will have the basic framework with which to start a story. With that, I wish you all luck and encourage you to think big. Ready. Let's get writing.’
However, I addressed the issues in the meeting today and discussed possible alternatives for it, as in getting rid of the studio setup in the beginning and of the crewmember, as I felt that this setup:
Did not serve the story itself
Would rather confuse or complicate the story unnecessarily
The crewmember handing out props and costume parts to the actress would become a boring feature.
Engaging Editing Techniques
From personal research that I have conducted after the release of the first draft of Craig’s script and the knowledge that we might be using green screen techniques, I was reminded of a Youtube video which I came across not too long ago and in which I liked the way it was edited:
The story is plain simple: It deals with ‘usual’ tropes that most video gamers regularly encounter while playing a video game:
Video gamers are never interested in the story and will skip story elements whenever they can
If they approach a NPC (non-player character) who is supposed to give them an item, they’ll definitely skip the story told
Advanced gamers will be dissatisfied by the free items and discard it as quickly as possible
The discarded item will then appear on the ground in front of them
Video games (especially online video games) will usually lag, resulting in a jump in a character’s animation
When a character’s action sequence changes, their movement will usually result in a jump as well
While men’s armoury will look solid, women’s armoury will usually consist of small threads and be rather sexist.
What I liked about the style of this video was the implemented ‘jumpy’ style that would occur whenever the actor changed an action. This, to my mind, does not only resemble the visual quality of a video game – and would thus be more likely to interest children or young adolescents by the sheer display of the topic and video game tropes in general – it would also pose as a splendid means to change the character’s costume and props in the educational video that we were aiming to create.
So during our production meeting, I showed our entire crew this clip and illustrated on why I think that this video game style (or at least this editing techniques) and what benefits they could have for the location jumps in our educational video. Lynley, Adam, and Katie liked the idea, and Lynley and Adam seconded that the underlying theme of a video game would be more interesting to children of this age group, commanding more attention and getting the creative juices flowing more easily. And Craig mentioned that he wanted to look into this more for the script until the next draft was to be finished.
Moving on to the question of locations, background images, and green screen, Lynley then suggested that we could also possibly use real locations to film instead of doing everything on green screen.
After discussing the script and its issues, we moved onto further topics. Craig wanted the script finished in a week from now, but regarding the amount of work that will be delayed, I suggested that we should have the new draft/script finished and locked down by Monday and the storyboard done by Friday to still give sound, camera, and editor enough time to get settled into the new script, come up with creative solutions and research them.
References:
Skillshare (2019) Homepage [online] https://www.skillshare.com [Accessed on 15 February 2019]
Viva la Dirt League (2016) Discard - (Video Game Logic) EPIC NPC MAN Ep | Viva La Dirt League (VLDL) [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yh35uWLBQ8&frags=pl%2Cwn [Accessed on 15 February 2019]
York, C. (2019) Creating a Story: An Eduational Video [Script]