Story telling: more script ideas

- Someone seen as a stereotype e.g. black or skinny geek
- They overcome enormous adversities such as discrimination or bullying to prove to themselves
- They under go a change (key part of plot) that result in difference in physical appearance/ personality
- Skinny kid starts building himself physically or Black kid starts doing something that goes against his stereotype e.g. ballet.


Everyone sees an individual as stupid or presume something about them e.g. living statue is just a no-good scrounger, but what if he is actually a university professor and does the living statue gig in his spare time.

Focus on someone possibly quite young, attempting over and over and failing to accomplish something. They come back the next day, try and fail, show them at different times trying and failing, then they meet someone, they work together, and succeed.

Young boy, age 10,

Story telling: Script writing - charcter profiles

Claire

• 39
• Dark brown hair, all natural
• Lives with son (husband deceased)
• lives in suburbia
• Commutes to work
• Works with CID (Criminal Investigation Department)

Damian

• 53
• Scragly dark hair with strands of faded blonde
• Squatter for last 24 years
• situated in outer parts of city
• Used to work an office job for insurance firm

Sub - character: Charlotte

• 8 years old
• Fair blonde hair
• small for her age
• lives in the country and is driven to school by parents

AFTERNOTE:

Since this session early on in the course I have developed different characters and changed my storyline completely. I did this due to the plausibility of filming and how well I would be able to pull it off as the whole "society blamed the obvious culprit but he was actually innocent" thing has been done before.

Louis lecture

How important is sound?

Can you have sound without pictures?

Can you have pictures without sound?

examples of films with sound and no moving pictures:

• Derek Jarman's Blue
• Chris Marker's Le Jetee (sound with still images)

Function of sound:

• Aural narrative (dialogue, voiceover)
• Sonic ambiance (mood, atmosphere, sound effects)
• Emotional or intellectual resonance or dissonance

27/10/2016 louis lecture Documentary

Book to read: Stella Bruzzi

Narrative Documentary modes:

• Expository - Narrating "voice of god" BBC documentary style
• Observational - "fly on the wall" no voice over, (Maysles Brothers)
• Participatory - Onscreen relationship between filmmaker and subject, usually via interview
• Reflexive - Seeks to challenge our assumption (Nick Broomfield)
• Poetic - Relies on expressive editing of sound and image (Adam Curtis)
• Performative - Filmmaker/ subject conveys personal experience (Michael Moore)

Critical approaches to documentary:

• Realism - making it look as natural as possible, as least artificial lighting sound etc. as possible, even when using artificial lighting make it look natural
• Mediation and Repressentation - What we see is NOT objective reality or truth
• Reception Theory - How we as the audience mediate texts, and factors that might influence us.
• Ideology - A set of opinions, values, belifs and assumptions that one uses to think about and relate to the world. Propaganda in documentary Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera (1929) and Leni Riefenstahls Olympia (1938)

Editing workshops

On Fridays Fergus hosts editing workshops at the Rochester UCA campus. Here we learn how to make editing easier faster and more fluid through the use of command keys instead of the mouse. For example creating "L" edits, this is where you use the ripple tool to overlap part of an image but keep it's audio, leaving the effect of de-intensifying/ making the subject of the shot less important.

We also learnt about the tool panel (pictured below). The first thing I learned about was using the ripple tool, this means moving an edit point and causing the rest of the timeline to move the same amount to compensate. Fergus showed us that to do this you just select the ripple edit tool from the tool panel, position the mouse at the edit point in the timeline and drag left or right.

Both the Ripple edit and the Rolling edit look similar but perform very different roles. A rolling edit means moving an edit point without affecting the rest of the timeline. The first (outgoing) clip is made shorter while the second (incoming) clip is made longer by the same amount, or vice versa.

I have not used the Rate Stretch tool yet but after researching what it did I now can think of many instances in which I could have used it. The Rate stretch allows you can change a clip's speed to fit a duration by selecting the Rate Stretch tool and dragging either edge of a clip in a Timeline panel.

A Slip Edit means adjusting the in and out points of a clip simultaneously by the same amount in the same direction. The duration of the clip stays the sameTo use the slip tool select the Slip tool from the tool panel (shortcut is Y) and click on the clip in the Sequence. Now drag the cursor left or right to roll the clip forward or backward.

I remember the slip edit as the edit that slips underneath the footage. By this I mean whichever footage you have hold of with your mouse will be slid underneath the other two pieces of footage (these other two will remain unchanged. In the diagram below the green section would be the footage using the slip edit.

To perform a Slip edit, select the Slip edit tool from the tool panel. Position the mouse over the clip in the timeline, click and drag left or right.

The Slide tool does the exact opposite, in this case the green section would slide over the top thus cutting footage from the end of the blue clip and the start of the red clip.

The pen tool I have only ever used for audio, I am not sure if it has other functions, if so I'm sure I'll find them out as I progress through the course. I use the pen to adjust the volume or gain of a clip, by simply selecting the desired clip, enlarging the view and then clicking on the clip will display small dots that you can drag up or down to make it louder or quieter.

The last two tools are pretty self explanatory, the hand tool is used to drag the viewable area in the timeline left and right. The zoom tool is well, used to zoom into and out of the frame.

Story telling - Analysis of 3 short films

Film 1

8 - Eight is a film set in the WW2 era based around two characters, one a German soldier and one a

     British fighter pilot. The German soldier captures the pilot as he has crashed landed and takes him walking with him at gun point, until he tries to run and so he shoots him in the leg. They continue walking (or limping in the pilots case) until the German then steps on a land mine, the pilot then tries to run again and for a second time is shot, this time in the shoulder. This repetitive shooting causes a kind of slapstick dark humour to the film. The pilot hobbles back to the German and wrestles the gun off of him and walks away. Until the German does a strange kind of whistle to him which he has been doing through out the film to communicate with him. This seems to push the pilot over the edge and he takes aim and shoots, but misses, after a couple of shots he steps forward to decrease the chance of missing and accidentally steps on a land mine. The film ends here with an overwhelming sense of irony and a close up of the German with a large grin forming on his face. I am very fond of these dark humour endings as they deliver both closure and an emotive response from the audience.There is also no dialog in this short film which I am a passionate supporter of  as I believe that sometimes, especially if you do not have access to high end equipment, poor quality dialogue can disturb the suspension of reality. I also admire the use of moving medium close ups that I took inspiration from and used twice in my short film.

Film 2

DISSAPEAR - This is a short stop motion film evolving around a single character who over the course of the film is shown to have a passion for magic and illusions. At the start of the film he is depicted as an unhappy individual due to his lac of facial expressions and how he ignores his phone ringing and his work paging him. There is also no dialogue through out the entire film which as I said previously I am a fan of, but in doing this, especially with an inanimate object such as a puppet, it is hard to show any degree of motion both sad or happy. After he walks in ignoring the ringing phone, he puts a meal in the microwave and looks through reports with post-it notes on saying "overdue". This a key element in relaying narrative to an audience without talking to them, using narrative devices to show not tell. His microwave pings and he sits down to eat it, all the time ignoring pages from work and the ringing phone, but as he goes to eat it he sees his wardrobe and walks over to it. After performing a plethora of magic tricks he throws a blanket up in front of him and disappears. The camera hovers over the discarded blanket and all that is left of him is his pager, which bleeps one final time "WORK"  

One of my influences was the establishing shot of DISSAPEARED, it is level with the worktop but just adjacent to it as to create importance of the phone ringing (that is the first thing you hear before you see anything in the frame). I used a similar shot in my first scene where my character walks in and puts his keys down on the table which the camera is level with.

Film 3

Disregard - This short film is about stereotypes and how individuals can be forced down paths towards the very stereotypes people are tormenting them with. Their are three main characters, a white teenager with blond hair and blue eyes, an Arab teenager, and an Hispanic teenager. Through out the film you are shown the struggles of being someone who is having pills pushed at them instead of supportive conversations, someone who is constantly being called a terrorist or having those types of joke made about him, and some one who is being provided with no support from home. I loved the use of sound tracks towards the end of the film where they have all gone down these dark paths, one become a KKK type gang member, one joining the Islamic State, and one joining the Cartel where the music is played without any environmental sound e.g. footsteps and background noise like cars going past. I feel it really impacts on the audience and makes what is in the frame more significant that other shots without music.

Story Telling - SOFT trailer

https://youtu.be/gyv3_kNpnZw