Week 2 – L’Amour des trois oranges

No editing class on Monday morning (what’s new!) however those of us shooting the opera (Prokofiev’s ‘The Love for Three Oranges’) met up with Ray at nine to discuss times. So, in other words, I was forced to come in for nine in the morning (again!) to be told what I already knew. It’s good for me…

We learnt the basics of three-point lighting with Ray in the afternoon and were left to experiment ourselves with different set-ups which was both enjoyable and encouraging.
A unique and interesting exercise took up the bulk of our Screenwriting class on Tuesday. In essence a glorified version of the party game ‘Consequences’, it involved filling in one piece of information on twelve different story outlines and passing them on so that everyone was contributing to every story. What this did very well was highlight the importance of having a clear, strong internal character need or emotional flaw (i.e. theme) and a unique but useable external character goal. If these are well defined and interesting the rest of the story should flow relatively easily.

At lunchtime on Wednesday we had our first Production meeting highlighting the exciting plans for DFTV and TPA. All we really need is a fresh, inspiring idea for a short but challenging project that we could join forces to work on and allow some talent from both courses to collide. I’m still thinking…

Andy gave us a very detailed deconstruction of Coronation Street which was very enlightening as to how a miniature world is kept alive over such a period of time. What with Richard’s influence it’s rather easy to forget that there are other types of writing than film; and obviously writing for soaps (or Serial Drama) is very different.

We had a quick look at using Moodle, with Andy on Thursday morning and were officially given our assignment. I’m not much of a fan of Virtual Learning Environments, I’d much prefer to sit down and chat face-to-face but I suppose it is something I should make an effort to adapt to. We continued our classes on The History of Cinema by analysing the ‘Odessa Step Sequence’ in Battleship Potemkin and what amazed me most was how much I hadn’t noticed of how good the editing was on my first viewing simply because it is so similar to todays accepted method; a testament to Russian cinema of that time.

Later I had a tutorial with Adam about my TV Drama idea. All I really needed to know was; is it worth developing? I got the answer to that and much more so I can go ahead with confidence and try to make something of it.

Nosferatu, my first vampire film and my first taste of 1920s German cinema, was actually quite good fun. After all the warnings it turned out to be rather tame and, rather disappointingly, not scary. It seems to be a recurring problem with silent films that the score, towards the end, becomes wearying. Nosferatu was no exception and at one point I thought I would go mad because the score was so piercing and repetitive. Nevertheless there were some parts I enjoyed very much; like the scenes in Count Orlok’s castle, the shots of the schooner and the Count’s unfortunate resemblance to Mr Bean as he scampered hither and thither holding his coffin! Most impressive was the work done on production design with some staggering make-up, costumes and set-pieces.

Introduction to Production this week was all about considering what makes a good story. We watched a number of short films and afterwards simply questioned whether it was an interesting, worthwhile and compelling story. We have done essentially the same thing in almost all the other classes but it is very useful to approach this from a producing point of view and think whether a story is worth telling.

This week seemed to be dominated by opera. I had already organised to go and see the first performance with my dad on Friday night, before agreeing to shoot it which then of course required going to see it on Wednesday, and filming it on Thursday. So after seeing it three nights in a row I was officially opera-ed out (although it was very good) and ready to get back to good old films!