Week 5 - Show Don't Tell

Joy! Editing at last. In fact a whole day of it. In the morning we looked at how to make a DVD (something which once took me a long sleepless night to achieve but now I can do in five minutes) and in the afternoon we were given some fourth year footage to mess about with and compile a scene. I wasn’t too impressed with the quality of the filming or the writing to be honest but the acting was pretty good.

In Screenwriting we were concerned with Visual Storytelling which turned out to be a sort of theme for the week. In the new three minute scripts we are working on the key is to communicate the story as simply and visually as possible, with little or no dialogue and Andy had asked us to think about how dialogue changed cinema for this week also. When I imagine scenes in films I am writing I tend to think in terms of characters speaking to each other, rather than how it could be told visually. The trick is knowing when it is appropriate to tell something visually and when it is in fact necessary for the characters to ‘talk’.

Another Production Meeting on Wednesday, where I took the opportunity to pitch an idea which was relatively well received. It’s rather ironic that we call it a collaborative opportunity but as long as we sit there reminding each other that “no-one is in charge, it’s collaborative” nothing ever gets done. However we managed to make some decisions and I am really excited about what I can learn from my group and what we might be able to achieve together. It inspires people from both programmes to explore their own potential in order to impress others and achieve greater things for and with the group. Personally I can’t wait until we can get started on something and test our own abilities.

Wednesday was the big debate on whether Sound ruined cinema. Come to think of it an actual debate, like the Democrat/Republican debate we did for Screenwriting, might have been a more engaging method of replacing the essay which would normally have been assigned at this point. As it turned out that is kind of what we did as a class, except that no-one was really on any particular side. We did however, seem to conclude that Sound has not ruined cinema and it was a necessary development, though not as necessary as editing. It seems to me, particularly when reading a screenplay, that good dialogue can in fact speed up the story much more effectively than visuals can. I have heard that script readers will often skip over huge passages of action and read the dialogue instead; so it is an important tool to master. Andy casually mentioned afterwards that the debate had been an assessment and that we’d all passed, which was rather relieving. The rest of the class was spent moodling away in our groups in preparation for the closing date of our Marketing Assignment.

On Thursday morning we had group tutorials with Andy to ensure we were all happy with our assignments, which we were. Following this we spent almost three hours completing our summative statement and posting it onto Moodle which definitely should not have taken so long. However I think it is fair to lay the blame on the distraction caused by the location – we were attempting to do it in the Production Office – and a certain person, who I shan’t reveal (*cough* Steven Ferguson *cough*).

There’s nothing like a good musical to brighten the spirit on a Friday morning. Singin’ in the Rain was a fantastic display of movie magic combined with Vaudeville energy and American sentiment. I confess I thoroughly enjoyed every toe-tapping, knee-slapping, finger-snapping moment of it and of course, before I run away with my emotions on the subject, it was also a brilliant film technically. I was slightly worried to begin with that it would be about Don Lockwood’s rise to fame but the flashback turned out to be, instead, only a short funny sequence which set the tone and propelled the movie on its way. I did notice that for a musical there was a relatively small number of songs and a good deal of story. Unfortunately with many more modern musicals it is the other way round and the songs slow the plot with painful predictability. In Singin’ in the Rain they were woven quite neatly into the story and I never found myself thinking, “Oh no, here comes another song”. Ultimately it was a fine feel-good film and it got me in the mood to do some dancing for Gavin and Charlotte’s music video later that day.

It’s hard to believe we’re half-way through the term already. Ah well, time flies when there is much fun being had.