Cleese on Collaboration

A sketch of what a post responding to the first PB2 prompt might look like:

Intellegent words contextualised within my own practice…

Critical engagement with quote – e.g. Cleese should stick to funny walks; collaboration is the death of original ideas.

Reading for Week 4

Hi Another Worlders,

You have become victims of your own success – as you’ve offered such considered, intelligent and invigorating ideas to our discussions of ‘World’ you have a reading this week from a scholarly journal. It’s a discussion about screenwriting description.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts on how it relates to our activities of week 3 (giving words to visual worlds). We will briefly follow up on the scenes you wrote based on the photo story board exercise, so be sure to bring those too.

The article by Adam Ganz is this PDF.

But wait, there’s more:

For our Thursday class – our last in the phase of the studio called ‘Losing the Plot’ – please each bring an example of a visual, audio, or audio-visual world (for instance, a link to an online clip, a screen grab – whatever works) – to discuss before we move on to making our own.

 

Look forward to seeing you all next week!

 

Studio task allocations

As we know, each studio is required to DELIVER the following

  1. Regular studio updates
  2. A mediafactory studio website archiving the learning process and studio outcomes
  3. Produce and present an 8min presentation for delivery on Thursday 8th June

Each student’s contribution to these will be assessed as part of their Project Brief 4.

Everyone has signed up and it is now official:

FORTNIGHTLY UPDATE 1 (Week 2)

  • Isobell Roberts
  • Jamie Bolger
  • Matthew Kennedy
  • Riah Stanley

COMPLETED AND ALREADY AVAILABLE HERE and also HERE on the Media Studios Facebook page.

 

FORTNIGHTLY UPDATE 2 (Week 4)

  • Sam Glover
  • Andrew McGlade
  • Liam Morkham
  • Marco Holden Jeffery

FORTNIGHTLY UPDATE 3 (Week 6)

  • Olivia Staffieri
  • Dan Bowden
  • Alaine Thompson
  • Jen Farrow

FORTNIGHTLY UPDATE 4 (Week 8)

  • Farina Othman
  • Amy Hanley
  • Brydan Meredith
  • Luke Trivisonno

FORTNIGHTLY UPDATE 5 (Week 10)

  • Meg Doyle
  • Justin Luh
  • Vera Pavlovich
  • Matt Manning

SEND YOUR FORTNIGHTLY UPDATES TO ADMINS DANA, ED and MICHAEL for upload to the Another World exhibition blog.

8 minute PRESENTATION VIDEO (Week 14)

  • Alexander Angliss-Wilson
  • Ella Caulfield
  • Margaret Tanjutco
  • Alexandra Brundrett

Website archiving the learning process and studio outcomes (Week 14)

  • Dana Louey
  • Ed Wong
  • Michael Firus

 

 

 

TONE

Today our discussions led to a great observation: ‘depends what you mean by tone’.

What do we mean by tone?

Here’s what came up:

the attitude the piece takes

feeling

‘colour’ and ‘temperature’

type of resonance (and possibilities for extending on the musical metaphor implied by ‘tone’ more broadly)

mood (which could also lead to genre)

and

tone affects the way the WORLD is portrayed.

Based on this discussion, we each tried to come up with our own definition for ‘tone’.

Here’s one from Ed: “Tone is the culmination of sensory stimuli employed to extract a general feeling, attitude or emotion from an audience/consumer”.

And another from Michael: “The degree and nature by which aesthetic and narrative elements formulate an intended emotional and psychological affect in a viewer or reader in construction of a world”

And from Vera (in terms of the active process of considering tone): where the story world sits in the continuum of lightness and darkness

And from Stayci – Tone: the quality of the piece as denoted by attitude, feeling and mood.

 

Readings – Week 3

Hi everyone,

A screenplay this week (if you can’t read the whole thing – and I hope you can – please at least read up to the top of p. 22).

Consider it alongside this other reading on screenplay worlds (excerpt) – we’ve discussed a lot of these ideas already, but pay particular attention to those questions in the last paragraph when considering the assigned screenplay, and your own developing ideas.

 

Look forward to seeing you all again next week!

Writing and visual tasks Week 2

We discussed this quote: “It is characteristic of the vast majority of cities in the movies that they focus not on architecture per se, but on architecture as it affects, and is interpreted by, citizens” (Thomas 2003, p. 410).

You came up with some excellent and varied examples of where and how this quote might apply, including Brazil (1985), Thor (2011) – the more interesting for being set in a small town, fish-out-of-water works including the Borat films, Seinfeld (1989), Godzilla (various) – in terms of the environment more broadly, the superhero genre overall, likewise sci fi, esp Blade Runner (1982)… as well as one example of where the architecture is arbitrary (The Room 2003).

NB – you’ll see I have included the year with each screenwork. This is standard referencing practice that I encourage you to adopt in your blogging practice and assessments.

We watched a DVD special feature from Ray Donovan (2013) Season 3 called Los Angeles: The Third Character (see screenshot), and explored RMIT as our third character, making 5-9 frame photo storyboards in groups.

What makes a world?

Based upon your responses to the assigned texts, and your brainstorming around the elements you might want to consider when building a world (for a character derived from an earlier writing exercise or otherwise), here are some of the things you collectively came up with (an impressive list!). Thanks to Isabel for filling the gaps in my notes 🙂

cultures

political structures

setting (and, we agreed, this is a wide category in itself)

boundaries (which relates to setting and character backstories)

character backstory as tool for exploring limitations and responses to world >>> Boundaries of the world

rules (internal logic)

genre (which affects the way you present the world and also the rules of it)

social constructs

political structures

incentive

pressure/outside forces

scope of characters

problems e.g. post apocalyptic

Writing tasks Week 1

For if you weren’t in class, or to jog your memories:

Write down something that you like, then something that you hate. Add five reasons why you like it, five why you hate it. Now write five reasons why someone might like what you hate, and why someone might hate what you like. Who would these people be? What stories could they tell? (paraphrased from Waldeback, Z and Batty, C (2012) The Creative Screenwriter: Exercises to Expand Your Craft London: Methuen Drama, p. 20)

***

Watch I’ll Wait For The Next One

In groups, imagine this the first act/inciting incident of a longer work.

What happens next?

***