…that inspired our world brainstorming exercise today.

I may or may not be sharing this for the sole purpose of showing the difference between using the flow chart and mind map methods.

Cued by the Ganz reading (p. 8), we watched the opening scenes of The Apartment (1960).

We discussed the big print, the tone set therein, and made some script-to-screen comparisons.

For those who were absent, or those wanting to read the whole script by I.A.L Diamond and Billy Wilder (and it’s a beauty), here’s a PDF.

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.

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.

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

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)

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Watch I’ll Wait For The Next One

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

What happens next?

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