New Year. New subjects. New projects. New ideas.
I am terrifically excited for this new semester’s subject, Film-TV1, and I am just as terrifically frightened by it. No doubt this subject will be the most demanding and challenging of the four this semester – its workload alone practically rivals the workloads of the other three subjects combined – but I expect it to be the most inspiriting of all.
So this ‘test’ thing is asking for my goals and desires in this subject. Well, that’s a hard one. It’s a hard one because I’m a horrifically ambitious person. However, I don’t yet have the skills or resources (more emphasis on skills!) to achieve these ambitions. I also believe that it’s not at all conducive to learning. So I’m going to try very hard this semester to not let my goddamn destructively ambitious nature make this great opportunity an unpleasant experience! ;)
1. My main goal: I want to make a great film. Well, at least a good one. A different one (not cliché). In doing this, I want to improve in everything filmmaking – screenwriting, storyboarding, shooting scheduling, handling of technical equipment, editing, so on (and on and on and on).
I am particularly interested in learning more about writing for film. I not only hope to improve in my storytelling and screenwriting skills, but I also hope to develop a better understanding of how writing for film is different from writing for other media texts.
I am excited to collaborate with my classmates – some being my friends from last year who I know have a similar fascination with story and the screen. I don’t know what it will be like to work with everyone, but I hope that, in my team, there will be a shared passion for the project, as well as shared endurance to sustain the developmental process so that we can effectively work together and bring someone’s film idea onto the screen.
I really just want to make a good movie :)
2. One thing I found interesting in the lecture was Jasmine telling us that screenplays are not like real life because “real life is boring”. I’d never thought of screenplays in that way. I’d always thought of them as somewhat inspired by real life – which, of course, they are, but they are also larger than life. And they don’t work like real life. They defy the laws of real life! (Time, space, etc.) And they’re far more entertaining. (Well, the good screenplays are!) I was struck by that idea.
And then she called us God and instructed us to have bad things happen to our character to make them interesting. That was fun too.
(I also was struck by the idea presented in the lecture that a screenplay is not a finished artwork, it is a plan. Wow. Bam. I had not even thought of that before. That’s cool.)
I particularly connected with a couple of quotes about inspiration in the lecture slides:
“You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club” – Jack London (author)
“All art requires focus. Ten percent inspiration ninety percent perspiration.” – The 21st Century Screenplay, Linda Aronson
I’ve always half been a victim of the illusion that inspiration and art just ‘happens’. All of my work in anything has been along the lines of 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration, and I’d always thought that was abnormally unbalanced. But the recent years have taught me that it is necessary.
As for the first inspiration quote, I completely agree. Any time I’ve found inspiration, I’ve had to get myself into a certain mindset, usually an obsessive one. I remember when I was 16, and I thought of my Year 11 Media film idea at 3 or 4am in a panicked half-asleep state of consciousness, and I immediately ran into my parents’ bedroom and told my semi-conscious dad the idea (a homeless man gets somewhat rich from an empty tin can he finds on the ground). Late night / early morning ideas are a now common occurrence for me.
These holidays, I told myself that I wanted to think of an idea per day (because I had wanted to make a movie those holidays). I did not make a movie – I found work and made money instead – but I did think of an idea a day. At least. The difficult part was catching each and making a note of them. This was only able to happen because I inflicted upon myself a need to think of ideas. I think I currently have about seven ideas that I really I want to put on the screen at some point in the future – when I’ve got the skills and resources to do a good job.
I read all of the readings for Week 1. Huzzah. The reflective writing piece was surprisingly interesting, and, as expected, I greatly enjoyed the Writing the short film piece. The screenplay, “Vincent”, was fantastic!!!
But I’m going to talk about the other two readings.
3. The Getting an idea reading mentions that we should consider which medium is best for our story. It’s interesting to think of a story in the sense of how it is best told – print, song, stage, film? A good point is made in the reading that “the content of a story told on film will be shaped by the medium itself”. Video, being a time-based medium, will not include every detail in a story that perhaps its novel includes. But, at the same time, it adds details in terms of audiovisual techniques – camera movement, lighting, sound, etc.
The reading also discusses different ways to generate ideas, saying that “an idea could start almost anywhere”. I really related to this. All of my ideas have been inspired by different things. Most happened out of the blue, probably influenced by something subconsciously. One was brought on by a hilarious article that I could so clearly imagine being voice over. Another was brought on because I was obsessed with a scene in a movie, and watched it over and over throughout the year, and I desperately wanted to make a similar scene simply to try out the captivating stylistic techniques. And after a long time, I thought of a story worthy of those stylistic techniques. Others have been brought on by pure fascination with another world. For example, homelessness. However, it was not just the world that was so fascinating, but some different angle of looking at it that made it worthy of a story. For example, the freedom in homelessness, or the strangeness of routine conversation for an autistic person.
I know I’m only supposed to talk about one reading, but I want to mention a part in the Narratives reading that caught my attention. This was the ‘activity’ to identify narrative roles in a favourite fictional media text and then watch a non-fiction form for a way that media language attributes narrative roles to construct characters. The example given was the news – a disease or natural disaster is often constructed in dramatic, “villainous” terms. So, the news sort of identifies antagonists and protagonists and makes stories too. This got me thinking. Story is like a universal language. It is an unbeatable tool for communication. The news uses story techniques to present its issues because the world speaks story (and always has). People are more likely to listen to and understand stories than anything else.