Week #6 – A Beginner’s Recipe for Audiovisual Stories
This week was all about cracking down to the core of audiovisual stories, well, trying to anyway. We started summing up all our findings and observations we’ve accumulated so far, and also began thinking about ideas for our very own audiovisual screenplays.
On Monday we were commissioned another open minded writing exercise, whereby the person to the left is to supply a random word. From here we go down a rabbit hole of 15 related words and then pluck out one of those, then from there another rabbit hole and another 10 related words. Of these, 3 are to be plucked out to use in a 500 word story with a beginning, middle and end.
here’s me giving it a red hot go:
1st word: Hound
15 related words:
Dog
Puppy
Elvis
Paws
Wild
Animal
Fur
Collar
Walk
Park
Fetch
Grass
Cute
Spotty
Lazy
2nd word: Wild
10 related words:
Untamed
Crazy
Jungle
Forest
Amazon
Animal
Heathcliff
Uno
Beast
Dream
3 CHOSEN WORDS:
Beast
Jungle
Heathcliff
Here is my jungle warped unfinished Wuthering Heights spinoff:
The jungle lay still. The trees did not breath a whisper of wind and sunlight danced in the gaps between branches. Heathcliff peeks out from behind a tall tree trunk. The beast roars and the leaves vibrate subtlety. He is distant. Heathcliff grabs Cathy and pushes her into the cobwebbed hollow tree trunk. ‘Be quiet, its safest here in plain sight’. He buries himself in the foliage debris, he is dirty enough to chameleon into the forest floor. The beast’s feet pound the ground, becoming louder and louder as he approaches/gets closer. Each step is as slow and heavy as the last. Cathy inhales deeply and audibly preparing for his passing. measuring her breath carefully to his thump step. The beast …
To finish off we watched an excerpt from Better Call Saul demonstrating a solo moment whereby the character’s personal/individual moments are telling a visual story, hence what we see/hear of their reactions contribute to story greatly.
On Wednesday we toyed with this idea in crafting our own solo scene, but first, we speed dated!! I ran through many different ideas but still cannot settle on the one.
We then began manifesting our list of audiovisual principles, guidelines, elements, considerations, practical applications, tools, conventions, contexts, etc. and how this plays out on screen and on the page.
magic recipe google doc: AVST GUIDELINES