Week #7 – Visual Cliches and Critiques

Week 7 has been about critiquing screenplays and audiovisual storytelling.

Unfortunately I was absent on Monday because I was a sicky 🙁

I had a go at the set homework: read the student scripts, make some notes/revisions and bring in work for the final project.

On Wednesday we looked at the notion of visual cliches as a mode of getting out our crappy ideas.

In groups we went out and filmed our own visual cliches and then presented them to the class.

We then looked at the chapter reading ‘Death by Visual Cliche’ by Peterson and Nicolosi titled Notes to Screenwriters: Advancing Your Story, Screenplay, and Career with Whatever Hollywood Throws at You Michael Weise Productions, Studio City.

We didn’t find any overlapping cliche examples between the text’s and ours. Ultimately, visual cliches can be used as shortcuts to convey/infer inner thought. They often save exposition time and are quick way to get from A to B. We disagreed with some of the examples in the reading like: a character stares at (anything).

We then relooked at the student scripts with the no dialogue brief from Monday. An important note from script #1 was taken from the mime urine scene – character knows, does the reader know, is this the same? Stayci said: Unless it is something the audience needs to know, the audience can find out with the characters. Who knows, who needs to know? When is the best time to reveal?

This is a super gold nugget for my ideas around my own screenplay as there will be some reveal content that will need to be delivered at the right time.