Jack Fahey – s3382553
I think something that influenced how I will approach my future screenwriting tasks was something that was covered in week one of this course. When writing, my mind is always focused on the conventions we have been taught regarding screenwriting. Don’t use adjectives for example, or ensure that every description in the text can be represented visually, or try not to include any cinematography related notes etc
Reading through various screenplays and picking out what worked and what didn’t was largely helpful in terms of getting me to just write and leave conforming to the conventions later. I saw the texts such as Toy Story, Trainwreck, Thelma & Louise and others and each text had mistakes or clumsy writing occasionally. Or perhaps they used the wrong tense or too many adjectives. This showed me that its not such a stringent set of rules when screenwriting, but more a set of guidelines to best help you get your stories onto the paper.
These films were all hugely successful and the fact that they incorrectly used a tense in a scene description or used an adjective when they could have used a verb proves that the most important part of the writing is just that, the writing itself. Are you crafting a good story? Does it captivate your audience? Can the imagine the world you are creating? I know that this sounds easy to grasp and honestly self evident but one thing that was putting up somewhat of a mental roadblock was the act of making sure that every single word I used was precise and necessary. Making sure every single verb was in the right tense, making sure adjectives where used sparingly, if at all. And while its good practice for screenwriting, its also incredibly tedious and time consuming and it was getting in the way of me actually wanting to write. Now I just write and let it flow, and later on I can go back and edit and change things if they are completely out of line with the conventions.
Conversely, it also showed me what to look out for, and what pitfalls there could be. For example, how to pin point when you have written something as an inactive action, or how to write freely but ensure that while you do so, you aren’t writing anything that cannot be represented visually on film (probably the hardest one for me, since most of my prior writing is in book form). One example of this is from Frozen River. The description “Ray Hears it” doesn’t strictly work within the conventions of a screenplay because it draws the audience out of the screenplay. How do we know Ray hears it? How do you visually represent that? If the audience has to start thinking those things, then that means they are actively adding to the text and are very aware of what they are reading. And since, as we’ve discussed several times in class, the big task of screenwriting is to immerse the audience fully into the text and to get them to explore the text as an audio-visual experience, anything that draws them out of that immersion should be cut or re-written.
Two children yell at each other as they dart around the room. Rinaldo, slumped in a large, worn leather chair, hangs a cigarette over an ashtray with one hand. The other, pushes through the little hair that remains on his head. He tilts his head back, closes his eyes and presses the cigarette to his lips. Filling his lungs, he then exhales a grey cloud of smoke into the room. He slams his fist down onto the arm rest.
The children, eyes wide, flee the room. Rinaldo glances at a photograph across the room, a picture of his wife. He sighs, heaves his body up from the chair and ambles towards his childrens room, picking up a football along the way.
This is a very short piece of screenwriting I completed in class a few weeks ago. The goal of the piece was to take a poorly written introduction to a scene, and then rework it using the conventions we have learned about, such as using the correct tense, trying to avoid adjectives, keeping the writing succint etc.
What Works?
I think in terms of painting a picture of Rinaldo it does very well. The first two sentences describing him are the strongest in the whole piece my opinion. I think that you get a very clear sense of the kind of man he is. Obviously worn out from balancing his work and home life tenuously and somewhere around middle age because of his thinning hair and not the healthiest of men represented in his smoking habit. And while he is clearly upset with his children for creating so much noise, he eventually goes to play soccer with them.
This part “Rinaldo glances at a photograph across the room, a picture of his wife. He sighs, heaves his body up from the chair and ambles towards his childrens room, picking up a football along the way.” I thought was quite strong too. Its trying to hint at the loss of his wife prompting him to put in the extra effort for his children like she would have had she still been there. An important aspect of the exercise prompt was to capture his “guilt” at him not being the best father he could be. I tried to do this above by implying his wife had passed, and perhaps I could have done something extra here but I think it adequately represents his guilt when he sees his wife, and realises that perhaps he could be doing better for his kids even though he is tired from work.
What Could be Improved?
Firstly, I think perhaps the children could have been better described in a different piece. To be fair, I didn’t really see them as all that integral to this particular seen other than just representing what Rinaldo is neglecting. But in a longer form film you would obviously need to describe them further if this was an introductory scene.
I also thought that this sentence was … somewhat clumsy “Filling his lungs, he then exhales a grey cloud of smoke into the room.” I just couldn’t think of a better way to phrase it in the right tense at the time. Something like “He draws air deep into his lungs, then exhals a grey cloud of smoke into the room” might have been a better way to write it for example.
Lastly, as touched on before, there might have needed to be something more about the wife or lack thereof, although I do like the ambiguity it leaves. In a short exercise like this it doesn’t really tell you everything you need to know, but perhaps thats alright. I had imagined that, in a longer form, the film/short film etc would go on to explain the loss of his wife and why he was raising his two children alone.
Scholar of Cinema Chris Dzialo wrote that “screenplays should be experienced […] as a form of cinema itself” whereby “both, although via opposite polarities, are audio-visual (the screenplay cueing the images and sounds in our mind)” (2009, p. 109)
In this quote he is at surface level making a statement that sounds counter-intuitive. How can a written text exist as a piece of audio-visual storytelling? But that is what makes the form of screenwriting so unique. Unlike other writing, its entire purpose is to become a film and so it must communicate the audio-visual elements of the work to its audience (Ingolstrom, 2014). There are many rules in screenwriting texts, such as having separate sections for directions and lines, setting each scene in the mind of the reader, using as few words as necessary to keep the reader engaged when describing a character or scene etc in order to fully immerse the audience in the text. This is why a screenplay is similar to that of a film, because it should be experienced in much the same way. The Audience should be able to, just from the words on the page, relatively accurately imagine each scene visually in their mind.
This is the biggest challenge in screenwriting, in my opinion. Its one thing to craft a story, but it is another to use a form so devoid of sound or image as text to represent such an audio-visual medium like cinema. A screenwriting needs to, often using as few words as possible to ensure that the reader isn’t drawn out of the experience, continually focus the readers mind within the world, while also cueing to them what sounds they might be hearing, what they are seeing, which characters are nearby, the setting, the tone etc etc. All of this needs to be clear in an reader’s mind because, at the end of the day, if the audience cannot imagine the film while reading the screenplay, the text has ultimately failed its main goal of becoming a film, as naturally it would be unwise for a producer or directer etc to convert a text to cinema that they aren’t fully engaged in.
So I think the main crux of what Dzialo was trying to get to was that screenplays are an incredibly unique form. As although they exist entirely on the page in written word, the most important thing that they do is create a world full of images and sounds that captivate the audience and lead them through the story. If a screenplays ultimate goal is to become film, then its initial purpose is to create an imaginary world immediately in the readers mind, because once the audience can fully realise the visual and audio elements within the film, it is much easier for them to harness that initial imaginary film and begin forming it into a real one.
Reference:
Ingolstrom, A 2014, “Narrating Voices in the Screenplay text: How the Writer can Direct the Reader’s Visualisations of the potential film”, in Screenwriters and Screenwriting: Putting Practice into Context, Craig Batty (ed.) Polgrave Macmillan, New York
Dzialo, C 2009, ‘“Frustrated Time” narration: the screenplays of Charlie Kaufman’, in W Buckland (ed.), Puzzle films: complex storytelling in contemporary cinema, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, pp. 107-28.
The prompt I have chosen is “I learned something in the studio that highlighted my previous experience/lack of previous experience with screenwriting”
The reading for week one by Mckee on description enlightened me on the topic of camera / cinematography related directions within a script (which I later learned, in week two, was a part of the extrafictional voice). I had only ever written scripts for things that I intended to shoot/direct, so including camera directions or notes made sense to me and seemed logical within that context. However Mckee argues that this sort of writing has no place in a screenplay, as it takes the intended reader out of the narrative and reminds them that they are reading a script. This, Mckee says, is because a director would “laugh at” the screenwriter telling them what techniques to use. Mckee even goes so far as to say that a writer should “Eliminate all camera and editing notations.”
I’ve learned that a better way to properly convey film and cinematographic techniques to the intended reader is to simply describe the scene in a way that paints a vivid scene in the readers mind. For example, rather than explicitly stating “close up on X’s hands” one could simply write “X plays with his / her wedding ring”. This obviously means that there will need to be a close up of the hand, without actually stating any sort of camera movement. Not only will this be less likely to come off as telling a director how to do their job, but it also flows better and creates a better image in the mind of the reader.
So with project brief 4 submitted and finished, I think this is probably the strongest of the three works I’ve handed in so far. Obviously as a whole having a group creating one piece rather than the other two projects which were individual, it would be expected to be that way. But even just my contribution to this piece is better than anything I had done previously in my opinion in terms of the editing aspects. I’m much more comfortable editing audio, even though I’d never used audition, I do have some experience in editing music and creating music in FL studio and a little in audacity. Some of the principles were similar which helped a lot.
What Worked?
From a broad standpoint, I think the overall structure worked really well. We were originally just sort of going to do various scenes with no link other than the thematic “attention” and social media/multitasking. However, what originally begun organically as an easier way to bridge two of the scenes, became the entire format of the whole project. It became a “day in the life” sort of piece where every scene had a sort of chronological order and a physical relation to each other. I think that this gave the piece a much more coherent feel, and each scene flowed well from one to the next.
Another broad part that worked really well was the bookends in my opinion. Have it begin and end both in the car in similar ways pulled it together and made the piece feel congruent in my opinion. I think having the second car scene also made the audience comfortable. They heard that same sounds of getting into the car and starting up the engine and thought, oh we’ve heard this before we know whats coming. Then there was music the second time, which would slightly alter what they were expecting. Before they have time to properly think through what was different the phone rand and everything got tuned out, then of course the ending snaps them out from focusing on the phone. I think its a powerful way to end the project.
What Could have been Better?
Firstly, I think some of the links could have been a little better. Specifically the narrated pieces. Perhaps its because it is my voice, but I just don’t think that they worked. I felt like it pulled the listener out of the moment slightly, and it gave it somewhat of a formal feel which was a little at odds with the rest of the piece from my perspective. I think finding a way to merge the scenes more coherently such as the time lapses or physically bringing the audience on a journey from one location to the next as we did in the other “linking” segments would have worked better had we had enough time to do so/been able to think of a better way to link.
More generally, I think I the piece could have done with one more scene. Its hard to explain exactly why, but the pacing feels a little off to me. We originally wanted to have a third car scene in the middle of the project, but felt that there wasn’t enough content in between the three car scenes and that if there were three car scenes, it would have been too centred around those and the others seemed a bit peripheral. If we had another strong scene to add in, we could have also had the car scene and I think that would have made the piece flow a little better.
What themes from class did it touch on?
I think the big things that we drew from the classes were two fold. Firstly the technical aspects. None of us really had a whole lot of experience in working on these projects. I had worked on music before, but making songs and making soundscapes are completely different animals. All the work we did in the lectures really enabled us to use audition to a standard I was proud of. I’m very happy with how the piece turned out from a technical stand point.
The other big thing that I drew on when throwing out ideas in the group and formulating the structure was the piece we listened to in class about transgender people in Thailand. Not so much content wise, but structurally. That piece gave me the idea to have separate scenes and jump from one thing to the next centred around one theme. That idea basically evolved into (with input from the rest of the group) what we finished up with.
What are the Affordances of working with Audio?
I think its a little easier to get the audience to be involved in the action. Having a pair of headphones on, you are sort of automatically in surround sound/first person in regards to whats happening. The sounds are all around you and its quite easy to get the audience to feel as though they are there if you use the right tracks. Its more difficult if you want a hyper realistic feeling, but thats not what we were going for, so in terms of a slight abstract feel and just trying to get the audience to “feel” the space we were creating, I felt like it was a simpler task to do that with audio rather than video.
Its also just a lot easier to get recordings. You don’t need to go to lots of different locations to do all your lines. You can just record all your background noises, and then try to get the rest in one or two sittings in a studio. With video you need to get all the lines right on location so it looks good. With sound however that isn’t required.
What Have I Learned?
Well I think technically I’m a lot better than where I started from. If I’m required to make an audio piece in the future I’ll be very comfortable if I’m given the appropriate time to do so.
Im also really interested in podcasting, and I think this was a great first step into that world. I sort of thought of podcasting as a strictly dialogue driven medium, but this project has completely broken that misconception and now I feel like I can do some really interesting, different things in a podcast studio/edit room.
Something that intrigued me while listening to Dr Lobato’s lecture, was the vast number of households/people (specifically in younger demographics) who relied solely on Netflix for watching television. I was thinking that these people may have a limited access to both local and national/international news outlets.
Once someone gets a bit older, they can find out what is happened for themselves around the world without the help of television through newspapers, magazines or probably most easily through the internet. However the internet has no standards like television, anyone can post anything to the internet. And two competing sources or articles posted to facebook will look identical to a reader who isn’t sure which one is backed up with evidence or correct and which one may be completely incorrect/biased etc. For this reason, gathering news from the internet as an adult requires faculties of reason, logic and the ability to discern fact from fabrication. Most people have this ability in at least a rudimentary form. Younger people however (I’m thinking the ages of like mid teens and below) generally haven’t formed the strongest ability to do this, and the younger you get the less able they are.
I think that perhaps children who do not ever watch television (and so don’t watch across televised news programs as streaming services like netflix and hulu don’t have them) will come across their news from sources that may be extremely unreliable, and may even be detrimental to their ability to reason.
Another problem is simply the access to the news. Thinking back to when I was in my early teens, the only time I ever saw the news (and the same was true for most of my friends) was on news shows in between programs I wanted to watch. There was no fast forward like on netflix so I just had to wait until it ended. This at least peripherally exposed younger people to the news and what was happening around the world. I have the feeling that younger people don’t actively search out for the news (on the whole) and so this may lead to an ill-informed generation in terms of global knowledge even though the access to knowledge is higher than ever before.
Jon suggested we take a listen to “The Truth” podcast, as it would give us an insight into how to effectively create sound scapes that rely on little dialogue. I listened to the first couple of episodes, and took a lot from it, specifically about hyper realistic sounds and how to make the audience feel like they are in the location. We decided to give our soundscapes a somewhat looser feel, not focusing on complete realism but just trying to put the listener in places they don’t expect, and trying to give them a certain feeling or mood rather than make them feel like they are exactly in the moment
Jon Gave us some great feedback on how to focus on this looser, more surreal feeling rather than complete realism. For example the ambience within the car – where are the ears in relation to the objects making noise? Did we want to make it exactly how it would be in real life, or make everything varying levels of noise to create the feeling and push our message across, rather than feeling hyper realistic. We opted for the latter.
He also gave us a few ideas for other scenarioes such as
Crossing the road with headphones.
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Music – honk pulls you out of the music.
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putting on headphones.
Guest lecturer Dr Ramon Lobato – week 11
Television, Streaming & Audience Fragmentation
The definition of TV as a system is shifting atm with the influx of self produced shows and rise in SVOD popularity
Hours of Broadcast TV – 2.7
Hours of Online Video viewing – 0.5
Devices per household – 6.4
Households subscribed to netflix – 25%
TV in Australia
1977 there were 4 channels on free to air.
1997 there were 5 free to air and 20 Pay TV options
2017 there are 30 free to air channels and 150 Pay TV
DVD/Bluray
Download
Streaming
IPTV
mobile
The Online TV Ecology
Catch Up
a channel on demand
eg iview
SVOD
curated catalogue
Netflix, Stan, Hulu etc
TVOD
paying per download
itunes, google play etc
PTV
ISPs version of foxtel
AVOD
youtube, facebook, twitter
Informal
illegal streaming/download sites
What Does this mean for Audiences?
The Marketplace of Alienation – James G Webster
Strong link between the history of television, the state and the nation.
used to address a vast portion of the nation at once in a controlled manner
that is no longer available with the mass audience of today, it is fragmented over various different forms of media streams
Personalisation has been a huge shift in media consumption. No longer does the audience all get exposed to the same television choices.
Netflix
Worlds largest SVOD service
125,000,000 hours of viewing per day
Operates in 190+ countries
100 million subscribers globally
US$41bil market cap; US$6.7bil revenue
Headquarters in Los Gatos, California
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Broadcast TV – Distraction |
Netflixv – Immersion |
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Over the airwaves |
Over the top/internet distributed |
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Schedule |
Curated Library |
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Flow |
On-Demand |
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Advertising Model |
Subscription model |
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Mass Marketing |
Niche Markets/personalised |
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Reliant on Hits |
Less reliant on hits |
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Sport, News, event TV |
Adult Drama, comedy, movies |
Global Netflix
Tracking the global roll-out of an internet TV platform
Netflix doesnt do well in India because of the lack of Indian Content
Europe is attempting to put a 20% European content quota on Netflix’s library in European markets
Kenya was critical of Netflix’s content and saw it as immoral
Netflix was blocked in Indonesia
The exercise for this week was to create a short Audio project in groups of 3-5 on the topic of attention.
With the audio we recorded, I decided to try and simulate what its like to try and have a conversation with someone while also texting on your phone. I used a heavy reverb to drown out the conversation while the texting was happening, then faded it back in after the text was sent.
In class we then spoke breifly about our assignments
Be experimental
This piece is not intended to be a report/scientific discussion. Do not need to quote the references or specifically duscuss them. Just use the information and draw upon what they say in a creative way to make the podcast interesting for the audience.