Adam Ganz’s 2013 Journal of Screenwriting piece “To make you see: Screenwriting, description and the ‘lens-based tradition'”, has probably been the most influential piece of reading thus far in the course  for gauging and evaluating my own pieces as well as others discussed in class as Ganz clearly defines “prosthetic visual perception”, in context to screenwriting as what we write in a screenplay and then what can we extract from the screenplay to add extra layers of depth through tone, visual choices, color gradients, etc.

Ganz cites 1960’s sardonic and comedic The Apartment as a key focal point in justifying how good screenplays and films guide audiences in such a way that they know exactly where to look within a shot and when.  “The writing selects and frames specific detail exactly as a camera does.” (Pg 8). As far as the readings for the semester so far have been, I think Ganz truly voices much of what it is our class are trying to ascertain at this point in time in terms of curating and unravelling the art of world building and establishment. From the screening of the opening sequence of this film in our class, each frame felt like it had true purpose in such a way that I personally believe has been lost in 21st century mainstream filmmaking, and to focus more specifically the dialogue of the film, to me at least, felt as if it had a level of fluidity, as if each sentence paired with the screen had this ebb and flow of pace that carried the film as a whole.

This reading and the film itself has already helped with my developmental practices of understanding what is and isn’t relevant on a screenplay as well as how to use dialogue and visual/audible/other developmental choices as an affinity of elements rather than taking the more segregated writing approach of doing one thing exclusively such as develop the world, then the script, then film it,
and then finally in post production find ways of melding the individual elements together to make it fit rather than taking the evidently smarter approach of considering earlier in the pre-production stages how each decision will influence choices made in future stages. To give an example, considering how a certain sentence of dialogue will appear on screen based on the tone, the shot itself and the context rather than writing it and then while filming finding ways to make it work.

Out of the lens based writing archtypes proposed by Ganz consisting of: (Prosthetic, Historic, Analytic, Aesthetic, Diachronic, Scopophilic), I believe that for my final assessment tasks I will lend heavily to Aesthetic, which Ganz outlines as “viewing and framing simultaneously” (p. 10) as well as Diachronic; “observing how things change over time” . This evidently shows I will probably take a much more methodical approach to my writing process then peers which will be interesting to evaluate retrospectively in terms of how it affected my final product and how it may influence my piece from a negative and positive perspective.

Achieved through actual actors and a built set, this shot was a clear standout from the film The Apartment (1960) from a sheer visual perspective but how one shot clearly defined many different aspects of the world of the narrative.

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The past 4 weeks have seen us undertake a series of writing exercises to further progress existing ideas to help fully realise their narrative potential. Expanding upon the group exercise assigned in Week 2 of creating a narrative out of still frames,  as our class we were tasked with writing screenplays based on the work we had produced. At this point in time I was not as aware of the expectation in screenplay writing to be concise and to the point during the writing process and thus the examples provided below do have faults in their overall design, however in becoming aware of this I have already began to improve my quality of screenwriting and after Week 4’s reviewing the screenplay of Pixar’s animated film Up (specifically the opening sequence), it has become clearer to me as to how to condense the amount of words in a screenplay to the point where only relevant information should be listed, and that all other aesthetic and more subtle nuances should be realised during later stages of production.

This piece pairs well with the first as not only is it a variation of the same exercise but it also suffered from the same issues of overly descriptive visual imagery, while I do believe this is important in establishing the world, procedurally I have not necessarily being doing the wrong thing but moreso doing it at the wrong time of the inception process of the idea, and should be doing it later in development. Descriptive language will clearly be a key part of designing and exploring the worlds we construct in future assignments and it will be good to use these skills in a more relevant area but from what I have learned through these exercises I should focus more on the concise language and singular words that convey more information.

“Less is more”

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“I always find that if two (or more) of us throw ideas backwards and forwards I get to more interesting and original places than I could have ever have gotten to on my own” (Cleese, John 1991 A lecture on creativity, https://vimeo.com/18913413 –  27:20mins).

Collaboration is a centric element in developing and reevaluating the quality of any project. Having undertaken many group based tasks already in our classes through the semester thus far, it has been evident to me the extent of how much an idea can develop and change when multiple parties are contributing. The key example from this semester thus far being our single shot narratives completed in Week 2. With the time constraint of an hour to conceive and execute our idea, my group consisting of Ella, Andrew and I began walking around the northern side of the campus in search for visual prompts or inspiration to spark an idea. Initially we planned on creating a sketch based vignette of a teacher and student where the student was the only member of the class to show up and the teacher. Based on time and visual constraints this seemed to be an easy achievement however given the extroverted nature of all of our group members we found no issue in elevating the situation further and further, proposing that “the teacher isn’t even there” , or that “the student and teacher are in different classrooms and we mislead the viewers through changing context”. This environment of us spitballing ideas created a formulation process which retrospectively after we concluded on our final idea it was completely foreign to what we initially had.

Relating this back to John Cleese’s quote from “A lecture on creativity”, it is undeniable that everyone has their own ideas and styles but through amalgamating many parties ideas together, or using multiple people/groups to help develop or create something there is a level of mutative originality that cannot be conceived by any one member on their own. In the case of our project “The Emergency”, I believe that each one of our members  retained some elements of their own originally conceived ideas but they amalgamated with others to produce the final project. Thankfully this all appeared to be quite an organic process with no unsatisfactory compromises which can be a potentially detrimental occurrence in group tasks.

Applying Cleese’s notion of creativity through collaboration, I will actively seek peer reviews and advice moving forward into the semester as even in individual assignments Cleese’s quote holds merit as even things as simple as constructive criticism or ways of improving upon an existing idea to open pathways otherwise obstructed to any one author of a creative work.

I conclude by providing another John Cleese presentation on Collaborative Synergies. While this piece focusing more directly on Business and Marketing based work, it explores the notion of collaboration further through exploring inefficiencies and redundancies in collaborative projects should members be working simultaneously on different areas without contact, a key area of collaboration that can hinder the potential of projects.

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