FORMING IMAGES/SPACES/IDEAS USING REFINED, INTERACTING ELEMENTS:
I want to briefly return to a previous blog’s topic about film being form and consisting of a multitude of interacting elements, each individually honed.
I’m also doing a sound design subject, and this is the same concept when we build a sound design – we try to create a spacial dimension by first refining individual elements and then combining and interacting these elements.
This is the same concept for when we write. We try to create a picture or convey an idea using words and grammar – little building blocks of ideas. We use these tools in the best way we can to create our desired image or meaning. (It’s a mark of my lacking skill as a writer that I end up using so many words when attempting to convey my own ideas – e.g. see my Slumdog Millionaire scene deconstruction. That weakness in my writing presents itself more than ever in these blog posts, perhaps because I write them for myself more than other people and this excessive wording is a way of brainstorming. It helps me develop my thoughts, rather than clarify them for other people.)
Sometimes images become too noisy in our attempt to convey their colours and textures to our desired audience. It can become too busy and lose its power if you cloud it with too many elements (unless that was the intention). Just like a sound design will become a less sensational spacial dimension if we crowd it with too many sounds (unless that was the purpose), rather than if the sounds are carefully elected and honed and weaved in.
LOOKING WIDER & DEEPER INTO FILMMAKING
SCIENCE & HISTORY – LIGHT, SOUND, AND STORYTELLING:
I’ve always wanted to look at filmmaking as deeply as possible. The better you understand it, the further you can take it. I’ve always wanted to understand it on a scientific level – for example, the physics of light and sound, because I’ve often felt like that’s an area that we filmmakers take for granted. I’m currently watching a science-focused television series called Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Yep, it’s pretty much what it sounds like. It goes through what we know (well, what we think we know) about the beginning of the universe through to the current day. Among a ton of completely fascinating subjects, it looks at space and time, and at light and sound. These directly relate to cinema. It even delves into the evolution of the anatomical eye. In detail. It also recounts the history of the first man-made lens and movie camera. It details the spectrum of colour and how we perceive it. And it talks about all of this on a molecular level. There is nothing more exciting to me than this right now. I’ve been so inspired by this series. It is, I must say, quite a theatrical series. But science is theatrical. Science is essentially magic. Nothing can ever be proven right, it can only ever be supported. So, what we take for granted may be dead wrong. Our understanding of the world is not set. What we think is normal today could be challenged tomorrow. We’ve just been conditioned to accept things as logical. But so much is unexplained and doesn’t make sense. For example, gravity. Like most of science, it’s pretty much magic (I mean this in the best way!). It’s an absurdly random concept. And it’s basically the reason behind everything. Movement is the key to everything. It’s magic. We owe everything to the magic of particle movement. You can see why I love the idea of movies.
Sight and sound is magic. It’s luck that we can see and hear. That we can recognise photon variations and sound particle variations. Just imagine all of the other things out there that we cannot yet recognise. We already know of many different kinds of light that our eyes can’t pick up. And of many different types of sound that we can’t sense. I’m sure there are completely different levels of the world that we can’t recognise, because we haven’t been lucky enough to develop a mutation that happens to be inclined towards one of these perceptions. Or we might have, but natural selection hasn’t rendered it relevant. We can use technology to detect things for us though. For example, the neutrino. The possibilities are endless. The world is magic. What we can perceive of it is chance luck.
What is amazing is our manipulation of it all – our manipulation of what we can perceive of the world’s existing levels – to create cinema. And cinema is magic. Imagination is the key property that science and cinema share.
I’ve also been recently inspired by Geoffrey Blainey’s book, A Short History of the World (it’s a brilliant book and I fully recommend it). I never did history at school, and there were so many blank areas I wanted to (and still want to) fill in. But, more so, my motivation to read it was writing-related. My reasoning is that all stories are derived from and inspired by experiences. And the biggest story in the world is history. Most of us unwisely accept history as fact. We trust it as law without hesitation or question. We completely and utterly believe in it. Why not learn from the most successful story in the world?