Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules for writing a short story

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Good advice for film makers I reckon. 

Project 13: Non-diegetic sound

Diegetic is sometimes known as ‘source music’ and non-diegetic as ‘scored music’.  Some directors use it as more than just a pleasant accompaniment. Tarantino movies are legendary for their soundtracks and it is hard to imagine the spaghetti westerns without Morricone.  Films such as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing who how much it can add to the richness of the experience.  The warring cultures are characterized by their musical preferences.   Music often gives clues to neighbourhoods or class stereotypes or ethnic groups.

Intentional confusion of diegetic and non-diegetic

• Barton Fink – a violin confused with the sound of a mosquito. This is a great film to explore for sound generally – good write-up on this here:  http://offscreen.com/view/barnes_bartonfink 
• In Bladerunner the piano scene mixes playing with a jazz soundtrack and the film also uses narration to add atmosphere
• The Pippin’s song sequence in Lord of the Rings mixes diegetic sounds from two scenes with a diegetic song and then a score to create a powerful sequence conveying the sadness of war and the unpleasantness of Denethor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45WXQZ8-tPc

Sound that is hard to identify as either diegetic or non-diegetic

• In There Will Be Blood, when the oil gusher explodes and deafens the boy, we hear the rushing sounds and some gurgling. Tension is often created in the movie with the use of the Col Legno violin technique
• In Amour, we hear what we think a soundtrack until one of the characters turns off the radio and the music stops. This is a great way of giving the viewer a change of pace, some time to contemplate what is happening and then pulling them back into the story
• The opening of Atonement uses a typewriter sound to lead into the credits. It merges with the non-diegetic and sets a lovely pace to the movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMvRPs_mWD4

Music (non-diegetic) used to identify social and cultural references

• A friend suggested the brilliant scene from the Big Lebowski when Jesus is bowling and we hear Hotel California but by the Gypsy Kings
• Boyhood uses music throughout to underpin the narrative and help place the characters in time
• 8 Mile uses rap very effectively

Music and other non-diegetic sound used to create atmosphere, tension and emotion

• Up – some very mournful music accompanies the imagery showing the married life of Carl and Ellie.
• Miss Gulch on her bike in the Wizard of Oz, heading determinedly to collect Toto.
• There are thousands of examples in horror movies and thrillers.  People have commented for example that Woman in Black is only scary because of the music (and our imaginations, of course).

Non-diegetic sound that sets the pace of a scene

• Bee Gee’s Staying Alive for the opening sequence of Saturday Night Fever
• The obvious ones are Jaws and the shower scene in Psycho!
• The drumming in the chase scene in Memento – this starts as we realize that Guy Pearce is being chased
• The opening scene to the Apartment has Jack Lemmon narrating at a fast pace to set the scene of his daily grind. The musical score underpins this with a beat being added to match the movement of the machine on his desk, adding humour and energy.  This is called ‘mickey mousing’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_mousing

Non-diegetic sound that gives clues or cues to action

• Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries as a battle cry in Apocalypse Now:  http://www.metacafe.com/watch/mv-FjzJ/apocalypse_now_ride_of_the_valkyries/
• Lou Reed’s Perfect Day during Renton’s overdose in Trainspotting taps in to the euphoria of the drug hit but quickly becomes ironic as we see the horrific side of the addiction
• In the Long Goodbye, the theme song is placed in the background as supermarket muzak, leading us into the scene

Notes on sound

This is an interesting article on how best to use diegetic and non-diegetic music in films.  http://www.freestockmusic.com/2011/article/diegetic-non-diegetic/

The opening sequence of Welles’ Touch of Evil provides a good example of sound perspective.

In the 30s and 40s orchestral music was mainly used, sometimes with popular songs but rarely with singing as the disembodied voice was perhaps considered to be too distracting.  This was incorporated diegetically (often in the format of dreadful musicals). Things started to change in the 50s and 60s and now music is often a huge part of the filmic experience.

The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first successful feature film with sequences of synchronized sound and as always technology has had a great impact on how things developed. In the early days, cameras would have been restricted to a single spot and the story would rely on the dialogue.

Some directors (formalists) were hostile towards synchronous sound recordings and found them to cause problems with editing and continuity.

‘Stingers’ can represent a moment of shock or high emotion. Sometimes the term ‘sweetening’ is used.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetening

According to Louis Giannetti (Understanding Movies, Pearson, 2005), a popular theory of sound design in Hollywood is know colloquially as ‘see a god, hear a dog’ meaning that if a dog appears on screen, the audience will hear traditional dog sounds.

The new realism in sound meant that acting styles also became more natural and more subtle.  And people with great voices became stars.  In the 60s, directors also started preserving extraneous noises on soundtracks to provide more realism. Our brains select what we choose to hear but recording equipment cannot do that. Jean-Luc Godard was an exponent of this and used it as technique to underpin some of the themes in his movies (such as violence and lack of privacy or peace).

Sound effects can be atmospheric or a direct cue to meaning.  Pitch, tempo, volume affect our response to a noise.  Suspense scenes often use high-pitched noises.  Low-frequency feels more full and heavy, denoting solemnity.

Off-screen sounds can bring the off-screen space into play which can expand the image we are seeing.

Sound effects can also be symbolic such as heartbeats, clocks. Absolute silence can also be extremely powerful.  It is often used to convey a moment of death, sometimes in combination with slow motion.

Key learnings and considerations

Need to understand what the result should be in terms of the narrative or atmosphere rather than worry so much about the technical side (find an expert)

How will you orchestrate sound in each scene?

Will there be any distortion and if so, why?

Will there be any symbolism?

Any repeated motifs?

Decide if you are going to use non-diegetic - be aware of how impactful that can be!

Does the music represent class or culture?

Does it add to the characterisation or the narrative?

Interesting article about war photography

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/

"Not every gruesome photo reveals an important truth about conflict and combat. " This is true of course but different things resonate with different people.  The photographer in this case says that he could “see clearly how precious life was to this guy, because he was fighting for it. He was fighting to save his life to the very end, till he was completely burned up. He was trying to get out of that truck.”  

Being able to look at the face of death is surely more powerful for some than scenes of corpses which become almost abstract, so desensitised are we.

Useful tutorial - this is why the internet was invented!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrdkFXsr5Us

Review: Boyhood

Boyhood, (dir Richard Linklater, 2014) is a truly unique and wonderful film which, as many have already said, redefines the coming of age movie genre.

Nothing much happens by Hollywood standards but we go on an emotional rollercoaster with Mason and his family as if this were a documentary.  If it hadn't been for the casting of already famous Hawke and Arquette, it would have been hard to convince me that these were not real people.  The Truman Show without the deception.  And with obvious parallels with Michael Apted's "Up" series.

With the many universal truths throughout there is something for everyone to identify with - the "you are not my dad" moment, Mom saying "I thought there would be more", the spats between the siblings, all the pep-talks Mason is giving along the way, just the general awkwardness of families.

All the performances are subtle and perfectly in keeping with the low-key documentary feel. Ellar Coltrane particularly.  'Dad' is complex too - seemingly a bit of a loser at the beginning, he turns into an inspiring, supportive and fun father.  How did the adults manage to stay in character for 12 years?

Once you relax into the slow pace and enjoy all the ordinary moments portrayed, this is a joy to watch. The audience feels privileged to have access to this world and to get these intimates glimpses of life.

The genius for me - as someone who is trying to learn how to make films, albeit tiny ones - is how restrained Linklater would have had to have been. I can imagine it would have been so tempting to put in some deaths and high drama or to have tried to include more cultural references to place the segments in time.  The subtleties of the edit are truly remarkable too. One very poignant scene is when Mason is upset with his Dad because he has sold his car, rather than giving it to his son - as promised, allegedly. A conversation is referenced which we never saw or heard which reminds the audience what a vast number of memories and moments we collect over even a very short time on this planet.

There are some savage critics. Here is an excerpt from a review on IMDB:  

The film which is much too long follows an unstable family and focuses on the life of Mason, a character that has absolutely no interesting characteristics whatsoever. The intelligent viewer will be unable to connect with such a person. Mason walks through this film as if he was in a coma or half asleep; he has no ambitions. At some point he gets his first kiss, gets interested in photography (the ultimate art form for unimaginative lazy people) during high school (haven't we seen that already too many times?), goes to college at which point the film ends. I kid you not, this is the whole movie. The mother becomes a teacher at a local college and always seems to attract the wrong guys. The father is an unemployed loser who only talks about pop music and ends up being a square. Mason's sister (the director's daughter) grows up too and that's pretty much all you can say about her.

It is actually impossible to spoil this film because nothing happens (unless you consider the fact that Mason finishes high school a spoiler). Linklater completely fails to dramatize his ideas. As a result, following this movie feels like watching family home videos of a family you do not care about - just with better picture quality.

"photography (the ultimate art form for unimaginative lazy people)"??

I must confess I did feel it was a very long film and there were times that I was not as fully engaged as I would have liked. Partly I feel this is because we are so conditioned by the Hollywood machine to expect action or tragedy. I feared throughout the film that something devastating was going to happen - every time someone said 'take care' or 'driver carefully'. Not sure if this was deliberate or not or if I would have enjoyed the movie more or less if I had known the story.


A couple of bits of quite interesting trivia....

Richard Linklater cast his daughter Lorelei Linklater as Samantha because she was always singing and dancing around the house and wanted to be in his movies. At about the third or fourth year of filming, she lost interest and asked for her character to be killed off. Linklater refused, saying it was too violent for what he was planning (Lorelei eventually regained her enthusiasm and continued with the project).

The film began production as The Untitled 12 Year Project and then became titled 12 Years. When the film was finished, Richard Linklater changed the title to Boyhood, to avoid confusion with the similarly-titled, Academy Award-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013).

Assignment 3: creating meaning

This assignment is to create a short sequence that tells a basic story and conveys implied meaning.  It must be no longer than 90 seconds and must be based on one of the scenarios provided by OCA. The focus is on meaning – we are required to clearly describe the action or sequence of events and imply a second layer of meaning.

Key considerations

• Composition
• Mood
• Atmosphere
• Where the audience’s attention is focused
• Space on and off screen
• Assumptions audience will make

From a list provided by the OCA, I chose the scenario of somebody making a cup of tea with the implied meaning that they are suicidal.

There is not much of a script as such as there is no talking in the sequence. Instead I created a storyboard, an essential shot list so I could have flexibility with editing and an extras list. In the end I stuck fairly closely to the storyboard but did include a couple of shots from the ‘extras’ list. I also had to lose a lot of the footage from the essential list due to time constrictions.

Looking back I can now see that my essentials list was actually very simple:  show Sara feeling sad, alone, depressed and thoughtful; show her making tea; show some specific indications that she is contemplating suicide (i.e. the note and the bedroom door closing on the camera).

Originally I had contemplated adding more drama: having the actress sobbing; showing her rubbing her wrists as if thinking about slashing them – even filming some spilt milk near her upturned wrists but in the end I thought this would be too forced.

I obviously did not have time within the sequence to convey too much about the character or to paint a picture of depression, as Melancholia does so incredibly powerfully. There are also a number of remarkable films which tackle suicide in very different ways: Polisse, In Bruges, Breaking the Waves, Wristcutters, What Dreams May Come, 21 Grams, The Hours and A Single Man to name but a few.

Storyboards

The sequence

Evaluation of finished sequence

My approach was inspired by Andrea Arnold’s brilliant 2009 film, Fish Tank. Arnold managed to convey some grim situations, without the mise-en-scene always being bleak. I deliberately kept most of the shots light and airy and used the birdsong as a diegetic soundtrack.  Instead, I tried to use the space and composition to show the feelings of confinement and suicidal depression.  I was aiming for a bit of an Edward Hopper feel.  

I think the sequence works reasonably well.  The opening shots show the actress trapped against a grey wall and, later, when she is sitting on the floor, she’s small and isolated and confined by the lines of the kitchen units.  The turquoise/blue background denotes a sense of calm, almost coldness, as she has made her decision.  We don’t get to see much else of the world around but we do see her looking out of frame to suggest that she has big worries or concerns.

It was important to make sure the audience focused their attention on the actress enough to develop some sense of intimacy and empathy, hence the close-ups. I did not want these to feel too intrusive but did crop them tightly to enhance the sense of confinement.  This resulted in a couple of moments of Sara breaking the frame, which I would have preferred to avoid.

I think the contrasts of sounds work well – the contemplative birdsong and general street sounds, followed by the violence of the kettle and unpleasant scratchiness of the pen; then quiet contemplation followed by the sounds in the hallway and heavy clunk of the door shutting.  The final shot of the letter in the empty kitchen has simple birdsong and sounds of London so as not to be too heavy-handed. I thought about adding the subtle ticking of a clock but that may have skewed the implied meaning somewhat.

The sequence would probably have looked more professional if I’d had a medium shot of Sara with ‘look room’ followed by a shot of the tea or the letter, using the right lines of attention, and with corresponding look room. Also some shots were too soft – even if I was channeling Andrea Arnold!

Areas of marked improvement since my last assignment

• Communicating with my actors – I have developed a good sense of when they need very precise direction and when it can be a bit more improvised
• Storyboards and shot lists – this is absolutely essential. It also helps massively with continuity if it is properly thought through in advance.
• I am now much more confident with mixing together various sounds and atmos tracks

Areas to strengthen

• Much more practice with getting the focus right when using large apertures – also to experiment with more lenses and artificial (but natural-looking) lighting
• Be more careful with headroom and ECUs/breaking frame (need to take more time during shoots to play everything back and check it looks right on screen)
• Shoot more overlapping action for the editing stage (needs to be built into the shot planning)
• More practice with look room and eye-lines.  
• Practise, practise, practise; shoot, shoot, shoot!

Creative constraints of 15 seconds or less...

Creating a compelling commercial was never an easy task. But the continued shortening of message formats and increased user control over ad-viewing has agencies facing new creative challenges: how to lure consumers into watching a commercial they can easily skip, and then tell them an interesting brand story in 15 seconds or less.

http://digiday.com/agencies/15-seconds-less-creative-constraint-short-video-ads/

Review: The Fighter

There is some kind of post-modern irony that movies based on true stories can seem less believable than fiction. In the case of The Fighter (dir David O’Russell, 2010), this also makes it more quirky. There are off beat moments and the narrative is less formulaic, less Hollywood than expected.   Music is a very big part of the film – setting atmosphere and pace very well (diegetic and non-diegetic are combined and confused).  But it’s the superb acting that carries it.  Apart from some of the fight scenes, which just did not ring true for me, overall I found this to be an engaging and enjoyable film.

It is impossible to watch this genre without thinking of Raging Bull or On the Waterfront or Rocky but there is some colour to the story.  It is rooted firmly in Lowell, set in a moment in that town’s history, and this allows for some tremendous authenticity. The dialogue is chaotic and even incomprehensible at times. Clichés abound (redemption, atonement, broken dreams, blue collar gritty realism etc) but some of the characters are multi-dimensional. 

It was shot in just 33 days and stars some of the real life characters from Eklund and Ward’s life (Mickey O’Keefe, the cop who was Ward’s trainer; Eklund’s nephew etc). They used the actual Lowell West End gym where the boxers trained and Christian Bale spent a lot of time with Dicky to understand how his mind worked.  The interviews at the beginning and end were improvised by Wahlberg and Bale; they set the tone and tie off the end of the movie nicely.

Wahlberg is adequate. He plays low-key well – we get a sense of his massive frustration even from his excellent poker face. The chemistry between him and Amy Adams is palpable and she is well-cast as an ordinary looking woman, not out of place alongside the ‘white trash’ Eklund sisters.  He just seems a bit slow – as a boxer and as a human.  Rather vague.  I would have loved to see Casey Affleck in that role.  Bale steals the show as always, reminding me very much of John Lurie (in Down by Law and on stage with the Lounge Lizards).

There is some clever cinematography. It is not always clear what is being seen from the film crew making the documentary and what is real; dramatic camera angles pull us in to the drama (and rapidly out in one scene early when the camera backs away from the street junction where documentary is being filmed). O’Russell uses a hand-held, free-moving approach and cuts in scenes as they would have been filmed for TV at the time, as well as some unusual multi-camera set-ups which convey the sense of chaos.  There is also lots of natural lighting to add to sense of this being ‘almost documentary’.

I very much enjoyed watching Melissa Leo as Alice Ward as I always loved her in Homicide, Life on the Streets as Kay Howard.   Alice could have been played very differently and would have been less convincing.  Having some strong female characters in a boxing movie was a treat.  Shame that Charlene still had to be seen in various states of undress and subject to the male gaze.

In the final analysis, this film does not grip us emotionally because it is hard to care too much about Micky but it is interesting to watch and has some good moments of filmmaking.