Picture This wk5

In an earlier class, for homework, we all sent in examples of scenes in films that use visual storytelling without dialogue. One that had a big impact on me was a scene from Children of Men (2006), when Kee and Theo are trying to escape a housing complex that is being fired upon with Kee’s newborn baby.

This scene gets me emotional every time I watch it. I think that one thing that gets me every time is watching all the grown men, all the hardened soldiers, going stock still at the sound and sight of a newborn baby for the first time in years. I think that it goes another level deeper than that; I think that the film as a whole takes many artistic influences from both classical and contemporary art, and Alfonso Cuaron uses all these artistic cues masterfully to make the audience feel intense emotion. That is definitely something that I want to be able to pull off in my writing, being able to use vision and audio, not necessarily dialogue, to convey emotion, intense or otherwise.

Something else that I think I could be working on is considering and conveying what I want the cinematography should be through a screenplay. Children of Men has beautiful cinematography, particularly full of shots that linger away from the protagonists and scrutinise the world of the film. This includes the social and political state of the film’s world, and allows the viewer to reflect on the state of humanity in the film and perhaps also in real life. I think that in my own writing, I can do a better job of conveying the actual visuals of the film. But even more so, I should improve my understanding of sound and aural storytelling. I think that this is something I should work on because I am not confident with sound and music in film.

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