Tag / media studio

by harrietread

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.

by harrietread

Picture This! reflecting on exercises

For one of our screenwriting exercises, we were given a prompt and had to practice our visual storytelling skills. In this interpretation that I did of one of the prompts we were given, I went all in full literature student mode. The main constraint was that we could not use dialogue.

I think that what I did well here was convey a sense of the story through physical action and space. I wanted to focus on the characters’ emotions and relationships through their physical movements and behaviour.

I think that I could have had a little more confidence writing this. I knew that we’d most likely have to read these to the class so I think I was holding myself back a bit. Also, this wouldn’t be appropriate as a screenplay used in industry, since it’s a bit long and waffly. This would probably be something I wrote as a novel, or wrote really early on as the foundation and then trimmed down super hard for a final script.

by harrietread

Picture This! MT wk2

We had some screenwriting exercises in our tute, and since I haven’t been writing in a while I feel like I struggled a bit.

First struggle was having the confidence to get going on a prompt where I wasn’t sure if I was invested in it or not. Then having the confidence to read it out to the class.

What I learned from hearing from other people is that anything goes. Which felt fairly liberating.

I want to spend some more time over the semester actually writing stories in my own time, and practicing. To me, the most significant thing in a story that can make it or break it is character and relationships. Some of my favourite movies as of late have been those with dialogue or scripts that don’t feel like they’re bullshitting me. This includes Donnie Brasco, In Bruges and most Martin Scorcese movies. In these films, I feel as though the actors actually exist not only in the world of the film, but could exist in reality too. In a lot of Hollywood blockbuster films, dialogue feels clunky, artificial and unreal. It feels like people talk in a way that is unrealistic, or unfaithful to our own reality. I appreciate scripts that imitate, to the best of its ability, the way that people actually talk: interrupting eachother, talking over the top of eachother, etc.

by harrietread

Picture This! MT wk 1

We had a look in our first class at how to effectively and professionally write screenplays. What I got out of this mostly was that it’s best not to waffle, but be very succint. It immediately made me think of the recent Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them film from last year, and an interview that I watched with Eddie Redmayne about the style JK Rowling took in writing the screenplay.

He described that the screenplay was very rich with description, and I imagined that it would be similar to reading one of her novels. This is not what a screenplay should be.

I can definitely see why someone would want to write a heavily descriptive, novel-esque script. When I write, I get really passionate in a first draft and it becomes a lot of poetic waffling. I think that something I want to start practicing is having a world that is well built, with strong laws and foundations to it, and then be able to whittle it down to a succint and understandable script. I did the exact opposite of this in a project from my last studio, but in my defense it had minimal dialogue. I plan on improving my practice in this studio

Project Brief 4 – Death on the Beach (1)-1u4t6w6

by harrietread

My Take: Uses of Photography Wk 2

This week, I did my presentation on Robert Mapplethorpe, an iconic and influential photographer and artist who worked in the 70s-80s. He came from a conservative family, and moved to New York as a young man where he met the soon to be renowned artist and musician Patti Smith. Mapplethorpe inspires me as an artist and creative soul because he was someone who loved to and endeavoured to work endlessly, whether it was on a new art medium or a new idea in his photography. His work in the 80s focused mainly on the developing gay and lesbian movement in America, at a time when homophobia and stigmatism against AIDs was growing quickly too. Much of his photography at that time, such as the iconic Self Portrait with Whip, explored ideas around S&M, sexuality and homosexuality. He died of AIDs in 1989, but his desire to challenge audiences and push boundaries in art inspires me to give myself my own challenges, in my work, art and other aspects of my career.