I found this very interesting short film by a Youtuber I follow called “Diner” . The video acts as an experiment in how context affects the audience’s relationship with a character, or how they react to a situation. The piece presents us with a situation where a man walks into a diner, shoots the bar tender, then sits down at a booth before police sirens can be heard. He then stands, revealing the wound to this stomach, and falls to the floor, dead. In addition to this scene having no background, character development or context, it doesn’t have any dialogue either, so the incidents depicted are purely visual storytelling. My personal experience with this film is that despite having no relationship with either character, I found the scene compelling and full of tension. I wasn’t annoyed that I didn’t know more, I sat in wonder as it is a rare experience to be totally in the dark. The shooting was still as shocking as it would have been had I known these characters, and even as the shooter died I did feel an amount of sympathy for him. Only knowing him for a few minutes I saw so many emotions conveyed through his face and how he held himself. I found this piece really encouraged me to think about the conventions of a screenplay, and how this video would’ve appeared as one. Much like the activity conducted in class, where feelings and thoughts had to be described through action, this piece takes that principal and plays around with the extreme side of it. It also makes me want to play with the same idea, throwing the audience into the middle of an important scene without giving them a chance to get a bearing on their surroundings so to speak. It really sets a tone and captivates the viewer as questions of “wait what’s happening, who is he, oh my god why did he shoot him” it becomes marvellously unpredictable. Of course for a full length feature, character development does need to occur at some point, the audience will only accept the contextless scene for long before getting irritated and disconnected from the story, since they are simply not invested in it. The void of context is more of a hook than anything, like a great headline to get people to want to read the article, to find out more. To encourage a desire or hunger in the audience that compels them to decipher what they are initially presented with, and that is a great thing to present an audience with rather than spoon feed them exposition and establishing information. I think challenging an audience to piece together identities and motives is a much more engaging experience. and one I would like to incorporate into my final project within this screenwriting studio.