One of this week’s readings was the Art of Noticing by John Mason (2002). He spoke of the levels of noticing and the differing amounts of mental and physical energy it requires to succeed at those levels. In the end it’s about being present and mindful of your environment – the people in it, the things all around you, and your own presence within the environment.
The levels of noticing and its energetic equivalents:
- Ordinary noticing – seeing the chocolate bar
- Marking – picking up the chocolate bar
- Recording – walking to the counter, taking out your wallet and paying for the chocolate bar
Noticing is odd because active noticing is basically seeing a bunch of things, comprehending them, and remembering them. Then there is the questions of interpretation, the subconscious mind, and the conscious. What we “naturally” notice has been conditioned all our lives. Imagine that our world has a canvas and each person has their own individual one. Things are new to us until they aren’t and they become just another part of our familiar landscapes. If we go to an unfamiliar city, our minds become busy looking, absorbing, and marvelling. Our own city has probably, to some extent, faded into the background while we prefer to occupy our minds with more thrilling things.
As story tellers, however, we must be present. Noticing can bring realism to depicting life on screen. It will enhance your awareness of the mundane and how to then best employ that awareness to create accuracy in story telling. The world is filled with detail – rich details of odd, random, boring, fascinating things that can only enrich life and our understanding of it.
‘Dear old world‘, she murmured, ‘you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.‘
– Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery
Here are some things I was reminded of during the reading which made my understanding more concrete:
1. Sherlock’s Mind Palace
This genius man’s level of awareness is insane. Nothing is above or below his notice and treats everything as a possibility. Some of my favourite sequences is when he rapidly recalls and visualises the hundreds of things he has noticed to find answers. The screen tracks his fast thoughts, focusing on the smallest details and moving swiftly between observations.
2. Virginia Woolf and the stream of consciousness
“In the course of your daily life this past week you have had far stranger and more interesting experiences than the one I have tried to describe…In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder.” (Mr Bennet and Mr Brown essay, 1923)
No matter how hard we creators try, life is a vivid, changing thing that cannot fully be caught. We can only observe and study the world – and depict it as much as we are able.
3. Espionage and spy training
I have always been so fascinated by spies and spy things so of course when I visited the Spy Museum in D.C., I had to do all the spy training simulations. Unfortunately, I’d be a crap spy because noticing everything is HARD and also exhausting. You were trained to notice suspicious things – and they would be as subtle as a mark on a tree trunk. Then of course you have to notice everything and blend into that environment so you don’t get caught and die.
4. Audio description training for the visually impaired
I once took a workshop on describing gallery exhibitions to the visually impaired.
It was basically noticing everything, judging what can enhance their experience, then describing it accurately. I realised just how much we depend on sight to form our outlook (pun always intended) of the world and it was interesting to be so extremely present and to notice everything about the work.
