Tutorial photos…

Red Shoes by the Drugstore

This Tom Waits song was quite a popular text for storyboards & scripts:)
02 Red Shoes by the Drugstore

Genre Conventions

“Understand the conventions of the genre you’re writing for,” says screenwriter Susannah Farrow. “There are certain things moviegoers expect to see in a comedy and other things they expect to see in a thriller. Make sure you include those things.”

Audiences have their favorite genres and are well versed in genre conventions. If they’ve come to see a comedy, they want laughs. But they also want original situations, not something they’ve seen a hundred times. To write successfully within a genre, a writer must study and master its conventions while avoiding its clichés.

The choice of genre may impose conventions on:
• setting (the West in a western, a battle in a war film)
• roles (detective and criminal in a detective story)
• events (boy-meets-girl in a love story)
• emotional expectations (in an action/adventure, will the hero save the day? In a horror movie, will the axe murderer strike again?).

Some genres have many conventions. Let’s take a crime story as an example. The audience expects: a crime to occur early on; someone to investigate; twists in the form of false clues, multiple suspects, or the revelation of hidden layers; and a showdown (physical, intellectual, or both) between the criminal and the investigator.

The hardest part of writing within a genre is avoiding its clichés. The first writer who revealed that the criminal was really a corrupt cop found an exciting, new twist. But by now that device has become an overused gimmick. Find ways of meeting audience expectations without resorting to clichés.

Watch as many movies in your genre as you can, and study their scripts. Ask the following questions: What are the conventions of settings, roles, and events? What emotional expectations are the films fulfilling? What’s been done to death? What’s original? How is your script like these movies, and how does it differ? Can you give the events that have to happen in your story a fresh, contemporary twist without committing any genre sins or falling into formulaic writing?

Understanding genre is an essential element of good writing. If you master your genre and its conventions, you’ll be able to pay off audience expectation with skill, originality, and elegance. And if you wish to write a genre-defying script, your knowledge of genre will only make your experiment bolder.

See Screenwriting Basics from a great blog called Screenplay Tips.
For more info on Westerns, Romantic Comedies (Especially screwball comedies), Horror, and Film noir see Cinematic Genre.

Storyboarding

See http://www.storyboardart.com/interviews.php for an interview with David Russell (concept illustrator/storyboard artist). Very interesting regarding the pre-production process and how storyboards fit into the film-making process. Also have a look under the ‘portfolio’ link to see some of his amazing storyboards for Narnia, Star Wars, etc.

David Russell is a noted film illustrator whose credits include Batman, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Thin Red Line, Master and Commander and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Red Tails.

Chronicles of Narnia

Also see: Basic techniques for drawing storyboards

Basic techniques for drawing storyboards

Stylistic Analysis of Tsotsi by Yusri

See: http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/shades/2008/09/22/a-stylistic-analysis-on-the-feature-film-tsotsi-2006>

Across the Universe

Wikipedia (for own reading, do not cite): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_Universe_(film)

Official site which features a section “About the Film” which has production notes which you may find quite useful: http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/acrosstheuniverse/

Article in New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/movies/20roth.html?_r=1

Pan’s Labyrinth

Official website: http://www.panslabyrinth.com/ Really cool, you can listen to Guillermo Del Toro talking about the film, there’s a section about the filming, downloads such as wallpapers – great stuff:)

Wikipedia (for your own reading, don’t cite in essays): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan’s_Labyrinth

Metacritic (Reviews): http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/panslabyrinth

Official Guillermo Del Toro fansite: http://www.deltorofilms.com/ProjectPage.php?projectid=10

Good source for use of colour, visual motifs, cinematography etc – article from American Cinematographer: http://www.ascmag.com/magazine_dynamic/January2007/PansLabyrinth/page1.php

Interview with Del Toro: http://homepage.mac.com/merussell/iblog/B835531044/C1592678312/E20070120121827/index.html

Blog post on the film’s cimematic magical realism: http://tedpigeon.blogspot.com/2007/02/cinema-2006-cinematic-magical-realism.html

A review which takes magical realism into account. Magical realism… “A device mainly used by South American and Mexican authors, magic realism incorporates elements of unexplained fantasy and the idea that parallel and/or magical ideas, places, times and things exist. Where time is fluid or nonexistent. Where ordinary people are capable of experiencing amazing events, oftentimes driven by natural forces. Where life, love, and memory are reflected back to a character in unlikely, but understandable ways”: http://passionforcinema.com/pans-labyrinth-a-fantastic-trip/

And for more info on this artistic genre, see: http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Magic_Realism

Sound in Cinema: Alfred Hitchcock on How the Introduction of Sound Hurt Cinema

“The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changs that sound brought in. In Many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema. They are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try first to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between… To me, one of the cardinal sins for a scriptwriter, when he runs into some difficulty, is to say ‘We can cover that by a line of dialogue.’ Dialogue should simply be a sound among sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.” (Source: http://www.slashfilm.com/2008/05/29/alfred-hitchcock-on-how-the-introduction-of-sound-hurt-cinema/)

The man himself...

Film Review

It was asked, and now it has been given. Enjoy.

 A Mother’s Dilemma

“If you used your one child to save the life of another, are you being a good mother or a very bad one?” This sentence encapsulates the main theme of the film, My Sister’s Keeper, based on the novel with the same title by Jodi Picoult. Anna, 11, sues her parents for the rights to her own body to prevent them using one of her kidneys to save the life of her 15 year old sister, Kate, who has leukaemia. The film stars Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine) as Anna Fitzgerald and Cameron Diaz (What Happens in Vegas) as Sara Fitzgerald. Diaz portrays the role of a mother of a cancer patient that is willing to do anything to save her child. This role digresses from Diaz’s usual typecast role of the fun party girl. The film is directed by Nick Cassavetes whose other works include Alpha Dog and The Notebook. The film starts with Anna making the decision to pay a visit to Campbell Alexander, a lawyer who is reputed to have sued God and won, and sets the lawsuit in motion. The rest of the film handles about how the rest of the family react and jumps between the past and present to reveal important events that has touched the whole family. The narrative of the film is shared by most of the main characters with scenes from their standpoint that reveals what they are thinking at that precise moment and gives more insight into the situation. The music used in the film projected the emotions experienced or portrayed in every scene with an uncanny precision. Actor Evan Ellingson, who portrayed the role of Jesse Fitzgerald, had an immense stage presence, even though he didn’t have a lot of lines, he portrayed them with conviction and his facial expressions revealed a lot of the character’s personality and emotions. During a very poignant scene between Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) and Taylor, the over-use of mascara on the actor distracts the viewer from the intimacy of the scene and the fascination of the mascara causes the viewer to miss some of the dialogue. The film can only be described as a tear-jerker that had most of the audience, including the men, reaching for their tissues. The film touches on different issues including the ethics of “designer babies”, the effect a sick child has on the rest of the family and how each person deals with their own internal struggle between right and wrong. The film follows the plot of the novel with an almost unknown accuracy except for the last few minutes. The film’s ending is a let-down for those who have read the book. The ending causes the film to move from a possible “excellent” to a mere “good”. In a typical American sentimental fashion the film ends somewhat predictable and leaves out the most important and unexpected plot-twist that would have had the audience on the edge of their seat and sobbing their hearts out.

Still Frame Analysis

From The Shining

According to Giannetti (2005), a systematic mise en scene analysis of any shot includes 15 elements:

1. Dominant – Where is your eye attracted first? Why?

2. Lighting key – High key? Low key? High contrast? Some combination of these?

3. Shot and camera proxemics – What type of shot? How far away is the camera from the action?

4. Angle – Are we (and the camera) looking up or down on the subject? Or is the camera neutral (eye level)?

5. Colour values – What is the dominant colour? Are there contrasting foils? Is there colour symbolism?

6. Lens/filter/stock – How do these distort or comment on the photographed materials?

7. Subsidiary contrasts – What are the main eye-stops after taking in the dominant?

8. Density – How much visual information is packed into the image? Is the texture stark, moderate, or highly detailed?

9. Composition – How is the two-dimensional space segmented and organized? What is the underlying design?

10. Form – Open or closed? Does the image suggest a windo that arbitrarily isolates a fragment of the scene? Or a proscenium arch, in which the visual elements are carefully arranged and held in balance?

11. Framing – Tight or loose? Do the characters have no room to move around, or can they move freely without impediments?

12. Depth – On how many planes is the image composed? Does the background or foreground comment in any way on the midground?

13. Character placement – What part of the framed space do the characters occupy? Centre? Top? Bottom? Edges? Why?

14. Staging positions – Which way do the characters look vis-a-vis the camera?

15. Character proxemics – How much space is there between the characters?

Frame from Tango scene in FridaFrom The Shining