Three Acts

1/4, 1/2, 1/4

The Inciting Incident

Beats

Character

Dialogue

Robert McKee…

Standard blogging form seems to look like this: Choose an enticing title so that internet surfers ride the proverbial wave onto your site; write in paragraph format; embed video or images along with text; flashy colors or themed designs or fonts or your ‘links’ all convey a sense of identity and personality, all of which could lead to a readership; an audience for your opinions concerning the world. Who’s to say that I can’t blog using screenwriting terms randomly placed across the page in order to visually show that the Screenwriting manuals and their tropes are merely tried-and-true success stories that lead to profit (well, maybe it doesn’t show the last part about profit). A set of norms/conventions has come to define the appearance of a blog in the same way that a successful screenplay is expected to work and conform to a set structure in order to be produced or even taken seriously by Hollywood. Could you understand a blog post discussing frustrations of screenwriting via a different formal presentation than expected? and How would we come to understand the meaning?

As I continue writing my own screenplay for a thesis, the MYMF reading really jazzed the side of me that really desires to create something original; the side of me that maybe wants 4 acts instead of three; a protagonist who rarely appears in the film but manages to drive the action. I want to push the boundaries of an accepted form, of accepted conventions, in order to create something that not only tells a story, but also says something about how we tell stories. This seems to harken back to our first day of class when we clarified our task for the semester: to examine how we tell stories. There are conventional ways and there are unconventional ways. It’s been said before, you must know the conventions before you can break them because that shows both a proficiency in the conventions themselves and the genius to mold the form into whatever you want. A powerful tool. I resist conventions; I accept conventions. More or less, these screenwriting manuals provide the tools within your toolbox to create a convincing storyworld presented via plot in a manner that will engage the audience successfully.

Going back to blogs, as I mentioned before, I want to see bloggers explore how breaking the conventions of the ‘craft’ can inspire new meaning or a better understanding of what’s being written. I’m familiar with video blogs, but I’m wondering if there are any examples of, say, intrepid bloggers successfully manipulating the CSS form in a manner which somehow magnifies or complements the meaning of their blog post or overall blog “voice” or message? The way German Expressionism visually and outwardly expressed internal emotions. I’m not saying my exercise in breaking blog conventions worked, but like any of the mediums we’ll be studying this semester (TV, Film, Video Games), we must be in tune to these subtle plays with conventions and how they invoke meaning both diegetically and mimetically? It’s just another tool in the toolbox…

In class on Thursday when we were discussing how a film could cue us to the subjectivity of the narration since, by default, a film is expected to utilize objectivity; similarly, the audience’s expectations, guided by cognitive norms, submit to the same objectivity. As I reflected about this notion, one film in particular struck me as representing subjective narration both diegetically and mimetically.

Double Indemnity, a seminal film noir from 1944, concerns an insurance rep who “lets himself be talked into a murder/insurance fraud scheme that arouses an insurance investigator’s suspicions (imdb.com).” Now, this plot summary does no justice to the complexity of the story, but this film noir hits all of the right notes: expressionistic lighting, femme fatale, murder, fatalism, crime, etc… Honestly, if you haven’t seen it, you must, and I apologize in advance if I reveal key events from the plot/discourse that could ruin your viewing experience.

Double Indemnity immediately cues us diegetically to its subjectivity by the narrator/protagonist framing the narrative with a confession of murder and the events leading up to that murder. Visually, we see the protagonist, Walter Neff, telling his story via a dictaphone. From this point on, the voice-over narration guides us into the body of the plot and how Neff became beguiled by both the femme fatale and thus the murder plot. What all of these techniques denote is the subjectivity of the events that follow: Neff is guiding us through the events, naturally providing us with one skewed (in my mind) perspective of the events leading to his eventual demise. What I think the film does very well is mimetically convey the inner conflict of Neff as he tells his story; almost as if the mise-en-scene visually invokes the emotional state of the fated character. It is as if the audience sees externally what Neff feels internally while narrating the tale. In one particular scene (the one in the photo above), Wilder constructs settings using both obtuse, Expressionistic lighting techniques to convey the turmoil of Neff. Furthermore, Wilder also prominently displays doorways, windows, portraits, and other architectural elements that appear as closed boxes or frames; as I saw it, visual cues suggesting Neff’s feeling of being trapped and unable to escape from his inevitable fate.

As I think we certainly showed in class, film diegesis and mimesis exist simultaneously within any film. They exist as weights on a scale: sometimes, more weight is placed on one aspect over the other. In this case, the narrative framework and plot construction of the story and its inherent subjectivity are complimented by aspects of set design and mise-en-scene that reveal the mental status of the narrator/protagonist.

Welcome to my blog. More to come very soon.

Welcome to my blog. This is a very rough palette at this point, but keep checking the site for updates, weekly posts, and discussions of the class’s musings.

In Tuesday’s class (9/9/08), we started the semester off by compiling a list of techniques and approaches that could answer the question: What helps tell a story? The list ended up being quite long and by no means exhausted all of the possibilities, but my brain has crawled out of its summer hybernation and has begun to actively recognize some of the techniques we discussed in Tuesday’s class. This leads me to the real meaning of my post. My friend e-mailed me a while back concerning a Spanish-language horror entitled Rec (2007) that scared him beyond belief, and being an avid fan of horror and frightful things, I decided to watch some of the more scary scenes on YouTube. Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gWEy9uHACU

The basic story involves a Spanish TV News crew filming a documentary that follows firefighters and policemen on their nightly rounds. This particular night, they follow the firefighters and police to an apartment building where an old woman is trapped. From then on out, the film delves into horrific events involving viral infections and possession to name a few, but has been lauded recently as one of the most scary movie experiences in a long time by critics and audiences alike, which is awesome, because the current state of the horror genre, in my opinion, is not in good shape. Regardless, the point of this post is to highlight some techniques used to tell the filmic story. I think the most apparent aspect after watching the clip is the use of a first-person perspective embodied by the character of the cameraman. Especially in this instance, the cameraman represents the curiosity of not only the characters, but also the audience. His camera follows the action, shifts throughout the space, providing the audience with a limited, but adequate perspective of the action. I don’t like this phrase, but the audience is meant to “identify” with his perspective, but not necessarily his character. I make the distinction because I am interested in looking at how the 1st person POV can inform us about the character of the cameraman, because obviously the camera is not just here to provide the visuals, but infact exists as a character as well. I’d need to actually see the movie in order to make those distinctions clearer and more well informed. I imagine that questions like this will crop up throughout this class: how does a 1st perspective provide meaning for a narrative vs. a 3rd person perspective?

Besides being a frightening clip, I think the film ingeniously uses both the audio of the audio playback machine and the images and photographs scattered around the apartment to provide a scary mood for the film as well as to unravel the mystery that the camera crew (and subsequently, the audience) are wrestling with. It reminded me a bit of those scenes in movies where the camera pans slowly across a series of photographs to say something about the characters within those photos. Obviously, this knowledge adds to the fear within and characters and the fear within the audience, which ultimately builds to a startling climax, which, I’ve at least seen that part, is SCARY.