Screen direction – one amongst many rules in visual storytelling. This one dictates the direction in which people look at each other, or the direction in which they walk, implying that on the two- dimensional screen, the characters are engaged by their looks, or walk away or toward one another.
I’m editing a film right now, and okay, some mistakes were made on the set. Not many, granted, but a few. In other words, we thought an actor should have been walking or looking right to left and as it turns out, when we cut it together, there’s a jump where we’ve crossed the 180 degree “line” – the actor should have been looking or walking the other way. In the last week, I’ve asked myself, in this age of very sophisticated film viewing, does it even matter anymore? Should we just sort of, get over it?
Last weekend I saw the delicious DRAG ME TO HELL, Sam Raimi’s celebrated return to his roots in fundamental gore. The great thing about the film is that along with Hollywood-powered special effects, such as protagonist Christine Brown being whipped around a room like a paper doll in a tornado, Raimi uses extraordinarily simple elements, such as, er, big shadows, to scare the living daylights out of us.
As I watched, I was reminded of an art project inspired by Raimi’s EVIL DEAD 2 by New York artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.
Read more about the experimental works of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy
Transwhat? Transfat? Transgender? No, transmedia. Have you heard of it? It’s one of the latest buzzwords from media guru, Director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program, and Convergence Culture author Henry Jenkins. Jenkins has strong opinions on the future of screen-based storytelling.
This is a weekly column written by Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson, two filmmakers and film professors who are wondering where modern storytelling is heading.
What’s the shortest film you’ve seen that’s been satisfying as a story?
In turn, what’s the longest screen story experience you’ve ever sustained?
I’m flashing back to my long long movie-going experiences … a five hour documentary on Cassavetes, A CONSTANT FORGE—THE LIFE AND ART OF JOHN CASSAVETES, dir. Charles Kiselyak, at SXSW in 2001. (After the movie, my husband Michael and I bonded with the five other people in the theatre, including Blaine Thurier of The New Pornographers, a Cassavetes fan and the winner of that year’s Best Narrative Feature for his film, LOW SELF-ESTEEM GIRL.)
The work of Hungarian director Béla Tarr. (Okay, that wasn’t me that endured the 7.5 hour SATAN’S TANGO, it was Michael again, and he stayed for the whole thing at Brooklyn Academy of Music — even after Gus Van Sant left.)
Sundance Channel salutes David Lynch this month with a series of screenings every Thursday, beginning this week with INLAND EMPIRE. See screening times and more.
Last week I was talking to a student about his screenplay and the “rules” of screenwriting, basically the formula that most stories get plugged into (you’ve got your “normality” and then “disturbance” in the first few pages and then the “first act turning point” … and so on). If you’re not familiar with it, please stay blissfully ignorant. It can make movie watching a little less fun when you can too easily predict exactly what is going to happen and when.
My own writing experience using this structure has run the gamut from… get-down-on-my-knees-thankfulness for the backbone it provides especially when you have a bunch of ideas that felt like loose body parts…. to feeling like creative choices have been reduced to something akin to the choices you hear parents give their kids… you can either eat your asparagus or go to bed (i.e. you can either do a strong first act turning point by page 30 or risk alienating your audience). But story structure is hard to knock, as a well structured movie moves and moves well.
Editor’s note: this is a new weekly editorial column from filmmakers Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson that will primarily focus on the evolution of film storytelling in this age of inexpensive, ubiquitous digital cameras and computer-based media. Watch for it every Wednesday.
Welcome to our column!
We are two filmmakers toiling away in the trenches, fighting the good fight in trying to make feature-length films. We also both teach filmmaking to undergrad and grad students, and co-create a web series that will appear on SundanceChannel.com beginning this summer. This column will take on the question, “What’s gonna happen to story?” Okay, we don’t know the answer, but we are both interested in the question. In this time of internet dominance, of viral video and short attention spans, where we live with both YouTube and the three hour release of Soderbergh’s CHE … where are we? And where is visual storytelling going?
Because of our backgrounds and interests, we want to examine these questions from the aesthetic, filmmaker-based point of view, less from the industry standpoint. We hope to share interesting links, pose questions about current films, web series, and web videos, and think in general about the way story functions. We hope you’ll read more, and contribute when you can.
Story as Contest
At least for the past ten years, marketing execs have realized the value of letting the public essentially create an advertisement for them, for free. My first encounter with this was in film school, when the Coca Cola company came to NYU, trolling for student filmmakers who would be willing to compete in their “Coca Cola Filmmaker Challenge” — win a “huge” budget to create a three minute film involving the love of movies and drinking Coke, to play theatrically nation-wide before major motion picture releases. I submitted. I lost.
I remember seeing the winning film play before some big romantic comedy, and feeling crushed that my ticket to the big time had been absconded by some squirrelly undergrad. Since then, of course, hundreds of organizations, both non-profit and for-profit, have posed filmmaking challenges to willing ‘contestants.’ I used to roll my eyes … how could this serious life pursuit be reduced to a contest? Why would makers play directly in to the hands of needy promotional types? But years later, I’m starting to see the opportunities, and how it’s grown far beyond simple commercialization. In posing story as game, isn’t there value in simply inviting broader creativity? Aren’t there new types of opportunities for collaboration?
A group of former students, a collective known as Profluence Productions, have participated for three years now in the week-long speed-doc-making International Documentary Challenge (affiliated with Hot Docs), and they cite the experiences here. I watched their filmmaking just get better and better; they made three wonderful shorts that continue to screen at festivals. My friend Brian Mooney has created this board game, The Storymatic, wherein players draw cards that help to initiate dramatic scenarios for fiction and screenplays. (Hmmm…good assignment for my screenwriting class.) Here’s the sample on how it works, on their site:
1. Think of this sentence: “X is in a conflict with Y about Z.”
2. Draw two ivory cards. Suppose you draw “plastic surgeon,” and “person with the hiccups.” This is your main character (X).
3. Draw one ivory card. Suppose you draw “child star.” This is your secondary character (Y).
4. Draw one silver card. Suppose you draw “overdue apology.” This is the source of the conflict (Z).
There is a good story in those cards: A plastic surgeon with the hiccups is in conflict with a child star about an overdue apology. There is just one thing missing: a person to tell that story.
5. Tell the story.
And, I just found the following docu-comic series contest through the very compelling smithmag.net: Next Door Neighbor. Readers submit stories around this theme, and the winner’s entry will be illustrated in to a comic strip. Clearly, this site utilizes well the notion of reader-contributed stories via theme (check it out, “My Pregnancy Story,” “My Ex,” etc). What’s not to like?
-AH
This is a weekly column written by Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson, two filmmakers and film professors who are wondering where modern storytelling is heading.
Sundance Channel salutes David Lynch this month with a series of screenings every Thursday, beginning this week with INLAND EMPIRE. See 
At least for the past ten years, marketing execs have realized the value of letting the public essentially create an advertisement for them, for free. My first encounter with this was in film school, when the Coca Cola company came to NYU, trolling for student filmmakers who would be willing to compete in their “Coca Cola Filmmaker Challenge” — win a “huge” budget to create a three minute film involving the love of movies and drinking Coke, to play theatrically nation-wide before major motion picture releases. I submitted. I lost.
