My Script Writing Progress

Reflecting upon the means of a script and script writing for the first draft and the script, feedback given in week 3's tute made me rethink my script again. Not because of the rules of rewriting but the story line. It is a bit cliché having a blond foreign girl in Australia and never seen a possum before and getting rescued by an Aussie Possum catcher, but what can I do to make it more interesting? What was it in the feedback that could inspire me to make my script grow?

It was one of my current favorite movies and the lecture upon sound design, of course! What does ‘Shutter Island’, ‘Blair Witch Project’, ‘Chopper’, ‘Sponge Bob’ and ‘Paranormal Activity’ have in common? A simply made story line (looking beyond the setting, chose of characters and the plot) with some creative and EXTREME sound effects. ‘Sponge Bob’ the cartoon upon a sponge and his sea star friend playing with ‘iiiiimaaaginaatiiiooon’ in their box is ridiculously over driven with sound effects matching the movements done by the characters and adjusted sound levels, becomes the film's drive force for me as an audience.

For my script sound and light effects as those used in ‘Paranormal activity’ will spice it up. Keeping the story line simple and focusing on details and camera movement upon my setting will clear up what is going on and rather enforce the mystique of my film instead of being confusing. After writing the first draft and implementing two feedbacks (first one was too easy, too short, too simple and to usual. And the second one needing more clarity) I decided to go for more details. This made me go in depth of ‘what would I do if I was the protagonist? What would I do if I was inside a house of paranormal activity and the possum guy I thought was chasing me but instead came for the possum? I would hear lots of sounds, be paranoid and scared. Sound effects and storyline here, I belive go hand in hand. It is simple but the visual is only less than half of it before adding dialogue, sound and noises.

Aiming to develop journalistic writing skills, script writing is about details and action and as I was rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, I felt that I as an author became clearer and concise of a character or a location. Script writing being as a writing style, has taught me to be more simple and more specific on a particular person, location and an action. Having told the story ‘Hello Possum!’ to friends and seen their reaction, I’ve realized the change and the dynamic of the story and where these changes and corrections needed to be made. Keeping it simple worked, now the details of camera, characters and sounds needed work.

Doing the shot construction exercise and going through feedbacks upon script writing, this style differs itself from others by being specific, clear, concise and detailed. For my professional strand of journalism this is developing my clarity and punctuality of writing and the most interesting aspect of this writing is how to get direct action down to paper by including the visual and the audio.

In this way both my script of the film and the visual and audio goes hand in hand. Maybe the storyline is cliché but that works for me; a bit cliché but simple. With the use of effects and camera I am imaginating, this could be good. And that is what matters for me, I am after all a RMIT student being the ‘author of my own story’.

Digidoss Experiences and being the Sound Designer (24th/3)

During the preparation of week 3-4 about sound, I thought about ‘what is sound?’. Not what is mentioned about speech, music and noise but what did I know about sound from before and what sound skills needed to be developed and explored?

After the Editing Media experience ‘analysing noise in one day’ and linking the activity to what Paul was talking about noise and sound effect, made me focus a lot on the noises, levels and amplitude. The activity was meant to record what we heard in one day from waking up to going to bed. Bresson’s reading, together with digidoss touched on this; ‘being capabe to of seeing and hearing it entire'.

‘Chopper’ and ‘Spongebob’ use of sounds had both a fluent level of sounds and noises. From ‘background hum’, outside sound effects to ‘mouth smacks’ and the sense of heavy breathing being close. After stepping out of the visual level, the meaning of the audio used in both these films shows a creative way of using, recording and playing around with sounds and noises. This informs and raises awareness for my learning key points;

• Differentiate the use of the sound and the use of the action in the movie (in the movie’s spaces, I must be careful mixing the audio and the action effect in order to not duplicate the visual with the hearing).

• Where to get sounds from (besides the shot)? Internet, RMIT ‘sAudio Visual Library and self-recording.

• Planning ‘the shot’: when ‘protagonist’ does this, sound designer does that.

• Be aware of the sound levels in editing for the cause of the ear.

• The detailing items used for the shot: what time are we in? What type of phone to use in a ‘phone shoot’ ?

• The rule of ‘the ear within’ and ‘the eye the outer’.
  
  
• Making sound and image go hand in hand.
  
  
• Make post-production plan and brainstorm what sound issues to face

In ‘Chopper’ noises from everyday life is used and I kept in mind ‘how is the sound woman recording ‘heavy breath’ while the character is in the shot?’ in a separate shot or with a high definition external microphone? After playing wit the audio recorder in the tute, I searched after what Ayers mentioned. Keeping the head phones on, my ear was being selective with sounds and its source and I adjusted the levels to see what the recorder recorded and what my ear sought to hear.

The placement of the microphone was highly important and so is the location. Ayers article for my learning process works as a guidance to get the best sound recording, as it goes in detail of why and how to understand and use dynamic range, equalization and the headphones.

Lastly, as for being a Sound Designer, Carlins 10 points is a crucial MUST to remember and when layering sound, this must be selectively performed to communicate the particular emotion, mood and feeling by;

• Using identifiable sources.
• Room acoustics and room adjustment.
• Listen sensitively for sounds.

Following these key points, the sound designer has created and ‘represented the overall styling of the sonic fabric in an audio production’. Mixing this with speech, music and sound effects, the entire story is signified trough narration, dialogue, harmony, rhythm, style and silence, together adding more power to the story.

Group Selection and expectations (24th/3)

Thursday’s 9.30 tute group ‘The Dream Team’ consists of Vanessa (Director of Photography) and Goi (sound person) and me (the director). Seen as a whole, the group had different media and communication experiences and international backgrounds, with strengths and weaknesses.

After the group had voluntarily chosen their roles, this is believed to work as a dynamical approach for the production where we can both individually and as a group contribute and participate from different perspectives. I believe we all have knowledge enough for the selected roles and also the interest of learning and develop ourselves. As for being the producer, I have to;

· Guide and oversee the film making with the DP and the SP.

· Take the initiative to set budget and manage deadlines.

· Communicate with the author to get the correct story line.

· Be open for criticism and adjust feedback.

Writing Style Consideration

Writing style for me in this course is to have concrete, clear and concise blogs understandable for my tutor and myself. Thus to develop my journalism skills. When writing weekly pieces of learning reflection, which varying in style and word count, the key of it is to write and reflect. Comparing week 1 to 5 I have picked up a few differences; I have removed ‘non-words’ by knitting the blog together stronger and I vary between what I go in-depth of (analyisis, readings and the digi doss). And here I come to my blogs main point; to deepen and strengthen my thoughts and analysis into the ultimate writing style, demonstrating my consciousness, participation and my learning Progress of Film-TV 1.

Review of ‘Rolling’ week 3-4

‘Rolling’
One repeatedly word for the review of ‘Rolling’ is absolutely and indefinitely weird. But in terms of love isn’t there some one out there for all of us? Both director Angeline Lim and writer Simon Ramirez has done one great job here. Starting in media res, I as an audience being given the big surprise of a simple desperate love seeking guy wanting to buy amounts of toilet papers as reason to get a chick’s number, find that desperate but makes the movie funny, entertaining and cute.

The medium shot/panning combination gives the viewer a depth of the antagonist’s world and I sense his reality of how hard and complicated love can be when shopping at the supermarket. All the weirdness in the conversation between a staff and a customer it starts off with, is simply silly and entertaining; ‘Do you want me?’, ‘Why would I do that? What makes you think that?’ and ‘I saw you staring at me and I work here so I thought you were needing help?’.

He them points at the toilet papers saying it is to orphans. This engagement with the audience the film has is weird but brings surprises of funniness.

The editing of fade out, texts and music works as a driving force for the eye and further on the symbols and items used as ‘Carpe Diem’ shows how much spare time this lonely toilet paper obsessed guy has. As an audience (both in the lecture and in the aftermath), this fulfills the concepts of unusualness and extremeness of how not normal this bloke is.
The wide shot zooming out from his chair with the antagonist eating a dried toasted bread demonstrates the weird character and one have to look further into the film to see what other weirdness it will show.

Mixing the present with the past works as a tool for the antagonist’s reality perception and the short films engagement works with the audience continuously until the end. The appearing color shifts of balanced fluorescent lights for me works; it gives that bright light supermarket feeling.
The protagonist (the girl) acting as the most confident character increases the spice of the movie and becomes the icebreaker both as a character and also as the diversion between the ‘toilet paper world’ and reality as she recognizes him and says his name.

However, the best part is when the protagonist herself actually delivers the 25 toilet paper package. The scene knocking on the door is totally awkward, horny for him, but cute and funny. Even ‘herself ‘is excited and that becomes some of the weirdest part of the movie, is really entertaining. And she’s keen to step inside. The producers surely kept the objectivity in a tight frame and succeed with their intentions of a weird production design.

Writing the short Film and the Lenny Project.

Writing short films is challenging. The script of 'VINCENT' by Cooper and Dancyger contains ideas and details of the entire film. There are camera movements inserted and there's a lot of dialogue descriptions of what's going on. But the most important aspect of this film is what we talked about in week three about making the ordinary extra ordinary and neighborhood boys mocking around about a blue cap resulting into the visual appearance of the only earn, and more, the woman's labour, is quite digesting and leading for me as a reader.

'SOB STORY' involving death is being creatively made with different characters and items involved with descriptions. 'PIGEON' use of internal settings and movement descriptions makes it unavoidable to loose track of the script and the use of time and destination makes it exciting. All these together, reminds me as a scriptwriter that by following up features I found interesting here and develop them as I write will clarify the script for those involved in the project.

After going trough the script of the Lenny Project, I made two attempts of rough cutting it. The first one with just Sharon and the second one with both Sharon and Lenny. In order to select the shots, I had to follow up the script's details before chossing and cutting the part selected.

See link: http://vimeo.com/10197127

The best short film to ever be made must be 'LOVEFIELD' by Mathieu Ratthe. Soundeffects and the filming is so simple and relaxing and one the whole film needs to be watch in order to understand what is going on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4meeZifCVro

Camera movements used are pannings juxtaposing from long, medium to close shots. Another cool effect the farmers legs being filmed from the knees only, the close shot to the bird and the camera lying inside the car giving the viewer every segment. The second last shot is a 'frog' shot from the angle of the woman, giving the movie scary impact before everything becomes normality when the camera is on the side of the farmer and we understand that it is all about those inconvenient situations and places for a woman giving birth.

Lastly, the short film 'Timeout' after editing 'Lenny' and this gave me ideas for shot construction; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDVu3TRM_wk

'Timeout' uses fast and slow sequenses disturbing the sense of time in which works for me as I have to imagine what is going on when. TO also starts with still shots, marking the setting for the film. Transport vehicles are used (boat, car, bus and trams) and shots as; close shots, profile shots, medium shots, long shots, panning (boat scene), over the shoulder shots, 'the fly on the wall shot' and fade outs. The camera being used is hand held an appears shaky on the screen. The film is cut in the most excitingly shots (leading the viewer to not stop watching) leaving a tiny hint. The ending however remains diffuse but gets explained with an uneccesary endnote.

The Dossier Readings

Getting to know more about the process of writing, week one's articles by Moon demonstrated different aspects of reflective writing. The article explains this process step-by-step and gives realistic examples of why this writing style is so important - to be able to draw a self-critical review upon one owns learning progress by writing. The personal and academical purpose it explains to me as a student gives me guidelines of what to write and how to do it by reflection.

Here's one example 'What have i learnt about shot construction in week 2?'

Rethinking my progress of shot construction in week 2, some mistakes were made but also learned upon. Seen beyond what is discussed about scriptwriting, using Final Cut Pro for the Lenny Project did not turn out to be a bit more complicated than iMovie.

As I was with cutting and making a rough cut of the Lenny Project my major problem was to figure out ‘why after 10 mins of marking the part of the shot I want to cut goes wrong every time and deletes the entire shot’. Fancing and glazing over this amazing high tech developed film editing program ‘Final Cut Pro’ I see something photoshop look-alike toolbar that can have something to do with this. The razorblade. Of course! I then realize that the software we are using is based upon a principle of simplicity and the old names of ‘bin’, ‘cut’, and so on.

Why had it gone wrong though? Because there are two windows to look at during editing; the canvas is my projecting of the shot and the viewer vindow belongs to the original shot.

By writing this way the Moon article's examples raises awareness of writing reflectively about something I have to do or have done. This is the favorite part of this reading because for my learning progress, I have to use 'I' and use first person. This quality for me means that when I reflect upon assignments, performance and presentation I can go into the details that went wrong and learn of the mistakes I did. In this way the room for self-improvement will take me as a writer not just to another higher level of university performance but also in real life work.

Narratives is fun and creating them is even better. Branston and Stafford goes in details of the importance of the narrative by going in-depth upon construction, forms, sharing cultural features and a mediums way to tell a story. The part where it discusses the work of Syd Field (also in this week's lecture upon the three-part-structure of set-up, confrontation and resolution) together with feedback from friends made me change the story line of my synopsis (see next blog). And also raied my awareness of religion and cultural aspects within stories.

When it came to the part of Propp and examinating the possibilites of grouping characters and actions, this made me rethink my own story and I shifted the story into a more 'heroic' story of David the plumber killing the horror possum for the beautiful foreign baby sitting Ina in a back yard. The 'good' and 'evil' is seen in David's eyes.

I think the best part with this article how they describe narration and its importance for selecting materials and arrange this in an order to achieve effects with the audience. This is remarkable in clown train where the story is told via the body language of both the protagonist and the antagonist and the good example of Norman's mental condition in Psycho.

The description of how to use narratives in different mediums is helpful and so is the broadcasting and soaps where the article talks about that the differences are to do with institutional and industrial demands. Further on in the last part of the article, it is up to date with describing open and closed narratives, and the trends of the computer.

Clown Train

‘Clown Train’ – Week 2/3

The Film’s attempt of realizing its script turned into the outcome of a lot of close and medium shots, generating the principle of less is more.

As the movie went and I was following the script I noticed that the dialogues were cut out and me as an audience had to pay more visual than hearing attention from both the protagonist and the antagonist.

Drawing upon what was said in the lecture this week upon a short film being a visual medium that cut fulfilled that. When the focus was more on the gestures of both the Clown and the boy a deeper way of looking into ‘the world’ they were in as a setting of a train at nighttime. Making the shots less conversational also made the scene more interesting to watch as the boy wakes up and the character he plays (waking up after falling a sleep on a train and facing a clown) becomes real instead of getting everything explained in a dialogue. It also strengthened the clown as the antagonist when shifting the focus on the character instead of using dialogue.

Overall, I think when it comes to realizing scripts in general there exists some common key points showing how important a script is such as;

• -The script is the first ‘brick’ of the film being a description of where it all takes place.
• -The authors story idea and construction is expressed in details on the script.
• -The cameraperson, actors and director coordinate together via the script.
• -The editor edits the film into its order, length and details of the script.
• -The script defines time and budget of the film in interesse for executive producers, which could take it to universal studies or film festival directors so it can be shown at either Melbourne Film Festival, in Bollywood or Hollywood.
• - The script is the base of a business idea and it is the film the writer idealized from the beginning.
• -The script is the writer’s. He or she wants to know what and why it gets modified in order to make progress as a scrip writer.

When forming groups this week the role I would like to have is being one of the scriptwriters. I enjoy writing and this a new interesting writing style for me is something I would like to get more into. Other roles being preferable is to be the producer, just because I enjoy having responsibility and work in team.

Week 1

‘The Big Tree’
The script containing dialogues, character and location descriptions created a mental imagination of how this film would be. The script went in details of camera movements, the set up, characteristic features and dialogues. The imaginary neighborhood with two boys gotten their ball stuck in the tree was mentally post-produced and the film started.

As film didn’t follow up the rules of script writing with the principle of the ‘one page per minute’ this removed the constructed mental visual bits and segments. The film’s expected quality shortly decreased as lacking elements where not shown. This removal of elements rather increased the rule of ‘less is more’ and instead made the movie entertaining. Instead of showing every detail a space was created for me as an audience, engaging me as the viewer more.

This disappearance shows that in the process of reflective writing I must through thinking and learning, observe and consider the characters, emotions, reactions/actions, time, context and the theory involved.

I then tried to relate the film to other movies to see what was up with using a tree and if there were any similarities. ‘The Lemon Tree’ from 1990 and U2’s Joshua’s Tree came into my mind so a tree is a symbol, maybe knowledge?

Reflecting on the film ‘the big tree’ many script details were removed and these lacking contents made the film less valuable but from an editing point of view, maybe the producer felt that it could be cut out, and then therefore decide to remove these pieces. Actions instead of focusing on details were entertaining and related more to the phrase ‘show don’t tell’ I think.

In this first attempt of a TV 1 reflection I decided to write it from an academical perspective by comparing the differences of theory and practice. When asked upon the expectations in the week 1 tute upon TV1, the reflection was less formal and more informal with details in a moody way.

Expectations and pre-reflection of week 1

I thought doing a journal entry reflection as homework would be a bit hard but when the classical song “Radetzky march” came on the radio, I don’t think I’ve ever seen my pen to paper come so quickly.

The very first thing to come to my mind as I am reflecting on the first week is the smiling Christine Rogers from Thursday’s 09.30 tute; “That’s sick.. but I think, I think it would be a good story! It’s actually exciting,” she said laughing.

Starting RMIT’s first semester of 2010 could not have been better. Of all the crazy stories emerging from the 7 words of sins the class is probably engaging more than ever before. I totally love third year. I’m surprisingly hooked. Yesterday’s 4 month summer of Thai beaches and an internship felt miles away, but this was a warm welcome to Uni. Whatever sick story that came up in the tute was great for Ms. Rogers. Cool.

I think TV1 shows the difference many of us have been waiting for; more practical work! Scriptwriting, journal reflections and a 5-minute film will be the most awesome assignment I reckon!

Now, a few days later the idea of reflecting writing is coming more and more into my mind, I am starting to learn how learning and thinking in this way crucial and important.

What am I taking from the course Film-TV 1
I see this course taking me to another level of creative writing and developing more narratives and story ideas. While writing in this course I think the narrative being written, needs to be more reconsidered and rewritten as it is being put into the practice of making a movie. I think this course will give wake up calls within writing and rise alarming bells of clarity and conciseness.

I see my degree will take me into broadcast. The assignments given are a good start on a portfolio. What I will take from it is reflection and perfection of creative writing, the use of software and camera equipment and improve presentation. The dream is to become a news reporter and experimenting and exploring the contents of Film-TV 1 is giving the opportunity to find weaknesses and strengths within writing, editing and presenting.

As a last reflection of this week I think reflective writing will continue the development of my writing skills as the reflection is a chance to look back upon mistakes done and learn and improve from these to next assignment.
It can be any RMIT assignment and further on as in Marianne’s situation learn from mistakes done at work, improve and get more confident.

The idea of short film
I believe a short film is good for experimenting with film production as its length gives the opportunity to edit an undo mistakes. Its shortness also limits the works of the pre-production as the script is meant not to overcome 5 pages, which suits very well for 12 weeks of work. I also think this is why you have chosen this format to teach us, and since many of us has done writing, editing and broadcast media it is not unfamiliar to us and gives us the continuation of previous taught editing skills. I think this altogether gives us the further development of creative story writing and more guidance from a perspective we haven’t had before.The things that make a short film work, is effective post-production; a simple but conflicting narrative, a met deadline, an easy available location for a set up and a group being open to give and receive constructive criticism and work under pressure. The genres we have been presented will work for making a short film as a lot of its elements is recognized in our everyday life.