Skills Development
STORYTELLING
Context
Pixar storytelling rules
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Putting it on paper - write ideas down
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Surprise yourself with your ideas, don't settle for the first idea
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Give characters opinions and make them unlikable so they can grow
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Give it a heart a purpose - ase off your belief or experience to drive the stroy
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Apply yourself to the characters - honestly lends to credibility to unbelievable situations
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Give us a reason to root for the character, give it stakes, underdog
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No work is wasted - go back to old pieces
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Know yourself and change yourself to new perceives
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Have to identify with the characters to make it believable
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Be economical with time within the scenes, be quick with unimportant scenes. - get to the point.
Ted Talk on storytelling notes
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Stroy is about knowing your punchline at the start.
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It should deepen your understanding of who we are as humans.
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The story is an ask to make me care.
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visual, emotionally, aesthetically
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We as humans want to finish the sentence of emotion don't give an audience 4 give them 2+2 make them work for their meal. For example in non-dialogue narratives like Wallie.
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Storytelling affirms that our life has meaning
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Storytelling has guidelines, not rules
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A theme always runs through a well-told story
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The best story infuse wonder
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The script is everything
We then labeled scripts with various features, I choose to do it on the first script I made in Y10.
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Story structure
This is the structure most basic narratives follows but not all and some of the best ones subvert this.
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Exposition:
Establishes the setting and characters
DEVELOPMENT:
Something is proposed as a problem to overcome, a mission, character development.
COMPLICATION:
something goes wrong
CLIMAX:
Theres a climatic event or crescendo.
RESOLUTION:
Things a tied up, whether that be happy ever after or not.
Exposition:
A woman is cooking when she accidentally creates a living dumpling
DEVELOPMENT:
dumpling child begins to grow.
COMPLICATION:
The child becomes less reliant on the mother and begins to rebel
CLIMAX:
The child tries to leave but before he can the mother eats him.
RESOLUTION:
The dumpling child becomes a human and everyone cooks and eats together.
An example of when this narrative is used is in Bao the Pixar short
We Analisyed what the first page of back to the futures script
The first location and scene focus on light and robots which establishes the sci-fi genre that is affirmed by the atomic explosion.
The classroom scene establishes Marty as a cool rebellious teen with him listening to rock and “bobbing” to the music. He is also presented as not like the rest of his class as they sit bored and he entertains himself.
Sucy Parker is set up as the love interest with her description as attractive.
The story's time period is also established as post-modern 80s with `Marty's disinterest in the 50s era on the TV.
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From just the first page you can predict the subsequent scenes and progression of the story. by making Marty being a troublemaker suggests he will break rules. It also sets up his character for the arc from a cool kid who doesn’t care to find a reason too.
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We then looked at a later bit in the script and how it had changed from script to screen, we found that often dioegue had been slightly changed and that technicalities in positioning specified in the script but incapable for the location had been changed.
We then learned the key rules for action scripts from a video, here are some of my notes:
well as a physical and phycological movement. Action can be used to convey
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Character
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Sound
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Visual details
Factors to keep in consideration when writing a script.
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Brevity - Be concise and give as much information in as few words as possible.
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Clarity - Be clear by using instructions. We need to understand immediately.
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Creativity - Using writing techiquies like metophors or figures of speech give a more visually clear image.
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Paragraph breaks - This creates more line breaks on the page. Should have a paragraph break when a new idea or new action or new character comes on the page.
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Capitalization Capitalise some words to show emphasis.
WALL/E
We were tasked to criteria the scriptwriter of Wall/e to how well they applied the action rules we learned in the previous lesson.
​Notes
The Script favors a weird writing style with short precise sentences describing the action of the camera this is not nesseraly negative in scriptwriting as it gets the point across in a basic sense and is a fast read but it leaves a lot of characterization and creative story control to the storyboard team and designers.
The limited script is reflected in the production where a shot is repeated from various angles to flesh out the time. The script is not representative of timing throughout.'
The capitalization in the script is used effectively asserting the trash is in "CUBES" So as to link wally and the world as he creates the blocks.
Mise-en-sen
Everything that creates the visual world of the movie and overall atmosphere.
Elements
Props can be key parts of the plot eg a gun in a fight scene. They can also be used to charectorize someone for example doctor witha stethoscope.
Setting - Establishes a the atmosphere of a scene eg in horror films the walls could be ripped.
Costume and make-up - Used to illatare a characters peronsoity, position /rank or current emotion. Eg a soldier wears a uniform. A sad person might not be dressed with care. And a revoultionly may wear bagdges.
Lighting and coulur - The lighting can be used to convey the tone of a scene. Eg a dreamy wismcal scene might be lit with pinks and yellows where as a sad one with blues and greens.
Staging - charectors proxemtics can tell the audience a lot about their relationship, eg if two characters stand close together we can assume their relationship is intimate and close.
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To look at mise-en-sen we watched the opening sequence of the Grand Budapest hotel.
Note
First, we see a woman holding a book walk up to a monument. The costume of the woman holding the book, which the film follows, is representative of its target audience. Wearing badges of revolution we can infer a rebellious nature in the story. We can assume the costume of the girl is not specified specifically in the script but instead she was simply described as a punk or such.
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Next in the sequence is a man talking directly to the camera about writing the book. The direct face on lighting together with the 1.8.5:1 accept ratio presents a modern interview-like sense while simultaneously calming the audience with the orange color tint. The tint was not specified in the script but preapers it desired effect.
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We then cut a combination of extreme long shots in the grand empty hotel portraying the loneliness felt by those inside. The grandness of the hotel is key in the story and was most likely instead in the script.
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Then on to a surreal shot of the external hotel in a pink and baby blue color dominant animation which sets into action the whimsical feel of the film. The color pallet is common of Wes Anderson's style and was probably not addressed in the script.
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Mise-en-sen task
We were told to design a room for a desribed charector, utilizeing mise-en-sen to create atmosphere and support the stroy.
A 40 year old male loner who is obsessed with playing pop music on his record player; he barely leaves his bedroom except to go to his mundane job at a burger chain.
Film genre: COMEDY
My notes
Costume hair and makeup
The man is dressed in pajamas covered in pizza sauce.
Setting and props.
On the floor are heaps of clothes and dirty plates.
Can’t see the walls for posters of the Clash and Sex pistols.
His bed is a single
A shelf of records is the only clean part of the room with LED lights lining around it
Lighting
The lighting is flat- making it look as realistic as possible.
It is dark lit mostly by a large computer screen
The 7 basic plots
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We looked at the 7 basic plots presented by Christopher Booker and identify how each of the scripts we've written in class fit into the plots.
The 7 basic plots
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Overcoming the monster
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Rags to riches
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The quest
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Voyage and return
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Comedy
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Tragedy
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rebirth
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My scripts and their Meta themes (Meta-themes are themes that acquire their meaning through the systematic co-occurrence of two or more other themes.)
INVASION - would fit the "overcoming a monster troop if it was not limited to 2 pages.
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DINNER TABLE SCRIPT - The dinner table script either fits tragedy or comedy depending on the director’s cinematic style.
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PROP SCRIPT - The full story of that script would develop into a rebirth narrative of both brothers entangled with an overcoming the monster plot for Mickey and his alcoholism.
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We also talked about what could inspire story plots in groups, In my group we discussed various things here are smeof them I noted down.
The writing process
We disscussed in class the writing process.
Establish a routine - it’s good to write and complete work in the mind of your schedule.
Write what you know - Writing from experience makes the writing more organic.
Binary opposition - Eg in Nemo, the father protectiveness is opposed by nemo's yearn for freedom
Watch other films - getting inspiration from other films is useful in stimulating ideas.
keep a notebook - ideas can be collected
Research - Learn from others experience and make sure your facts and correct
keep it simple - don’t complicate things for production with experience or complicated visuals and sound. Some of the best ideas are simple.
live a little - Go and get personal experience which can draw from in writing
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Loglines
Loglines are short desribetions of a film or piece of media that outline the basic plot, bineray oppisites and key charectors.
We then made logliines for 3 scripts we've written.
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Invasion
Everything is not as it seems around brit, mysterious spiders nests begin to appear all around. As the headteacher reassures the student’s everything fine they begin to fall.
Dinner table
Things begin to go a stray in the Freeman house hold, objects go missing and change in mystrories ways, what will they do.
Bert and Mickey
Brothers Bert and Mickey learn to navigate the world together.
Role of a script writer
RESEARCH
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Look into the validity of a potential idea.
FIRST DRAFT
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Complete a first draft of the script.
REWRITES
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Fine tune the script until it is complete.
SCRIPT READER
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Someone checks the script - e.g. script checking service
DIRECTOR/PRODUCER INVOLVEMENT
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Listen to advice and opinions.
SHOOTING SCRIPT
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Camera information is included.
ADJUSTMENTS DURING PRODUCTION
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Changes can be made once production is underway.