Week Four

Sorry people I know this post is two weeks late, but I've had a hectic couple of weeks being away in Melbourne for half a week for a rugby competition then only to arrive home absolutely shattered and have to leave for a week of madness for the annual C.I.T. media camp down in Fairbridge (which was a blast, and I got to direct so it was well worth it). So recently assignments have started snowballing a bit, but enough excuses!

In this lecture we went through the first process a director normally goes through when he or she first receives a script, which is generally research & breaking down a script.
This is necessary so they can get down to the core elements of the story such as the underlying themes of each scene & overall theme of the script, the individual characters & their motivations, how the director feels about the story and then decide on the visual elements side of it.

We were given a scene from one of the lecturer's short films which we had already seen, "Kanowna" and asked to each do a simple breakdown of the scene. Easy I thought to myself! But not so simple when it actually came time to do so, even thought I felt I had a good understanding of what was going on and what the director was trying to get across it was very hard to articulate it accurately & it took a lot longer than I anticipated.
There were a few key questions of that particular scene I had to figure out such as, what story was it telling the "A story" (main plot) or the "B story" (sub plot)? What's happening, the characters motivations & relationships, theme, feeling, specifics and look for any symbolism in the visuals. And every scene should have a beginning, middle and end. So knowing the inciting incident and how the mood changes from it had to be considered .
For the scene from "Kanowna" the key questions were where was it set, when was it set, what cultures were involved, relationship between the two characters and what sort of troopers were the two men?

By the end of it all my script was covered handwritten, scribbled notes, underlinings and it looked like an absolute mess. Which is funny because another lecturer said the messier the better, as it shows that you've gone through it, made changes, did some deliberating over it and had broke it down. And the better you as the director know the story, the better you can communicate with the actors and crew as to what you want from them! So I guess that is the main thing I took out of that lecture, so now on to the next.