“Charged”: what a great word. Not “filled,” not “loaded,” not “used,” but “charged.” It gives a sense of energy and power.
“Emotion”: this is the pure essence of filmmaking. Every frame is about emotion. I like to think that it’s a two-way thing: the emotion we portray on the screen and the emotion that the screen is able to elicit in the audience.
One might say, “Wait a second, if every frame must be ‘charged with emotion,’ what about the insert of a phone?”
You are right, the phone doesn’t portray emotion, but in the context of the story, if the ability to pick up that phone means the difference between life and death for our protagonist… then even the insert of a phone is charged with emotion, right?
One Frame, One Story
The power of visual storytelling is the power of telling an entire story with one frame, one picture.
Can you see the story behind Figure 1.1? Can you think of what happened before and what might happen next? Do you feel something for the people portrayed in this picture?
Figure 1.1. AP Photo/The Journal&Constitution, Louie Favorite
This picture portrays Major Terri Goodman Gurrola as she greets her daughter after returning from a seven-month tour in Iraq.
Now, let’s put on our director’s hat and pretend that this is a scene of a movie you are supposed to shoot. Here are some of the elements you need to consider and decisions you must make.
First of all: Where are we?
When I ask this question to my students, I usually have one overwhelmingly common answer: airport. Then I must ask, why? There are no airplanes, there are no signs or timetables. Why are we in an airport?
Because all over the image there are visual clues that tell our brain this is an airport. Because the shiny floor, the people with luggage, and even the colors of the objects out of focus in the background belong to what we know to be an airport. Whether we have experienced them or we have just seen them in movies and documentaries, this is what an airport looks like to us.
Now, imagine that as a hot-shot director the producer wants to give you whatever you want and you say, “For the return of the heroine at home I want to shut down a terminal at LAX because it will be epic and magic and…” and then you deliver this shot. Do you think your producer would be happy to have spent a few million dollars for this frame? It’s definitely beautiful and it’s charged with emotion but you don’t need an entire terminal, right? Hell, you don’t even need a real airport. You need a shiny floor, a few extras with luggage, and a colorful box of chocolate, and the magic is done.
Yes, because one of the amazing things is that you can rely on what the audience already knows about the world they live in. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.
Thanks to the fact that the audience of your story lives in this world, we can also assume that the woman’s wardrobe tells them that she is a soldier. And everybody will agree that from her behavior and body language she didn’t spend the last six months guarding a monument in Washington, DC. I think she’s been to hell and back, don’t you?
In one frame an entire story has been captured. The tension in the woman’s hand; her closed eyes; and her whole body seems to have just collapsed to the ground. All those elements contribute to telling us this story.
Even in terms of composition, the presence of the man in a suit walking behind her gives depth and reinforces the dynamism of the frame, a kinetic energy that moves from left to right.
This frame has been definitely “charged with emotion.”
There is one thing that we can say creates the whole story. The fulcrum of the picture is the facial expression (the performance, if you want) of our heroine. There is where the story starts. Everything surrounding it is information that reinforces that image.
Figure 1.2 was taken by Oded Balilty and won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography. The image shows a lone Jewish woman defying Israeli security forces as they remove illegal settlers in the West Bank.
Figure 1.2
With this picture, I want you to focus on the composition and camera angle. If we apply the notorious “rule of third”4 to this picture (Figure 1.3), we understand immediately why it’s so powerful.
Figure 1.3
We have different elements to analyze:
more then two-thirds of the image pushing against one-third
the contrast
the low angle that prevents us from actually seeing the real number of law enforcers (from this angle it almost seems that even the people on top of the hill are pushing against the old woman)
Once more, when you think about this image you can imagine what happened before and what is going to happen next.
Here the story is the classic David versus Goliath. One woman against an army.
Or is it?
Here is the truth: the woman is actually fighting against one soldier, maybe two, but the others don’t even know she exists. In a split second this story is over; this is a story that existed only in this frame. Why?
Because of the camera angle and the moment. If the camera weren’t in line with the shields, we wouldn’t have this perfect line of separation. If the camera were a little bit higher, we would have seen that the woman is pushing against one shield and there are many others behind her that won’t find any resistance because nobody is there.
This story exists only in this frame because the camera angle and the composition create a reality that never existed.
Let’s do one more little experiment with this picture. Let’s crop it. (Figure 1.4a and Figure 1.4b)
Figure 1.4 a&b- AP Photo/Oded Balilty
Do you notice anything different? In Figure 1.4a we reframed the picture, giving more space to the woman, making her stronger. And if we flip the image, Figure 1.4b, we even convey the feeling that she is actually winning.
Same situation, different framing, different story.
That’s why I cannot agree with the famous statement “Photography is the truth. And the cinema is the truth twenty-four times a second.”5 As soon as I frame reality, I manipulate the perception of it and storytelling is always manipulation.
As soon as you look at Figure 1.5,6 notice how your eyes are driven to one particular part of the frame: the face of the young man.
Figure 1.5
It’s not because he is more attractive than others. The reason our eyes go to him right away is because it’s the only part of the frame that is in focus.
Everything around him (in front and behind) is out of focus and our eyes can’t stand it. So we are driven directly to him. It doesn’t matter where the object or character is, we would have moved our attention right away to it/him.
You might ask, How does the focus/out of focus change this story? It’s pretty simple.
Right now the picture tells us the story of one person surrounded by a crowd. If the focus would be deeper giving us an image where all the faces were in focus, then the story would be about a crowd. Same shot, same angle, same performance, different focus, different story. (The manipulation of the focus is due to the use of a property of lenses called depth of field.)
I want you to pay attention to this method because it’s a very powerful tool to drive the attention of the audience to the part of the frame that matters the most.
Assignment
Your assignment for this chapter is to start a collection of still pictures that tell stories and affect you emotionally. This is not an assignment that has an end. I suggest that, as a storyteller, you keep collecting images for the rest of your life. They’ll become your visual background and they’re going to inspire you and offer solutions to problems that you’ll encounter as a storyteller.
Choose these images not only from movies, but also from magazines and especially from newspapers. As photographers who capture real events, photojournali
sts have a gift for getting the right moment. They rarely have second chances so they are great at framing events in a very intense way.
Personally I prefer to have the pictures printed on paper so that, when the time comes, I can hang them on the wall of my office and use them as a guide through production. But if you prefer, you can create a folder on your computer and start to collect them there.
Do not underestimate this part of the process. You never stop learning, so never stop studying.
* * *
1 Hitchcock, by F. Truffaut (Simon & Schuster)
2 Making Movies, by Sidney Lumet (Vintage)
3 Impressions at 24 fps, by Simone Bartesaghi on the YouTube Channel SIBAMEDIA
4 A quick search on YouTube will give you all the information about this fundamental rule for composition. If you want to know more check out The Filmmaker’s Eye by Gustavo Mercado (Focal Press).
5 From the movie Le petit soldat directed by Jean-Luc Godard
6 A fan in Times Square reacts to a play while watching the New York Yankees play the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 6 before going on to win the 2009 Major League Baseball World Series in New York, November 5, 2009. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson.
2.
Touch
Production Design
Touch:
is a perception resulting from activation of neural receptors, generally in the skin including hair follicles, but also in the tongue, throat, and mucosa. A variety of pressure receptors respond to variations in pressure (firm, brushing, sustained, etc.).
(Source: Wikipedia)
Environmental Reflections
A few weeks ago I went to see an apartment. While I was moving from one room to another I was mostly paying attention to the size of the place, if there was major damage, if the kitchen and the bathroom were in good shape, etc., until something changed my point of view. When I entered the second bedroom I immediately noticed “the board.”
“The board” is a nickname for one of the most popular techniques in screenwriting. In the most classic version, it consists of placing a series of cards on a cork-board. Each card represents a scene (or sequence) and helps to give a bird’s-eye view of the entire project.
This is a technical description of the board, but for screenwriters it also means a damn honest commitment to the story, serious work, and, mostly, sweat and blood.
So, as soon as I noticed the board, my focus shifted and I started to notice immediately other details that were familiar.
The kind of books that were on the shelves and the one on the desk, the color-coded 3×5 cards and the pile of scripts to read, the ergonomic chair and the little fridge under the table. Now even the details from the other rooms come back to my mind with a new meaning. A few inspiring magnets on the fridge; lots of DVDs, mostly in special editions; a big TV, way too big and sophisticated compared to the rest of the furniture. This is the place, this is where he or she spends most of his or her time. Suddenly I know that person, I don’t know who he or she is, but I know that we have a lot in common and I can already imagine an interesting conversation that we might have because I can see that on the desk he or she keeps Syd Field as a reference book while I use Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!.
I learned so much about the person, in just a few glances. I can sum it up with one sentence: our world reflects us, we reflect our world.
The Outer World as a Reflection of Ourselves
Next time you enter a store, or stop by your boss’s office, or get a lift from a friend, take a look around and try to understand how these people affect their world. It’s not only a matter of what they buy or wear; it’s also about how they take care of their personal environment.
You’ll notice very quickly that their world is often a reflection of their identity. What they care about is often already there. It’s kind of our instinct to personalize (some might say contaminate) our world as much as we can. I don’t know if there is anybody who still remembers when computers used the “character interface” for which you didn’t have the freedom to personalize your desktop with your last vacation picture. Unfortunately (I’m that old) I do and I still remember how exhilarating it was when, for the first time, we were able to put our personal stamp on something that was, for a long time, the same for everybody.
And this leads us to the second aspect. We personalize our world, we show our true selves unless… unless someone prevents us or we censor ourselves.
The Outer World as a Deformed Expression of Our Selves
Not only might there be office rules about clothing, but even more there are societal rules about how and what to show about our identity.
We might self-censor certain kinds of hobbies or past events in our lives if we expect those who surround us may not appreciate it.
A very famous Italian writer and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Luigi Pirandello, wrote several masterpieces about the masks that society forces us to wear. In a particularly important novel, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, the protagonist, Vitangelo, discovers by way of a completely irrelevant question from his wife, that everyone he knows, everyone he has ever met, has constructed a Vitangelo-persona in their own imagination and that none of these personas corresponds to the image of Vitangelo that he himself has constructed and believes himself to be. Therefore Vitangelo is one person for himself and, at the same time, one hundred thousand personas, each one created in the mind of each person he ever met.
When you work on a character, you must also think how his or her world surrounds that character. What would the character keep secret and what kind of image would he or she want to present to others?
It’s important to answer these four questions:
How would that character affect his or her own environment? Personal space (where the character can express his or her personal taste more freely, like at home) and social space (places where the character might interact with others, like work or public events).
How does that character try to project a different self-identity? What are the secrets he or she chooses to keep?
How does the environment force that character to behave and express him- or herself?
How does the environment perceive that person?
I want to express myself.
You cannot express yourself, social rules.
PERSONA
ENVIRONMENT
I want others to see myself in this way.
Actually we see you in this other way.
The fascinating part is to think in this way: What information can I provide the audience without even showing the protagonist?
Difficult to do? Of course, you must know your characters very well.
In order to illustrate this concept look at these frames from the movie The Matrix.1 Figure 2.1 clearly shows how Neo is affecting his own apartment. Chaotic, creative, personal. Figure 2.2 sets up the transition to Neo’s work place. His boss’s office is clean and aseptic, without personality. It’s not a surprise that in Figure 2.3, Neo’s personal cubicle has none of his personal touch.
Figure 2.1
Figure 2.2
Figure 2.3
Two more examples. Review the opening sequences from two masterpieces: Rear Window2 (Figures 2.4 to 2.21) and Back to the Future3 (Figures 2.22 to 2.37) and answer the following questions:
Rear Window
What is the season?
What’s the job of the girl who loses her bra?
What’s Jimmy Stewart’s job?
How did he break his leg?
In just a few minutes the extraordinary Hitchcock’s visual storytelling has already given us so much information.
Figure 2.4
Figure 2.5
Figure 2.6
Figure 2.7
Figure 2.8
Figure 2.9
Figure 2.10
Figure 2.11
Figures 2.7, 2.8, 2.10 (+ water truck) give us the same message: it’s hot. But why? Why is it so important that we understand it’s hot and we are in the summer? Verisimilitude! In winter nobody keeps the windows open. With closed windows there wouldn’t be any chance for our protagonist to learn so much about his neighbors, let alone a murder.
Figure 2.11: One gesture, a movement, a habit, and we already know so much about this girl and her passion: dancing; even better, ballet.
Figure 2.12
Figure 2.13
Figure 2.14
Figure 2.15
Figure 2.16
Figure 2.17
Figure 2.18
Figure 2.19
Figure 2.20
Figure 2.21
The Director's Six Senses Page 2
