Bob da Great

Some statements of a typical Singaporean my age vs [how similar / different i am from them]

They are very self-conscious. [I am usually not]

They follow too much. [I sorta at times]

Many worship and are obsessed with reality TV stars such as talent search idols or bands, both local and foreign. [Not at all]

They are satisfied with the government. [i guess i am]

They eat and breathe MSN and Friendster. [In Denial]

Everybody wants to be in on the in thing. [Somtimes i do]

At least 75% of their ‘properties’ are branded. [Depends for me]

Many club and pub, do social drinking. [Nope, i don't at all]

I spent the whole of this week in Hong Kong. So since I missed story-telling technique class, I shall do a short reflection of this module in general.

Storytelling class has been really meaningful and satisfying – i find myself really learning and growing. I am aiming to get an A grade for this module. (NO HINTS). However, I’m afraid that my weakness in creating and developing my ideas inefficiently will hold me back. It is still a barrier that I have yet to overcome. And quickly. The first draft of the next assignment is due by this coming Saturday.

Story-telling is an art, or as the official title of the module says – a technique. Indeed what good is a story (idea/thought) when it is not told well, whether it be through the script or the story-teller. So far we have learnt what a good story is, how to create a good idea / story and lastly, how to execute it in a captivating manner. It has somewhat prepared us for an assignment of a different module also – Photography. We are to put together a story based on 70-150 photos.

Anyway, as I occasionally browse through my fellow classmates’ blogs, here are my comments on the following few:

Dengli: She is very candid in her words and is able to write her thoughts and ideas in a very efficient and pleasant way.

Jordan: He writes because he loves to. One can easily tell from all his additional material posted that are not part of homework assignments. And very interesting stuff too!

Kane: He writes so much that he makes our few hundred words on his posts / pages look like a single paragraph on his. STOP IT KANE! I’m just kiddin’.

What is the difference between a memory and experience?
Sindhu gave an excellent answer – Memory is a biased account. It is the evolved product of an experience – it sits in your mind and modifies overtime, gradually leaning towards what you prefer to remember of it. Experience on the other hand is of course what actually happened. I never thought of it like that before – looks like most of what we deem to be experiences are probably no longer 100% ‘authentic’.

Kane’s stories were awful hard to guess which was true and which was false. The class was not just split in their guesses – most of us were doubtful of our answers. At the end of the day, it seemed to be a matter of how ‘stupid’ each thought Kane could be that determined the truth, as Sindhu rang out loud and clear to support her stand of story one, “ cos’ he’s really DUMB!!!’’ The class totally cracked up.

That aside, what struck me the most was how he was able to make both stories equally believable and unbelievable. And it made me reflect deeply on mine. I realized that the aim was not in trying to fool the readers into thinking that the true story was false and vice-versa but to actually make it impossible for them to even decide in the first place. Once the reader is quick and definite in giving his answer, regardless of whether he is right or wrong, the writer has already failed.

Next to share was Qing Hong. His stories too were hard to figure out. The first one was exciting but a turbulence? Possibility-o-meter, 2/10. Then Ryan and I were both in agreement of the implausible dramatic ending of his second story which I immediately associated with the movie Dead Poet’s Society. It simply seemed too marvelous to be an appropriate ending to a real-life story. It was ‘stuff’ you’d see in the movies. Possibility-o-meter, -2 /10. But perhaps things like that can happen after all as Qing Hong revealed to us that the second story was indeed true. I still think that it would have been really cool if the turbulence story were the real one though.

Annabelle’s stories were another learning / thinking point for the class. Many of us went for her first story as it had the ‘necessary’ and personal details that made it ‘authentic’ such as the show that she watched before going out, the address of their hang out spot, the cost and number of pellets, etc. Then Ryan raised an interesting remark – details do convince the reader but when there are too many details, would the story seem fake instead of true? I then pondered – So how do we match realism when we create stories?

The stories today were very well chosen.

From my last question, I received some enlightenment in the next part of our lesson. Writing realistic dialogue. We started off by watching a short The Autograph Book. As we discussed the short afterwards, I was surprised by how dialogue can be manipulated in many ways to reveal other information besides just the words themselves. For example, dialogue shows the relationship between the main character, Tessa and her best friend. It portrays that primary school girls are petty and childish which totally reminded me of my own primary school days, where amidst our juvenile ways there was a certain sense of innocence embedded in it all.

Dialogue is also used to express characters personalities and attitudes such as the crudeness and angst of outcast in the Tessa’s class. It is especially interesting to see how it implicitly shows that teacher is trained to say the ‘right’ things. To further exemplify our lesson, Ryan made a reference to a movie that we had watched before during our Intro to Film class The Usual Suspects. The story is built around the character ENTIRELY with dialogue. Audience experiences the story through Verbal’s eyes / words – we could only learn about Keyser Soze by what he communicated to Agent Kujan.

Essential exposition is an important detail that the audience would never understand unless someone tells them. For example, we can know why Tessa drew on the library book only if is her best friend is there to tell her (Tessa) that it wasn’t her (the best friend) fault. Exposition lets audience know, hence understand.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNT:

Functions of dialogue:

1) Express the personality of the characters
2) Communicate emotions
3) Tells of past or future events
4) Reveals new information (twists) to the audience
5) Expresses culture

Elements of dialogue:

1) Dialogue reveals character
- A character talks about himself or herself
- Other people talk about that character

2) Dialogue establishes relationships between characters
- Characters express attitudes and opinions that are in opposition to one another. (Like how the two girls communicated with each other)

3) Good effective dialogue will move the story forward

4) Dialogue communicates faces and information to the audience
- It conveys essential exposition:
Important details which we would not understand unless it was explained to us
- It is plot base information the audience need to understand, and is done through dialogue
- Characters will talk about what happened, establishing the story line.

5) Dialogue ties the script together
- The whole plot of Usual Suspects is in the dialogue; it always comes back to the conversation between the detective and Verbal.

Bad side of dialogue:

1) Tells too much
2) No visual impact, not enough show
3) Not natural, cliché
4) You shouldn’t make dialogue sound real as it will be boring but then again it has to sound real.

Common mistakes:

1) Dialogue should be used sparingly, never telling the audience what they can see for itself.

2) Dialogue is no substitute for action.

3) Dialogue should not match conventional spoken dialogue “real talking”
- Not real, but realistic

We started off with a disscussion on a short film we watched last week. It is about a group of young boys who were infatuated with a girl much older than them and knew that their infatuaution woul never be satisfied. Hence, they decided to ‘hate’ her instead and try to ‘destroy’ her relationship with her boyfriend. Indeed as the narrator of the film (who was one of the boys) puts it, “Virginal heart has its own logic”. A virginal heart can be interpreted as one that has not experienced real love or been broken. Therefore, everything seems logical when one first begins to experience it. And for the boys, the logic of their virginal hearts was immature revenge whereby they followed the “If you cant it, no one else can get it” rule of their hearts.

The story concludes with the girl’s fiancé dying in a mountain climbing accident. Audience assume that the boys most probably feel guilty but they didn’t, they felt nothing pity. In fact, they were very indifferent towards her. This is to portray that love is not always a happy thing. It brings about a lot of emotions – a lot of miseries and pain, different from what we expect. There is a transition between romance as one grows older. This film certainly does not do the typical things most films do.

After the film, Ryan got us into groups of three or four people to share our letters to the past. The discussion made me think very differently about how to effectively and genuinely convey my emotions and meanings to others. I learnt that the reader would not feel sad just because the writer is. The writer needs to give the reader REASON to feel the emotions. And the reason derives from how well the writer can conveys why the person he is writing about deserves to be missed or deserves the emotions of the readers. Basically, the reader should feel for the person that the writer is writing about and not the writer himself.

There are three main things to consider when writing such a Letter – Emotions and Details and Writer’s changes. Our letters need to have a balance of details and emotions. Also, we (the writer) tend to subconsciously assume that “ people would understand”. We must remember that we are writing for an ‘audience’.

Hence, how can we properly explain our feelings to the audience? Using words like sad, lonely etc. are actually quite emotionless. Using complicated and over-descriptive terms also makes it hard for the audience to understand. We need to explain the process and situation in simple yet moving ‘language’. To achieve this, we as writers need to compare our emotions with something else that the audience can relate to – basically, to put ourselves in the reader’s shoes. As Ryan sums up our discussion,” If a movie/book is sad, do we feel sad because we care about the characters, or because we can relate it to our own lives?” I feel that it depends on the context (whether I can relate to it) and also how the characters are described. I guess it can be both.

Just a thought – I think our group managed to have a constructive discussion because Ryan is a relatively direct person. Therefore, we were able to progress and improve on our letters through knowing the weaknesses of what we have written. I like how Ryan said that as friends, many of us tend to be afraid to give and sensitive to receive criticism. It is bad because without hard words, no effective discussion can be developed – Negative words are more impactful and begets change / improvement /progress.

We went on to watch an Australian short titled “Intransit” by Mike Daly. It was about a boy “Intransit” between life and death. We see the reflections of all the things that have happened in his life – how he kept apologizing to his dad, how he wanted to ask his dad to pay more attention to him than the TV.

The weakness of this short is that there is a certain lack of emotions. The plot is also difficult to understand – there are no immediate followings. Its strength lies in its ‘rushing’ and sometimes gripping images coupled with intense music that creates a momentum and pace. Looking on the other side of a complex plot, it can be a strength as well because it is also open to individual interpretations.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNT:

WRITING FOR AN AUDIENCE…

The audience does not want to know what you feel.
They want to know why / the reasons behind your emotions.

1. Screenwriter = storyteller

The cinematic experience is not just made up of words you might put on paper, but the audiences’ emotional reaction to that reaction.

Don’t write just for you, to please yourself. Figure out what the audience wants and connect it to the something that you want to tell them.

Writer => takes something and connects/relates it to our audience
Director => develops that connection and brings it to the people
(In all these roles, it is still a person that you are connecting your ideas to.)

2. Its people to people, and not the director/writer etc who are important.

*Writers= need to connect
a) Themselves
b) Their unique vision
c) The material
d) The drama
e) Others
f) Emotions/ what they have learnt

To create a certain sense of magic, emotional effect on the audience…

*What people want from watching movies
a) Kane’s beautiful thought – to know that somewhere out in the world, there is someone who feels just like them
b) To relate, connect.
c) Audiences want to be transported by screenplay.

3. Where do you look for a story?
a) Inside yourself
b) Everything to learn about other people is already in you.
c) You need to figure how to connect to it.

Figure out how to connect the things in you to what you observe in life…

4. Experience
a) All people have fragments of stories from our lives
b) These potential ideas prompt your desire to know more
c) Respond emotionally and intellectually to what you heard
d) Think of what’s next and what do you care.
e) Good stories are born in the heart, not the head.
f) Remember the role of the audience
g) You ARE the audience

Most of our life we have been the audience. Now, we need to provide to the others the same experiences.

Today, Ryan had some of us share our 50-word stories so that the class could improve upon them. For each story, we were to write a one-line summary of what it was about, followed by what worked in the story and what didn’t. A few of us struggled to sum up the story in one sentence, but I think we all eventually understood how to write only the raw basic idea down. I learnt a lot through analyzing my classmates’ stories. It made me think and reflect about mine; what were the strengths and weaknesses of my stories and hence, how I can make them better.

I found many of their stories very interesting and creative. I couldn’t help but to wonder how long they took to develop their ideas, though I am pretty sure none of them took as long as I did. I’m still working on this difficulty of mine.

Anyway, Ryan gradually directed our discussion to the topic of today’s lesson that was – Plot and Character. I think it started with Sindhu’s story about a speed demon. The story had a relatively detailed plot but very little was known about the character itself. It sparked off the debate about which we thought was the more important element to elaborate upon when we had a mere fifty-words – the lesson kicked off from there.

I never knew that characters could be segmented into 3 dimensions – Physiology, sociology and psychology (makes a good tongue twister if you say it really fast…haha). Also, there are 2 separate components that make up a plot – the interior and the exterior events of the character that have happened and are happening respectively. (further elaboration in notes below). To help us better understand these concepts, Ryan used the beginning scene of the movie Taxi to teach us how to apply them. It was a really interesting activity. Before the movie, I could have never guessed that we could actually get such an immense amount of information about a character by only watching several minutes or so of him.

At the end the day, we concluded by coming back to the question that I was still battling with– Is plot or character more important? If a plot was weak, can an outstanding and entertaining character still salvage it? Vice-versa, can an excellent plot still carry through even with weak characters? And how does one decide what is the right blend of character and plot? It suddenly dawns upon me as I writing this reflection that deciding factor is actually ultimately the audience – the level of importance for either element depends what they want to see / which they to prefer to know more about. This leads me to a thought that Ryan shared during class – Females are more interested in characters while males are more interested in plot. I guess in other words, it also decides the kind of genres they rather watch.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNT:

1. A story starts with character:
- It is easy to identify the character and relate to the plot and so on.
- The character is the heart, the soul, and nervous system of your story.
- Characters narrate the stories; let us know more about the story. (We follow their point of view; we grow with them)

- It is through your characters that the viewers experience emotions.
- It is through your characters that they are touched.

Connect with the audience

a) Without character, you have no action (We need the character to do something)
b) Without action, you have no conflict
c) Without conflict, you have no story
d) Without story, you have no screenplay (nothing to write)

2. What are the questions in mind when you are developing a character?
- Personality
- Goal
- Obstacles he faces.
- Emotions

3. When developing a character, ask yourself:
- Who is my character
- What does he want
- What is her quest
- What drives him to the resolution of the story?

Storytelling tool 2: Memory
Your memory is a wonderful cabinet of past incidents which you have experienced or been told.
These memories are points of references to your own past experiences.

1. Write what you know
A certain element of truth in what u are trying to communicate
Can relate better and make audience believe you better

BUT actually you should…
2. Write what you don’t know

Memory plays an influence to the film