In Genre Filmmaking author Danny Draven shows the aesthetic, emotional and visual techniques of popular shots and sequences in the comedy, thriller, sci-fi, horror, action, romance, and masterworks/epics genres, and then explains how, when, and why to use them.

Here’s an excerpt from the Thriller Genre chapter, with examples from movies like Children of Men and Seven:

Genre Filmmaking Excerpt

Photo by Daniel Dudek-Corrigan

Because it’s possible to send video directly from cell phones, many users are coming to prefer these devices over similar-sized but dedicated pocket video cameras or more expensive (and heavier) video-capable dSLR cameras, or even single-purpose video cameras.

Yes, smart phones with complete video capability like Apple’s iPhone® or Samsung’s Galaxy® can shoot high-definition (HD) video that looks good on a computer screen, a tablet, or even a huge TV screen. Many are equipped with multi-million pixel sensors that produce amazingly sharp pictures both outside in bright light and even indoors where the light is dimmer. They also are capable of recording professional quality sound.

One significant challenge for any amateur shooting video is not to induce seasickness with images that jiggle from camera movement. Many recent smart phone models, however, even include a built-in stabilization feature to help solve that problem! However, even though this clever piece of software does help to settle down a wobbly image, I still recommend putting the phone on a small tripod, especially when shooting an interview.

Most of the phones even have a built-in torch (flash light) for shooting in dark situations. The quality of the light is predictably awful, but does allow shooting in very dark situations. Downloadable apps add pro-like features to phones’ and tablets’ cameras that provide surprisingly complete technical control. For example, VideoPro Camera® http://www.videoprocamera.com/ ($4.99) allows iPhone® users to manually focus one point of an image by touching the screen, and to control brightness by activating the built-in light meter and then manually locking exposure by touching a point on the screen anywhere in a scene.

This short video shows how to control focus, exposure, white balance, and even stabilize the image when shooting video with an iPhone:

The automatic and manual controls on smart phones are constantly improving. Using Apple’s latest generation iPhone, iPad and iTouch devices, external mics and headphones, and the app VideoPro Camera® (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/videopro-camera/id598364177, you can simultaneously record and listen to live audio to monitor its quality.

As an inexpensive alternative to high-end remote wireless mics, I recommend using a Bluetooth wireless mic and receiver from Sony, which will provide clear sound from up to 100 feet from the phone.
With the addition of apps like Apple’s iMovie http://www.apple.com/apps/imovie/ you can edit the video on the fly and, of course, send it anywhere in the world with a finger’s touch. Note: You do have to have small fingers to edit on the iPhone.

Editing video on the tablet is much easier. And many people are actually shooting video with tablets these days, immediately viewing the footage on the tablet’s relatively large screen, editing clips and combining the footage into polished video stories.

Then it’s easy enough to upload to Dropbox or post to Facebook or another social network, or Internet video site such as YouTube or Vimeo.

One thing is sure: Smart phones and video-capable tablets are more and more pervasive. The number of homemade videos shot with smart phones on YouTube alone is staggering. The quality of a lot of that video is also staggeringly poor.

However, the improvements in smart phones, the use of external microphones and headphones to monitor sound, and the control and functionality that apps are adding to the phones are likely to change that.

WEBSITE: http://www.videoprocamera.com/
VIDEO: http://vimeo.com/63351134
APP: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/videopro-camera/id598364177
VideoPro Camera | Professional video for your iPhone
www.videoprocamera.com
VideoPro Camera is an app that brings professional video to the iPhone. Monitor audio in real time, control zoom speed, and more.

The basics of television storytelling are really a tale of two dynamics. In one, television shares many storytelling elements, concepts and techniques with cinema, because much of the language of television was initially adapted from film. The other dynamic is one of a gradual evolution over time, with television storytelling being slowly reshaped by strong forces tied directly to a medium that is dictated by broadcast networks and their financial model. Traditional television storytelling and development is derived from the harsh demands of a weekly broadcast distribution schedule.

Photo by Medhi

Television, unlike film or video games, is fundamentally a sponsor-driven medium, paid for by advertisers that buy commercial space during a particular show based on ratings information gathered by services like Nielsen which electronically track who is watching what, when and for how long. Sponsors identify those shows with the most potential for reaching customers for their products. Shows with higher ratings allow the network to demand more money per minute from these advertisers, who are now often competing with each other to buy commercial time on a hit show. Conversely, shows that receive low ratings are usually canceled – they are not generating enough revenue for the network by not reaching a large enough audience (or the type of audience) to interest advertisers.

Though the sponsor-driven revenue model of television dominates, it has some competition of late from the subscriber-driven revenue model used by premium cable networks like HBO, Showtime, and others. Under this model, the cable network uses its total subscriber value, the aggregate of the ratings of all of its programs, to dictate its licensing fees to the cable providers, like Comcast, DISH, or Direct TV. Subscriber-driven networks don’t show commercials (other than for their own programs, which are promos), so programs produced for the network don’t have commercial breaks.

Due to the sponsor-driven revenue model of television, advertising has become an integral part of the way television stories are organized and presented. Every episode needs to be structured in such a way as to keep audiences from changing the channel during the commercial breaks. This is why you sometimes hear derisive comments that television stories are simply a method for delivering advertisements, but writers and producers in television have worked this seeming limitation to their advantage, creatively adapting traditional storytelling techniques into new forms that are unique to television but dynamic and creative in ways that have begun influencing the ways other media think about storytelling as well.

Structured Acts

Television shows can be characterized both by their format, which is the length of a standard episode, and by larger narrative issues including genre conventions (though duration and genre have become so interlocked in some types of shows that they are sometimes talked about almost interchangeably). Regardless of format or genre, the basic building blocks of a television story are acts , or the ways in which the narrative is broken into parts that, unlike film, do not flow immediately from one to the other but rather are separated by commercial breaks.

These breaks occur at regular intervals – interrupting the story, arbitrarily and artificially creating narrative chunks that do not immediately or easily line up with the three acts described previously. As a result, television storytelling has had to rethink the way that stories are told, borrowing or developing additional storytelling elements, such as the recap, prologue, teaser, tag, cliffhanger and previews (more on these later) as well as rethink three-act structure.

Though there are some television shows – like The Simpsons (1989–present) – that have tried to anchor their stories in a three-act structure, we’ve seen more and more examples in recent years of these basic constraints of broadcast television and sponsorship being the impetus to creatively redefine the way acts are defined and what each has to accomplish. These constraints have been around for a long time and explain why television has always had examples of storytelling structures like the two-act and four-act show in addition to three-act approaches. But in recent years, we have begun seeing more and more shows that are considered four-act, five-act, six-act and seven-act structures.

Though the number of acts and what has to happen in each are somewhat dependent upon a show’s format and genre, in all of them, Act 1 establishes a character (or in some cases, characters) who has an important need, want or desire. This need is the result of something being out of balance, and the character needs to take action, to do something, to get things back to normal. This need is sometimes referred to as a goal, and the rest of the show is about the character trying to get what he needs.

This first act establishes not just the need but also the conflict, or those things that make it difficult for the protagonist to have what they want. Whether drama or comedy, there must be conflict. Conflict occurs when obstacles are placed between the character and the attainment of his goal. The more challenging the obstacle, the harder the character must struggle against it, and the more compelling the story.

Just like in film, the obstacles must become increasingly more difficult to overcome as the story progresses. Obstacles in Act 2 are harder than in Act 1, and each subsequent obstacle within Act 2 is more difficult than the one before it.

The character will either get what they want or be denied what they want during the climax, which in film traditionally occurs in what’s labeled Act 3, but in television generally occurs in the last full act of the show, whether that’s called Act 3, 4, 5 or 6. In both comedies and dramas, the climax is the highest point of action, where everything is on the line. After the climax, the central problem is solved one way or the other, and we move on to resolution, which tells us how the characters are doing after the climax. Simple, huh?

Excerpt from Storytelling Across Worlds: Transmedia for Creatives and Producers by Tom Dowd, Michael Niederman, Michael Fry, and Josef Steiff © 2013 Taylor and Francis Group. All Rights Reserved.

1.) Where is the audience looking? The Visual Sins can’t cause problems if the audience doesn’t look at them. Every shot has a subject and a lot of non-subjects. The audience spends most of its time, or all of its time, looking at the subject. The subject is the actor’s face, the speeding car, the alien creature, the adorable dog etc. If the Visual Sins have impacted the subject, the audience sees the problem and gets brain strain.

But most of a scene is not the subject. Peripheral objects, backgrounds, unimportant characters, crowds etc. are all non-subjects that the audience acknowledges but tends to ignore in favor of the subject. Non-             subjects can tolerate most of the Visual Sins because the audience is looking elsewhere.

2.) What’s the screen size? The problems caused by the Visual Sins can occur on any size screen, but the problems become more severe as the screen gets larger.

3.) How long is the screen time? Time is critical. The longer the audience looks at the Visual Sins the greater the risk of brain strain. All of the Sins have degrees of strength and may cause instantaneous discomfort or take more time to have a negative effect on the audience. Brief 3D movies like those shown in theme park thrill-rides can get away with using the Visual Sins in ways that would be unsustainable in a feature-length movie. An audience can even tolerate the Visual Sins in a long movie if the Sins’ appearance is brief.

Fortunately, the Visual Sins can be avoided or controlled to create a comfortable 3D viewing situation. The following discussion assumes the 3D is being presented on a 40-foot theatre screen.

Sin #1: Divergence

A stereoscopic 3D movie may require the audience’s eyes to diverge. This can be a serious viewing problem and can cause brain strain.

Divergence occurs when the viewer’s eyes turn outward in opposite directions to look at the subject in a scene. In real-life, our eyes don’t diverge. Ever.  Look at yourself in a mirror and try to simultaneously force your left eye to look at your left ear and your right eye to look at your right ear. It’s impossible to do. Both eyes want to look at the same ear at the same time.

In the real world, both eyes converge on the same object at the same time.

But when watching 3D, our eyes can be forced to diverge or angle outwards in opposite directions to look at an image pair. Divergence can be a problem when it involves the subject of the shot because that’s where the audience is looking.

Consider how our eyes see a stereoscopic image pair for a subject that appears behind the screen. The left eye sees the screen left image and the right eye sees the screen right image. Human eyes have a 2.5-inch IO. If an image pair’s actual measured parallax on the screen surface is 2.5 inches or less, the audience’s eyes will not diverge.

On a 40-foot theater screen with 2K resolution, a 10-pixel parallax will measure 2.5 inches or about 0.5 percent of the screen width. The 2.5-inch parallax separation forces the audience’s eyes to look in parallel but that will not cause eyestrain. In real life, we do the same thing when we look at any object more than about 40 feet away.

As the measured parallax widens past 2.5 inches, divergence will occur. The tolerance for subject divergence varies, but most people can watch subject divergence up to about 7.5 inches of measured screen parallax without feeling eyestrain. A 7.5-inch parallax is +30 pixels or about 1.5 percent of the screen’s width.

A parallax separation greater than 7.5 inches is called hyper-divergence. It can be used briefly for extreme subject punctuations but sustained hyper-divergence for a subject can cause eyestrain and headaches. Hyper-divergence can be used successfully for peripheral non-subjects without causing eyestrain because the audience isn’t looking at them directly; it’s watching the subject. Non-subject divergence can add depth that would be difficult to assign to the subject.

Watching hyper-divergence can be aesthetically distracting, and visually tiring. It’s like trying to hold a heavy weight. Initially, the weight feels tolerable but as time passes your muscles fatigue, the weight feels heavier, and eventually you collapse. The same pattern occurs with hyper-divergence and it becomes visually stressful.

Hyper-divergence is less likely to occur on television screens. A 60-inch (measured diagonally) consumer HD 2K television has an actual measured screen width of approximately 52 inches. A parallax of +92 pixels (4.75 percent of the screen width) measures about 2.5 inches. Any background object with a +92 pixel parallax places that object at infinity, and will not cause divergence.

A pixel parallax up to +280 or 14.25 percent is theoretically tolerable but is unusable in practice because other problems occur like ghosting. In practice, a television background object’s parallax of up to +92 pixels is tolerable, won’t cause eyestrain, and is extremely useful directorially. Placing objects farther away than +100 (5.25 percent of the screen width) isn’t necessary.

Divergence’s eyestrain is actually due to a combination of screen-measured parallax and the viewer’s distance from the screen. See Appendix C for a full explanation.

Hyper-divergence can cause another problem for the audience. If an object’s image pair is too far apart, the audience won’t be able to fuse them into a single 3D image. Even when wearing 3D glasses, the image pair appears as two identical objects rather than a single, fused stereoscopic image. The non-fused image pair visually disconnects the stereoscopic depth and the 3D illusion collapses.

Sin #2:  Ghosting

Ghosting (sometimes called cross-talk) appears because most 3D viewing systems cannot completely separate the left and right eye images of the stereoscopic pair. Each eye gets some “contamination” and sees a faint “ghost” of the image meant for the other eye. Ghosting is most visible in high contrast image pairs with a large parallax.

Put on your 3D glasses and look at these photos. Moon #1’s stereoscopic pair shows severe ghosting because it has high contrast and a large parallax. Even with your 3D glasses on, you can still see two moons instead of one. The ghosting is less noticeable in Moon #2 because there is less parallax. Moon #3’s ghosting has been eliminated by completely removing the parallax but it’s lost its depth.

Lowering the tonal contrast between Moon #4 and the background reduces the ghosting. Moon #5 uses a glow to decrease the contrast and minimize the ghosting.

Ghosting can be reduced by art direction and lighting. Avoiding high tonal contrast in sets, locations, set decoration, and costumes can reduce the problem. A fill light can reduce the tonal contrast and add light to deep shadows to avoid the ghosting.

Single person 3D viewing systems, like those pictured here, eliminate ghosting because their mechanics completely isolate the image for each eye.

Excerpt from 3D Storytelling: How Stereoscopic 3D Works and How to Use It by Bruce Block and Philip Captain 3D McNally © 2013 Taylor and Francis Group. All Rights Reserved.

Few film artists have been as prolific, talented, and utterly dismissive of their body of work as Woody Allen. “When I’m home lying on my bed and I’m writing something, I have these incredible ideas,” he once said. “I think I’m going to write Citizen Kane every time out of the box, and it’s going to be so great. And then I make the film, and I’m so humiliated by what I see afterward. I think: ‘Where did I go wrong?’”

Annie Hall

He is far too modest. Born in December 1935 in New York’s Bronx, Allen has been steadily writing and directing (and often starring in) his own films since 1969, and he’s proved equally capable at delivering hilarious comedies and thought-provoking dramas. Both have intrigued him since his childhood: In his teens, he was already selling jokes to local newspapers, but he was also intrigued by the great European films that were making their way to American cinemas. “Suddenly I saw that movies could actually be something substantially wonderful,” he recalled. His journey to moviemaking began in earnest when he wrote the 1965 comedy What’s New Pussycat?, but his unhappiness with how the film turned out convinced him that he needed to direct his screenplays in the future. Thus began a level of creative control that has been the envy of several generations of filmmakers.

After early success with comedic films like Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975), Allen made a major creative breakthrough with Annie Hall (1977), a mature romantic comedy that went on to win four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay (which Allen shared with co-writer Marshall Brickman). Determined to stretch himself, Allen spent the next several years making films that demonstrated the breadth of his ambitions, moving from the Bergman-esque drama of Interiors (1978) to the grand-canvas romantic melancholy of Manhattan (1979) to the 81/2-inspired Stardust Memories (1980). The switching between serious and lighter fare has been a cornerstone of Allen’s work ever since, and indeed some of his very finest films are the ones that have merged the two: Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), and Husbands and Wives (1992).

Interiors

The Purple Rose of Cairo

Allen has received 23 Oscar nominations, winning four: three for writing and one for directing. Because of his self-effacing manner, he would probably diminish his own accolades. (“The whole concept of awards is silly,” he said in 1974.) But perhaps he would be more receptive to the six Academy Awards that have gone to actors in his films, which explains in part why performers happily sign up for his projects, even if it means playing small roles for not much money. Indeed, few contemporary writers have crafted so many memorable parts, whether it’s the movie-mad Depression-era wife (played by Mia Farrow) of The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), the adulterous murderer (Martin Landau) of Crimes and Misdemeanors, the emotionally adrift philosophy professor (Gena Rowlands) of Another Woman (1988), or the lovable titular heroine (Diane Keaton) of Annie Hall.

Hannah and Her Sisters

Husbands and Wives

As he is so prolific, Allen has experienced fallow periods in his career—it would be impossible not to have a few duds over the course of 45 films—but even his weakest efforts reveal an insight into eternal human concerns. Allen’s writing grapples with how people struggle to find contentment: through love, through success, through a few laughs. But, as his characters discover repeatedly, those comforts don’t last—a fact that supplies his films with their poignancy. At age 77, he remains as searching as his protagonists, and for audiences around the world, that tireless quest for meaning has been one of the greatest, most enduring rewards the cinema has offered over the last four decades. “I’m obeying nobody but my artistic muse,” he once said about how he decides what project to write next. “The experience is doing the project; the critical and commercial responses are not terribly relevant. Doing the idea and expressing yourself, maintaining your own criteria, is.”

In the case of entertainment, a brand is the maker of the content. J. J. Abrams production company Bad Robot is a brand but LOST and the 2010 Star Trek reboots are very much extensions of that brand identity, at the same time each of those properties is a brand unto itself, or part of a larger brand. The content, as a brand extension, is meant to satisfy a need by the target consumer to be entertained in a specific way. The Bad Robot audience expects a different experience than the Pixar audience. All consumers are not created equal and brands tend to create content for a specific consumer called the target audience or target demographic.

Photo by Andertoon

Demographics: Demographics are statistical characteristics of a particular group, referred to as a population. Demographic data is used to study target audiences and create a profile of a brand’s consumer to help create content that attracts and maintains those consumers. Examples of target audiences include gender or age ranges, ethnicity, employment and location, alone or in combination. Erroneously, demographics are often associated with spending habits, lifestyle choices, values and other areas related to interest, activities, or opinions. These are actually part of a psychographic profile, which is often combined with demographic details, hence the confusion.

Niche audiences: Niches represent even smaller more fine-tuned or specific groups of target consumers such as dog owners, 14–35 year old males who play the blockbuster video game Call of Duty or single working women over 35 with kids. Interestingly, the idea of appealing to a niche audience, especially in media, was viewed as a negative. In television, for example, series that appealed to a “niche audience” were usually canceled quickly since, traditionally, niche meant low viewership. Today, however, more and more media projects of all kinds are targeted at niche audiences as those audiences become more and more selective of what they consume and when. The term “narrowcasting” has even been coined to refer to the practice of specifically targeting, through advertising and marketing, what not all that long ago would have been an undesirable niche audience.

Some larger brands, big studios and production companies, usually try to satisfy multiple demographic groups. Universal Pictures, for instance, is not known for distributing a specific genre of content created only for a narrow target audience. Universal makes everything from 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake to the upcoming Woody Woodpecker reboot. Walt Disney Studios, however, is synonymous with family entertainment and makes movies that range from Pinocchio (1940) to their most recent transmedia mega-partnership with Marvel Studios to distribute Marvel’s The Avengers.

If Disney made Dawn of the Dead, fans around the globe would be up in arms, confused and ready to choke Mickey on sight. Why? Disney would have stepped out of brand and disappointed their core audience of kids and their parents and fans of Disney movies. Disney would have betrayed their unwritten contract with their audience, to remain “in-brand,” to stay Disney and to continue to churn out, with the help of Pixar and Marvel, Disney Magic.

From that example we see that branding is about a relationship between two “entities,” the brand and the consumer. For a moment let’s think of these as people named “the Brand” and “the Consumer.” These two people have established a relationship of expectation. The Consumer expects the Brand to offer continuous and uninterrupted supply of “in brand” products and to make the very same general type of product or content that they were making when the relationship was established. The Consumer comes to depend on the brand for their “special” type of product. It’s OK to make different products, but they have to give the same type of satisfaction, and they have to satisfy the “need” created by the Consumer’s liking of the original product offered and consumed. In turn, the Brand expects the Consumer to be loyal and continue to purchase brand products and not competitive brands.

A Brand to Consumer relationship is not unlike a human love relationship. “When I met you, Disney, you made me laugh and took me on countless trips and adventures to magical and fantastical lands … but now …you bring home Zombies who eat the flesh of screaming and terrified teens?” Next line …“I’m sorry but this isn’t working out … I’m leaving you for DreamWorks.” And just like that, the Brand consumer relationship is shattered. The consumer goes to another brand where they can find what they were used to getting from the previous brand.

So, a brand is maintained by paying tremendous attention to the needs and wants of the target audience. By understanding their “language,” who they are, what they love, where they engage their media content and most importantly for a transmedia brand, figure what they see as the primary engagement of the property and give them more of it, piece by piece, across multiple media platforms. This model works best for brands like Marvel, who have an established interrelationship with their core audience.

Excerpt from Storytelling Across Worlds: Transmedia for Creatives and Producers by Tom Dowd, Michael Niederman, Michael Fry, and Joseff Steiff © 2013 Taylor and Francis Group. All Rights Reserved.

About David Hare

Heralded as a playwright, screenwriter, and director, Sir David Hare has enjoyed a professional career that has stretched across more than 40 years. His time in the theater has been marked by several triumphs, including Plenty, The Blue Room, and Stuff Happens, and in 2011 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize for his thought-provoking and politically engaging oeuvre. Hare’s transition to film began in earnest in the 1980s when he wrote and directed Wetherby (1985), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Paris by Night (1988), and Strapless (1989). But a growing dissatisfaction with his films inspired him to refocus on theater, where he wrote his celebrated trilogy of plays about British life—Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, and The Absence of War—in the early 1990s. Thankfully, Hare returned to screenplays with his terrific script for Louis Malle’s Damage (1992), a portrait of obsessive, doomed love based on Josephine Hart’s novel. More recently, he has received Academy Award nominations for his adapted screenplays for The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008), which won, respectively, Nicole Kidman and Kate Winslet the Oscar for Best Actress. He also worked to adapt author Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, The Corrections, into a feature film. His plays Plenty and The Secret Rapture have been adapted into films, and in 2011 he wrote and directed the conspiracy thriller Page Eight, which starred Bill Nighy, Rachel Weisz, and Michael Gambon.

“I only went into the theater because it was impossible to go into the cinema. Cinema in the 1960s, particularly in Europe, was the most exciting art form, but British cinema was going through one of its many collapses. And so I started a traveling theater company, and I was the director of it. One day, somebody failed to deliver a play—it was a Wednesday, and we had nothing to rehearse for the following Monday—so I sat down and wrote a one-act play, How Brophy Made Good, which we then started rehearsing. But I didn’t think of myself as a writer. For many years, I just thought of myself as a director who wrote.

That first play wasn’t very good—I was 22, it was terrible. But then the most famous producer on the West End—Michael Codron, who had produced Joe Orton and Peter Nichols and Harold Pinter—commissioned me to write a full-length play. I stumbled into an ability I didn’t know I had. It was just chance. When I talk to the young I say, “Things are always worth trying.” I don’t think there’s anything more exciting in life than discovering a gift you didn’t know you had. And it might have gone undiscovered. It might be for tending a garden beautifully. Or it might be for making a nice pair of curtains. But you don’t know until you’ve tried, and it’s always worth trying.

The Hours

Even though my first play was no good, when I handed it to the actors they looked at the dialogue, and I knew they were thinking, “Oh, this is fine, I can say this.” I’d been a literary manager, so I’d read a lot of plays. It’s like a chef in a restaurant—when the plate is put before you, you know whether it’s edible or not. And it was exactly the same thing when I wrote a page of dialogue—it looked like a page of dialogue. That’s harder than it seems. And actors immediately went, “Oh great, if I say this, I can there’s this conservative politician . . .” And within about two sentences he’d say, “What sort of person is he? Why is he doing that?” He’d just ask questions. And so maybe by lunchtime we had got through about six scenes, and it would be really solid. Then the next day, he’d get up and say, “Tell me the story of the film.” And I’d try and pick up where I left off the day before, and he’d say, “No, no, you’ve got to go back to the beginning.” And this went on for about 10 days. By the end of that process, I could tell the story of Damage in about 20 minutes. He said, “Well, you’ve done the hard work now—you’ve written the film. Just go and hang some dialogue on it.” It was an incredible way to write. And writing the dialogue only took me a few weeks, because the story was already completely laid out. It was the most severe way that I’ve ever worked on structure, but it was also the best way ever of writing a film. It does drive you absolutely mad—you just think, “Oh, I’m going insane.” But that’s when I began to realize why my own films were so bad: I’d never subjected them to this narrative test and created such a taut string on which you could just hang the pearls.

If my life in the cinema has been about anything, it’s been about introducing subject matter that is not normally seen in mainstream films. During The Hours, director Stephen Daldry and I did our very best not to use the word “lesbianism” or “suicide,” but ultimately, that’s what that film is about. And if you start thinking about movies about lesbianism or suicide that have played in multiplexes, there are actually very few. I’ve written plays about aid to the Third World, the Chinese Revolution, the privatization of the railways, the diplomatic process leading up to the Iraq War. These are not regular mainstream subjects, but what I want to do is get this kind of subject matter into the mainstream. That’s the first thing that draws me to a movie.

People who disdain my movies tend to complain about them having “messages,” and implicitly say how much they prefer what they call “pure” entertainment. Well, I’m all for good entertainment—I wish there were some in the mainstream cinema. But so much of the stuff that’s presented to us, I don’t find very entertaining. Do I want my films to have some content? Yes, I would prefer that. But this idea that my films have “messages”? To me, it’s just a nonsensical line of argument. You know, who are these tender flowers, these sort of overprotected people, who just feel that they’re going to wither if anybody brings content to them? I’m bewildered by this line of argument. So many great American films are full of content. But now there’s this extraordinary delicacy that everybody has developed lately, as if they’re not hardy enough to be able to withstand a plot with something urgent to say.

After Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for The Hours and Kate Winslet won an Oscar for The Reader, I got a lot of telephone calls from actresses saying, “Oh, I understand you’re the man who writes films that win actresses Oscars.” And I had to explain to them, “You know, Nicole Kidman won the Oscar for The Hours.” If she hadn’t played it, the actress playing it would not have won. Same with Kate Winslet. It’s not the part, it’s the actor. The idea that I write these parts that are a free pass to winning an Oscar is nonsense. I just happen to have worked with two very great actresses.

I don’t have any insights into how to write Oscar-winning roles—I only know how to write good parts, but that’s completely different. That’s something I developed. My first play I had in the West End was called Knuckle, and there was a part of a barman in it. The barman had to say, “Do you want a drink?”—that sort of thing. The actor was sitting around in the dressing room all evening just to say that. And I thought, “I’m never going to do that again—I’m never going to get people along for something that isn’t worth playing.” And so now, I look at every character and think of it from the actor’s way around: “Is this worth it? Is there going to be something in this to play?” I mean, everybody in Page Eight remarked to me how incredible that cast was. They all came because the parts were worth playing. And that’s because I thought about the structure of their parts—even if they only last three scenes. Gary Oldman did a film of mine, and he said, “I did it for this one line that I just knew I wanted to say.” And so what you’re trying to do is give actors something that they go, “Oh yeah, I’d really want to do this—this gives me something extra.”

The Hours

Lately I’ve seen some absolutely appalling films where actors have obviously been allowed to improvise their own dialogue. You know, when Mike Leigh improvises, it takes him three months. When John Cassavetes improvised, it took him six months. And yet, now I regularly go to the cinema and see films where the actors have plainly improvised on the spot. You can feel the whole film sag when it happens. Last month I saw the dramatic climax of a film where the actor’s line in response to the film’s principal revelation was, “Wow, hey, that’s a real slap in the face.” Now, no writer has written that line— you can tell the actor has improvised it. And this foolish director imagines the line is more authentic for the fact that it’s the first line an actor can think of on the day. You can only say in response, “Get a professional,” because a writer will spend a week working on what that line should be. And they will know as much about writing as the actor knows about acting. The whole notion that an actor saying the first thing that comes into his or her head somehow delivers authenticity is a complete misunderstanding of what art is.

I was asked during previews of the musical of The Lion King to rewrite it. They said to me, “The dialogue is very bad, and you’re very good at dialogue, right?” And I said, “Nobody is listening to the dialogue in this thing. That’s not what it’s about.” I saw the musical, and it was dazzling, but the dialogue is not important—it’s only there to express what’s going on. If a lion cub wants to go back to its dad, then “I must return to my father” is a perfectly reasonable line. I can’t come up with a better line than that. I can’t make something happen between those lines that’s not happening anyway. The audience will be perfectly satisfied with that line. It may not be the greatest line ever written, but it’s doing the job you want it to do. Good dialogue is not something that you slap arbitrarily on top of a narrative: Good dialogue is the expression of good ideas and complex feelings. It grows out of ideas, it isn’t decoration you add at the last minute.

I’m very pleased with Page Eight, but my only regret is that it’s genre. I’ve been trying to avoid genre all my life. I think it’s the death of cinema. Nearly all the interesting work these days is from people defying genre. I’ve tried hard to avoid genre because the audience know the game so well. They know more about Joseph Campbell’s writings than the screenwriters do—they’ve read all that stuff about character arcs and journeys and all that mythic nonsense. They know the hero’s setting out to find the holy fucking ring or grail or goat’s foot or whatever it is. They can see the strategies coming a mile off—they know that in reel 10 the hero will face an insuperable problem, and they know that in reel 11 he will overcome it. Why write it?

Interior of Hare's Office Space

Corrections not being made. I was on it for 23 drafts. I think the problem was that there was nothing for a director to do but shoot it. Jonathan Franzen has a huge personality—and I don’t have a small personality—and by the time we had got what we wanted as a feature film, there wasn’t anything for any director to do except turn up and shoot it. That’s all they had to do. And now, of course, nobody will do that—that’s out of fashion. They all want to say, “What is my unique creative input going to be into this?” To which the answer was, “I’m already taking up a lot of room, Jonathan Franzen is taking up the other side of the bed, and there isn’t room for three people in this bed. Just shoot the fucker.” Director Stephen Frears is famous for the fact that he regards the script as the thing that he’s just there to deliver, but that is not how most Hollywood film directors talk today. And so ultimately I think that’s why it wasn’t made. A part of me died when I lost all that work.

I think that my interest in writing came from— not a lonely childhood, but I suppose a solitary childhood. I was born 60 miles from London by the sea in a town, Bexhill, with the oldest average age in the country. It was just full of old-age pensioners, and it really was the most boring place on Earth. So I had the classic provincial childhood—exactly that kind of solitariness that fires the imagination. And it’s left me for the rest of my life grateful that I’m not in Bexhill. Life has always seemed to me incredibly enjoyable and interesting because it’s not Bexhill. But there’s no doubt that I dreamed very powerfully from such a background. I mean, come on—suburban setting, semi-detached, it’s a classic writer’s background. The theater and the cinema were very, very glamorous to me.

And they still are. I still get an incredible kick out of walking past a cinema and seeing my name on there. That sense that I’m incredibly privileged and lucky to be doing what I’m doing has stayed with me. I’m 64 now, and I still get thrilled at the sight of a marquee because I can’t believe it’s happened to me.”

Excerpt for FilmCraft: Screenwriting by Tim Grierson © 2013 Taylor & Francis Group. All Rights Reserved.

Photo by Horia Varlan

If you expect your video project to really be yours after completion, make sure that all the material you use has been created by you or by people who are working for you. If you or one of your coworkers uses material owned by others, you may find yourself spending time with lawyers instead of looking for more video projects to produce.

Using other people’s material without their permission is a copyright infringement; if you are caught doing it, you have created a legal problem for yourself. The problem arises very often when copyrighted music is used without permission. Four simple approaches will help you avoid this problem:

• If you need music for your program and the music you choose is copyrighted, contact the copyright holder (the record company, music publishing company, or individual artist) in writing and ask for permission to use the material. In your request, be as specific as you can as to your intentions. Name the material, the excerpt (if appropriate), the program it will be used in, the distribution or exhibition plans, and any other relevant information. If you do this far enough in advance of your postproduction time, you may get an approval for use of the materials (referred to in the publishing business as “clearance”).

• Use material that is in the public domain—material that has never been copyrighted or material of which the copyright has expired. Material that has not been copyrighted is probably available from your local amateur composer or music student. They may have excellent material already composed or may be able to compose music tailor-made for your project. Material composed long ago, such as old folk tunes (“I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” or “Oh, Susanna”) or classical music that could be performed especially for your project, is generally available for use, since the copyright has long since expired. (Bach and Beethoven are rarely offended when you use their material.)

• Purchase the material or subscribe to a library service that provides music or other material such as sound effects. These services work in two ways. One way allows you to use the material as often as you need to use it; you buy this privilege when paying for the material, and its use is at your discretion. A second type of service involves a needle-drop fee.  Music library services provide you with the material, but you must pay when you use it. This term comes from the practice of being charged for using the material when your phonographic needle “drops” on the record (vinyl LPs) for actual use in a production.

• Hire a musician or musical group that will use original compositions and perform them for you. Once you pay for this service, you should own the right to use the material. Another consideration is that you have permission to use the images of people who appear on camera in your project. This can be accomplished by having those people sign a Model Release, in which they give specific permission for you to use their image in your project or program.

Excerpt from Portable Video: News and Field Production, 6e by Norman Medoff and Edward Fink © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group. All Rights Reserved.

Photo by Cali4beach

“Casting a documentary – choosing your subjects – is one of the key creative decisions made in preparing a character driven documentary. The main subject or subjects set the whole tone of the film, usually driving both the content and the presentation of the content, meaning that the whole creative approach flows out of the people you are choosing to focus on.  They become the face and the voice of the film, and the major aesthetic and editorial decisions will flow from the filmmakers’ relationship with those subjects and the force of their stories and personalities.

If you are doing a subject or character centred documentary, you do in a sense “cast” it, as you are making selections about using this person rather than that person.  Sometimes this is done for you, as you pick a certain character because there is something interesting or unique about them that you are going to build a story around.

Or, if you have an idea or theme you need to populate it with people who will advance the structure and content of the film.  You may talk to a large number of people in doing background research, and then select a few of them to be in the film, based on how articulate they are, how representative they are of the overall group being examined, how they look, how their stories intersect with the theme of the project, their degree of ease on camera, the degree of access you have to them, the visual opportunities offered by where they live or work or what they do.”

Excerpt from The Casting Handbook: For Film and Theatre Makers by Suzy Catliff and Jennifer Granville © 2013 Taylor and Francis Group. All Rights Reserved.

Photo by Popturfdotcom

Making video look more film-like requires starting at the lens and the shooting aspects of the production. Using nothing but prime lenses, using dolly shots rather than lens zooms, and shooting with lighting intended for film are all part of the process. Shooting through filters, such as the Tiffen Black Mist series, helps warm the image as well. Practice shooting in a progressive scan or frame based mode rather than shooting interlaced images, and, if the camera allows, shoot at 24p or 25p (NTSC or PAL) and learn how to operate the camera properly in progressive scan mode. In progressive scan mode, the camera must be handled differently from shooting in interlaced modes.

Pans can easily become mush and blur in the hands of the inexperienced user. Handheld shots become a wash of colors in those same hands. Managing the camera correctly is half the battle in getting a good film-like appearance from the digital information.

Interlaced or Not?

One of the first exercises in the process of making video look film-like is to deinterlace. Interlacing is the process in which lines, known as fields, are drawn for every frame of video. NTSC DV and 60i HD have a frame rate of 30 or 29.97 fps. PAL DV and 50i HD has a frame rate of 25 fps. This information means that NTSC and 60i HD have 30 half-frames of lower fields/lines and 30 half-frames of upper fields/lines. PAL and 50iHD have 25 half-frames of upper fields/lines and 25 half-frames of lower fields/lines. These lines generally should be removed or blended to gain the smooth look of film.

Video shot in progressive scan mode does not have these temporally offset fields. Be certain that when editing progressive scan footage in Vegas the project properties are set for Progressive Scan. If the setting is not correct, Vegas may insert the fields in transitions or other generated media.

Removing interlacing can be done within the project itself by setting Vegas to the project settings of progressive scan versus interlaced. Several ways to accomplish a properly deinterlaced image are available. The first and fastest way is to set the project properties to Progressive Scan. To do so, open the File j Properties dialog box, and in the Video tab, select Blend Fields for Deinterlace method and None (progressive scan) for the Field Order. This method is fast and easy and ensures continuity.

Another way, or “look,” is to blend fields manually. This process creates a slightly softer image and may be preferable to your eye. When manually deinterlacing, create a new project. Set the Project Properties to Progressive Scan, and insert a new video track (Ctrl þ Shift þ Q). Place Events on the timeline. To deinterlace for a film-like appearance, duplicate the video track. Select an Event on the top track, right-click, and then select Properties j Media j Field Order j Upper Field First.

Using the Track Opacity/Level slider on track 1, set opacity to 50 percent. On track 2, be certain that Events are lower-field first. This process deinterlaces the footage by drawing all parts of the frame rather than drawing only half the frame.

Excerpt from Vegas Pro 11 Editing Workshop by Douglas Spotted Eagle © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All Rights Reserved.