MDA2100 - Week Two

In the second week we looked at personal experiences, memories, emotions, and how your own life itself (pretty much) can be turned into a story which you can adapt into a short film.

I found it very interesting when we talked about how emotions (such as love) form part of human experience and can form the basis of a story idea, such as how Love normally drives the subplot of a film (i.e. the romance in 'Witness', a particular favourite example of Middlesex Tutors).

I also found how each of the four primal emotions (Happiness, Sadness, Fear and Anger) can effect characters and story in strong ways, particularly interesting. When you think about it, they form the basis for characters' identities, their actions and stories and plots in almost every film you can think of.
The emotions all affect characters in different ways:

• Happiness - Brings a character 'up', often tied in with the character's goal (i.e. happiness from love, or achieving their goal)
• Sadness - Brings the character 'down', (often tied in with the character's failures)
• Anger - Drives a character forwards, urging them to further achieve their goal (e.g. the death of the yoda-like figure in the 'hero's journey' story structure can instill the character with a desire for vengeance assuring that they will be able to achieve their goal)
• Fear - Pushes a character backwards, hindering them, usually entwined with an aspect of their past which the character has to overcome in order to successfully achieve their goal (e.g. in the final addition to the Harry Potter series, Harry has to overcome fear of death, which gives him the power to defeat his enemy)

In the two films we watched in the seminar (Lynne Ramsay's 'Gasman' and John Giwa-Amu's 'Barrie the Barber') the ideas of emotions and experience driving characters and their story's became relevant (i.e. in Gasman, the young girl realising her father has another daughter, and her realisation that she must accept that, and in Barrie the Barber, the eponymous Barrie realising that dwelling on the past isn't doing him any good).

As evident in both films, there is no major change, it just becomes clear that the character has had a realisation and will probably (but in the case of Barrie, maybe not definitely,) make a change in the way they are in the future. 

Personally, I find the endings to these films (in which the story is not 'resolved' so to speak, it is just set up for the path of resolution) much more poignant and impacting than if the film had had a clear resolution. This, I think, is possibly because the fact that the characters' journeys aren't over, (they have changed and are possibly beginning), means that the spectator still identifies with the character's journey, (as their story is not yet resolved,) so they still have the character on their minds and feels for their story, meaning that even though the film is short, it still has as much an impact on the audience, as it could have done had it been feature-length. 

In the workshops we were given a writing task in which we wrote in constant prose without thinking too much about it, a scenario involving a character, and then we had to answer questions (in a similar writing style) about the character. This was a particularly interesting exercise, as I had never really thought about a characters motives in as much depth as I did for that exercise. 

After answering the question we were then asked to write the prose story in a screenplay format. Given the understanding of the character's feelings, past and motives, I found it much easier to translate her as a person in the specific situation to her actions within the script. 

My story, a noir-esque revenge story, in which a widow sought revenge against those who killed her husband, was given a whole depth by my considering the character's feelings, emotions and motives. In the exercise I found it much easier to script a character's actions when I knew them as in-depth as I did this particular character.