BVA203 (Research-Led Industry Practice) : Visual Journal : Week 2

DAY 1

I found peer review that we did in class this week to be very helpful, it made me more confident in my idea - vocalizing it - and forced me to look for examples to support my argument.

We did an activity in class where we had to act like we were in charge of a class and give them an assignment that would help answer our question. The assessment I set was:

"Read a passage from a book where something is presented that would be hard to communicate in film, without narration, and then adapt it into a short film"

This is definitely one of the things I will do to explore my idea, so my next practice activity is to do the assessment I set my imaginary first years. I will be reading some books and find a passage or paragraph from a book that I want to adapt.

I looked at three books that my brother recently bought when the library had a sale to see if I can find some interesting passages to adapt, they were:

- Macbeth

I think what will be interesting about this is that Shakespeare uses a lot of metaphors and monologues, both of which are things I want to avoid. The question becomes about how do I still adapt it faithfully. I think there is a lot of interesting things in here that I can have an attempt at communicating with film techniques.

- All Quiet on the Western Front 

This is one is the most normal book of the three, it's a simple fictionalized novel told in the present tense. I chose it because it is middle of the line and it would be interesting just to see how to differently translate a book to the screen.

- Raging Bull

This is an autobiography so there should be plenty of opportunity for insight that would usually be communicated with narration.

An interesting to note about all three of these is that they all have film adaptations that I can look at. Macbeth has multiple. I will try and find new ways to communicate small passages from each.

DAY 2

Feedback

This week we had to present our ideas to the whole of the class and I got very harshly critiqued. What I took away from the experience that I need to focus less on the technical aspects of my project and anchor it in conceptual and contextual areas.

This means that I have to be specific with what I intent to do.

Here's how I should break down my question:

- Concept
- Context
- Technical

Technical is only one part of a larger whole, I don't know how to spin it to fit this though.

Development and Rephrasing

I looked for help from my peers and got some good suggestions.

The first comes from Matthew Wilmshurst who suggests that I can look at a film that takes a very omniscient viewpoint and apply a subjective one to it. The example he provides is some of Guy Richie's early films - e.g. "Snatch", "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels".

Snatch is on Netflix I'll give that a watch.

I can pull inspiration from other sources with omniscient viewpoints too, I'm thinking something like Back to the Future.

My brother helped rephrase my question to better communicate what I mean in terms of context and concept:

Concept:

"Humans form languages to gain understanding within any context. Some of these are not formed in speech or written word. Film has a language that is used to translate story ideas into visual and audio that the audience can easily read without being told the information.

My concept is the visual language specific to film".

Context:

"Narration is an element in some films where information is directly told to the viewer. This often relates to the way a character feels. In what ways can the visual language of film be used to communicate this to the audience in a more natural way?"

Practice:

My first practical exploration of the subject will involve taking a piece of writing from a novel that I feel can be interestingly adapted into film and translating it by making a short film, using the language specific to film - the idea I came up with when we did the tutor activity in class.

My first step to achieving this goal is to break down some extracts from novels and brainstorming how I can translate them to film. This will be done with documentation. I will choose the best of these and create animatics or storyboards and make the one or multiple that work the best.

At the moment I feel shaky about my idea, it isn't even as clear in my mind anymore. I am contemplating changing it entirely and getting feedback again before Week 5, idea development is after all what these first four weeks are for.