Sweet Easter deal!

I couldn't help myself!

 

Six chocolate hot cross buns and a free loaf from Brumby's bread shop.
hummmmmm chocolate.
hummmmmm 12 grain fried bread.

Monday 16th March

Last Thursday we were given a fragment of a script to learn.
A dialog between two people.
We had to first dissect the fragment using the white board technique.

So what’s this script analysis about?

One gets hold of a whiteboard (is this mandatory? I wasn’t prepared to challenge the teacher on it.)

Then one divides the surface into four sections…

•    Facts
•    Questions (get three answers to questions)
•    Mysterious lines (lines that pique interest)
•    Images and associations

Now we examine each scene in the script and rigorously apply these four criteria to the text.
This helps the Director (or other production staff such as cinematographer) open their mind to possibilities.

We are presenting the fragment of script to the class on Monday, so I’m spending my weekends committing words to memory again.
As before, I’m typing this stuff out to help ‘seat’ it in my head.
Oh Joy!

Once again, feel free to skip it…

Say Goodnight Gracie

What next?

Steve surprises him

Excuse me, do you know what time it is?

Jerry. Holy shit!

Steve. Wait. Before you say anything. I’ve got something wonderful to tell you!

Jerry. What are you doing in my apartment?! You trying to give me a heart attack or something?!

Steve. Oh it’s ok, Ginny let me in. She went to pick up her dress at the cleaners. How’d the audition go?

Jerry. What are you doing in my apartment, Steve?!

Steve. Your weren’t right for the part, were you?

Jerry. Never mind!

Steve. Jerry, it doesn’t matter! Wait till you hear what

Jerry. Not now! Please

Steve. Oh boy! Just wait till you hear what I’ve got to tell you! Come
on: ask me what it is. I haven’t told anybody yet- Benny’ll be right
back, bobby’ll be here, we’ll be leaving for the reunion- come on!

Jerry. Where’s the Chunky Turkey soup?

Steve. Soup? Soup? Who cares about soup?

Jerry. Where’s the chunky Turkey soup?

Steve. I ate it! It was delicious! I thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Jerry. You ate the chunky Turkey soup?

Steve. Yes! I was all alone, I was excited and hungry and I wanted to
celebrate and here was this little can crying out: Take me, open me,
eat me, I’m yours!

Jerry. In my cabinet, Steve, in my kitchen, in my apartment, there are the following items-

Steve. And do you know why I was so excited???

Jerry. 3 canes of chunky beef soup, 3 cans of chunky vegetable soup, 3
cans of chunky split pea and ham soup, and 7 family size cans of
Franco-American spaghettios. Are you listening?

 Steve. What are you doing?. Rehearsing a monologue!

Jerry. Early this morning, as I was about to leave my apartment, I
paused for a moment in my kitchen and looked in my  cabinet, and I made
certain that hidden away behind all those other items, there was still
one remaining can of chunky Turkey soup. Why did I do this?

Steve. 10..9..8..

Jerry. I did this because Chunky Turkey soup as you know, for some
mysterious reason, has become almost impossible to locate in this part
of the city and because I like it very much. In fact, I love it! Why do
I love it? I don’t know. I can’t honestly tell you why I love chunky
turkey soup. All I know is-

Steve. Hey, thanks so much for coming. We would have preferred hearing
something from Shakespeare, but this gives us a damn fine idea of your
talents, and believe me, if a part should turn up…

Jerry. All I know is: I love it! It is dependable. It is there. It is
the last thing I can be certain of in a world filled with uncertainty.
And in any case, I don’t believe that an emotion such as love has to be
explained. Don’t you agree?

Steve. Are you al right?

Jerry. Do you agree?

Steve. My Bad, it was only a can of soup!

Jerry. it was only a can of soup. Was that what you said?

Steve. Yes.

Jerry. Guess what word you left out?

Steve. I have no idea.

Jerry. Guess

Steve. I don’t know!

Jerry. Take a guess!

Steve. But I don’t know!

Jerry. What’s the word?

Steve. Hmmmmn, It wouldn’t be swordfish’ would it?

Jerry. Myz2 the word is ‘my.’ My my my my my! It was only my fucking can of soup!

Steve. You are very angry.

So today we’re all presenting our scenes as an actors rehearsal.
Which means I have to act.
Oh Joy!

This was another long day as not only did everyone perform their piece, but
we got to apply various tones, objectives, and actions to the text.
My turn was pretty much a multi-lane car crash.
I was so reliant on my partner feeding the correct lines for me to reply to, that when they didn’t, my brain froze.

Tried to work my way through it, but the second time through was almost
impossible, what with my partner acting like a crack fiend and feeding
me even less cues from the text.
I had a pot that I had taken in as a prop, and I was left at the end of the ordeal wanting to cave his head in with it.

Can’t blame my partner much though. Hell! we’re both inexperienced with this acting gig.

Doesn’t matter if they learnt the lines or not, cause when stage fright hits,
all the prep in the world an’t worth a ‘bucket o beans.’
Besides, it’s only an exercise. Learn from it and move on is the attitude I’m taking.
Despite any personal discomfort, everything we’ve been doing in this class is damn useful stuff.

Friday On My Mind this week at AFTRS was an interview with Adam Elliot and Melanie Coombs who were presenting their new feature Mary and Max.

http://www.maryandmax.com/

Amazing stop-motion type animation.
Kinda different from the insanely popular Wallace and Grommet type fare though.
These film makers have described a really interesting Australian suburban landscape.

Bit dark, in a good way.

Little bit surreal, and very grown up.
Every Australian should go and see this flick.
It’s sophisticated in concept but almost naive in style.

Mary and Max are shot with digital Canon stills cameras that feed into a central server.

Really beautiful images, and it looks like they used some decent Canon glass to shoot the amazing monochromatic sets.
Lot’s of texture, and all the effects were shot ‘in camera.’
Adam Elliot said in the interview before the feature was presented, ‘people like to see the finger prints.’

Friday On My Mind this week at AFTRS was an interview with Adam Elliot and Melanie Coombs...

...who were presenting their new feature Mary and Max.

http://www.maryandmax.com/

Amazing stop-motion type animation.
Kinda different from the insanely popular Wallace and Grommet type fare though.
These film makers have described a really interesting Australian suburban landscape.
Bit dark, in a good way.

Little bit surreal, and very grown up.
Every Australian should go and see this flick.
It’s sophisticated in concept but almost naive in style.

Mary and Max are shot with digital Canon stills cameras that feed into a central server.
Really beautiful images, and it looks like they used some decent Canon glass to shoot the amazing monochromatic sets.
Lot’s of texture, and all the effects were shot ‘in camera.’
Adam Elliot said in the interview before the feature was presented, ‘people like to see the finger prints.’

Character based story telling

A guest speaker took us through character based story telling
The class gathered in the auditorium

Then we watched the movie The Searchers.
When it finished we were all taken through a dissection of the movies structure.

Don’t think I did very well with the dissection.
Honestly, I was pretty much drifting off watching this flick.
It was too slow and the acting was pretty melodramatic.
It
was pretty hard just keeping interest up to the point where I could
remember turning points during it’s playing and I pretty much flushed
it out of my brain as soon as it was finished.

Should have taken notes while it was playing. Would have at least passed the time.
I
get that it has clearly defined acts and goals, but after decades of
evolution of film, I think there must be a point where hoary old
chestnuts are laid to rest. There must have been a film from the last
ten/twenty years that could serve as just as good an example?

Weirdly,
I came out of the viewing bitching about how much I dislike Westerns
and yet I’ve just spent two weeks riveted by Deadwood, and Star Wars is
just a re-tooled Western.
Maybe it’s the dust I don’t like?

Notes from Character based story telling

Must create empathy with lead character
How do we create empathy?
• Victim of something
• Likeable
• Character in jeopardy
• Funny
• Powerful

Clearly defined endpoint and a high stakes goal are required.
The four great goals…
• To win
• To escape
• To stop something happening
• To retrieve something

Structure
Clearly defined end and timescale

• Set up
• Opportunity – set initial goal
• New situation
• The plane- visible end goal set
• Progress- obstacles accumulating
• Midpoint- hero is utterly committed with a point of no return
• Complication

• Major set back- all is lost
• The final push
• The climax, goal is achieved, successful or not, we must see protagonists new life
• Dénouement- new life being led (often very short)

Inciting incident must mirror climax but climax must be greater.

Friday again.

Hard to believe. The days and weeks shoot past so quickly.
Hour lunches feel like twenty minutes.
The arrival of five o’clock is always a surprise.
Fridays are our ‘free days’ where we can slack off, finish homework, and pursue our own projects.
I’m
in at school bashing out this blog entry, was a body in a short film
captured by a guy testing his super8, committing a fragment of script
to memory for next week.

So what’s been happening since my last entry?
Was back in the park Tuesday morning.
Sat in the dew and read the monologue to the ducks and swans.
They had all disappeared by the time I looked up from reciting the passage to myself, just like the dog walkers.

Nother stressful day where we had to read out our monologues to the class.
Then
we had to choose some verbs from a list to apply to the text such as
flirt, challenge, stalk, and brag. This so we could see how different
attitudes changed the text.
These emotional actions can involve a lot of investment by the individuals reading the texts.
This is mentally hard stuff to have to put oneself through.
I’ve decided that I’m only going to make action flicks so that the only emotions I have to deal with will be anger and revenge.

Went and saw The Reader after school Tuesday night.
Brilliant flick. Really enjoyed Kate Winslet’s flawed character. Pretty much everyone else in the picture paled in comparison.

Was so distracted Wednesday morning I almost walked out of my flat in my underwear.
Seriously, I was lacing up my shoes when I suddenly realized I hadn’t put trousers on.

I felt I needed to apologize to the teacher for being churlish, and caustic, and confrontational in class.
I
shouldn’t be taking it out on her, the content of the course is
brilliant. My problem is that I’m being force to exercise emotional
muscles (glands?) in this class and that hurts.
If you do this class
properly, there is an opportunity to be wounded. Invariably the
wounding is a result of an unrealized, avoided, or repressed truth.
A
favorite comment of a few students is still ‘if I wanted to act I would
have gone to Nida’ (National Institute of Dramatic Arts)
Calluses, wherever they are indicate hard work, right?

First day of 'character performance and script.'

It's raining again!
It's like the first week all over again. As soon as I step off the bus, the heavens start pissing on my head.
New group of classmates too. We’ve been mostly mixed up in the rotation.

All the students have individually chosen monologues to work on (based on the portfolios we submitted to gain entrance to the school,) and all are given a key figure in the history of acting to research and then detail in a presentation to the class.

I've scored Jerzy Grotowski.

We viewed a video on an amazing scientist that used her stroke as an opportunity for researching brain dysfunction.
She lost control of the left side of her brain and discovered amazing insights into the right brain.
You'll have to see the vid to get the full gist. She starts off very ‘left brain.’ Straight forward and scientific but then ‘takes off’ with evangelical zeal while describing the right hemispheres functions.
Riveting stuff! Especially how she describes suffering the stroke. Almost makes it sound so wonderful that I want to suffer a stroke to experience it. That said, the way she describes the experience is pretty similar to people describing meditation or drug trips.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

What was a little weird was when a member of the class arrived late. Her excuse was that her granddad had just suffered a stroke and she had been at the hospital that morning.

We've all been giving individual passages to present as monologues tomorrow.

Sat in a park under a tree and tried to commit the passage to memory.
One of the tools the teacher gave us to help in the memorizing, was to read out loud a sentence and emphasize the first word, then re-read the sentence highlighting the next word, and repeat until all the words have been covered, and repeat for each sentence in turn.
Was just about to start when a woman jogger appeared, lay down a towel nearby, and started doing sit-ups.

Have to wait for her to leave
This learning a monologue is as boring as learning the times tables when I was a kid.

Now she's doing push ups.

I've included the passage below. Less for your edification, and more so that by typing in the passage, I've given myself another opportunity to burn the text into some synapses.

Skip the italics...

I was almost killed once in a car accident.
I was drunk and I ran off the side of the road and I turned over four times. They took me out of that car for dead, but I lived.
And I prayed last night to know why I lived and she died, but I got no answer to my prayers. I still don't know why she died and I lived. I don't know the answer to nothing. Not a blessed thing. I don't know why I wandered out to this part of Texas drunk and you took me in and pitied me and helped me to straighten out and married me.
Why, why did this happen?
Is there a reason that happened? And Sonny's daddy died in the war. My daughter killed in an automobile accident. Why? you see, I don't trust happiness. I never did, I never will.

Ok she's split now. Been reading out aloud for five minutes and dog walkers are giving me wide birth.

Now I’m being rained on.

OK, that's two weeks of Image done.

Lots of male hair in the student group.
My shaggy locks are fitting right in.
I reckon I managed to work with almost everyone in the group.

Character begins next week. As in ‘acting.’
Not sure if I’m looking forward to it, but it’s a bloody important part of the process so ‘bring it on.’

This is a brief summary of the ‘Image’ course (art happens in your head.)

The 'image'
First day was all bout what makes a 'classic image.'
Lot’s of slides o black and white photography.

We split into groups and were sent out to recreate a classic image.

Then we had to change it...

Colour
Telling story with colour.
You know how it goes, Red is sexy, blue is introverted, yellow is warm, and purple is for mystery.

Lighting
Spent the entire day in a studio learning bout lighting.
We then got to play with the lights.
What’s the difference between a Redhead and a Blond?
Bounced light is your friend.
Watch out for hot metal.

Lighting exercise

Movement
Telling a story with the camera.
Where you put it and what you point it at.
Trust in an audience’s ability to suck in information.
Human
eye has about forty five degrees of view. Therefore wide angle lens
tend to unsettle us (mind you IMHO, everybody likes wide angle on their
cameras cause it’s more unsettling to have a small field of view in our
images. What are we missing?)
‘Locked off’ cameras tend to make us feel restricted.
Left to right movement across a frame gives us the impression of forward movement.

We were shown the axe scene from The Shining where the camera looks like it’s locked to the head of the axe.
Bit of North by Northwest where Cary Grant is attacked by the crop dusting plane.
Finally
a clip from Blade runner where a scene between Decker and Rachael where
the camera is ‘locked off’ for most of the piece until a dramatic
moment where a close-up of Rachael is gently vibrating in sympathy with
her ‘high emotion.’

Practical for the day was to shoot a suspenseful scene with three shots.

Suspense exercise

We
found a place in the school with red walls which ramped up the ‘colour
emotion,’ and I pushed the highlights into green in Post, so that the
glass walls increased the contrast with the red walls.
Also crushed the shadows a bit to darken the tone.

VFX
We
had a short talk on the history of VFX. Then we were down in studio
shooting footage of us goofing around in front of a green screen.

Green screen exercise:
Spent a day fooling around with our clips from the day before in After Effects.

Green screen exercise

Pulling
a matte was hard on the people who had no experience o compositing. I
was impressed at how quickly everyone grasped the concepts and got
'something' out of After Effects.
The software situation is a bit difficult for some. There are folks doing the course that have never used Photoshop!
Extra classes have been organized by the school.

Final exercise
Final two days were devoted to teams creating pieces which create emotional attachment with an inanimate object.
This is our piece…

Final exercise

We’ve been pointed to two books as reference.
Adventures in the screen trade by William Golburn, and Story by Robert Mckey.

Sorry to have neglected the Cloud Porn group for so long

This is the last of the timelapse footage for 08.

Sydney East Suburbs time lapse last of 08

Now that YouTube has high def, if the quality isn't all that hot, jump over to YouTube to check it out.