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Beginning week 2 of year 2 at college, we had our first full lesson with Fahmida. I liked the pace of this lesson as it more or less turned into a discussion about adapted films we know and our thoughts on them. This was a thought provoking discussion which began with us all writing down as many adapted films as we knew. I decided to work alone, unlike everyone else, and had the second highest among the class which I’m pretty proud of. What would happen is Fahmida picked a group to tell us an adaptation they wrote down then we’d progress by discussing that genre of film, with each group adding another film of the same genre. We spent an extensive time discussing horror and why people enjoy horror, even talking about what everyone’s first encounters with the genre were and why they are scared by/ enjoy horror and thriller features. The discussion also featured a lot of talk about fantasy as this seems to be the most common adapted media our age group consume. Personally, I watch fantasy features rather than reading as I prefer to see a confirmed world in front of me rather than creating it for myself. I believe that how a place/ character is bought to screen says a lot about the director and a window in their beliefs and views of the world. Also, you can get several different interpretations of adapted books bought to life and each will be vastly different although they follow the same source material. This discussion in class was very thought provoking and I like to see us having discussions like this week on week as it builds up peoples’ opinions and speaking skills which are essential. For the rest of Tuesday, we had our short check in session with Attila followed by another CCP session. Below is the list of adaptations I was able to come up with in the 10 minutes we were given. A lot of them I listed as franchises as there were a lot I could think of in a short time. This list can also be seen as a watch list.
This week we started working with the actors as the timetables had been set off when we are going to have crossover sessions with them. We began in the TV studio with Attila so he could do a refresher safety talk, mainly about the lighting equipment we have. Following our lighting test, Irene’s class of 7 actors from year 1 and 2 joined us and we were able to see them rehearse scenes they were working on in the space. This meant that they could get used to us being present and we could see the blocking of the scenes before jumping in and filming. The difficulty is they are an extremely small class while we’re around 20 people so getting everyone involved with the setup we have is difficult. The year 1 actors did ‘the flower girl’, a Charlie Chaplin piece featuring a blind flower girl and a man passing by. This was a silent film piece with music the actions should be larger than life and obvious. Also, for silent films, the camera work is very static so the actors needed to bare this in mind with their movements. Below are the notes I made during their performance:
- Needs more energy physically
- Must be more open
- Minimal camera movement needed
- Take more time
- Confidence
- Find your feet (choose a spot and stick to it)
- Open body to camera
- Use your back most hand to help open up
Following this, the rest of the actors did a piece from A Midsummer Night’s Dream which is very useful for me to see as this is the play I would like to adapt. They did a scene where Helena and Hermia are fighting following the mix up. The difficulty with using the actors in my version is there are only 3 of them and all are girls. Preferably, I would like 4 people, including two guys and two girls. Therefore, I may use these actors for test footage but not in the long run. This is a Shakespearian scene that they were directed to perform like it was for film, which is very different from the silent film Flower Girl we just saw. The actors had to make sure they were performing to a camera and not like they were on a stage. The main difficulty for them here was that they had only recently been given the scripts to learn so they performed holding them, making it feel harsher when directing as they haven’t had the time to find a footing as the characters for themselves. Below are my notes for their performance:
- Too animated
- Less movement required
- Less volume as not on a theatre stage
- Relax and release tension
- Helena needed to be more upset rather than angry
- Acting is reacting
- Give a situation that gives the actors a jumping off point
My general assessment of this first workshop with both our and their classes was that context of a scene is vital, knowing why a character acts the way they do, why that location, etc. However, my critic of this lesson was that it came too soon into the term. I believe we should’ve waited a few weeks for us to have more lectures in class and give time for the actors to gather the material and rehearsals they needed. This was throwing them in at the deep end and not giving our class much opportunity to get involved, only limited to watching and making notes at first.
Continuing with Wednesday, Nick gave us a lecture on auteurs. An auteur is a filmmaker with vision and style who influences film culture. Well known examples are Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. In future weeks, Nick wants to take us through different auteurs and their styles to help us define our own styles in the long run. This week, we looked into more detail at Wes Anderson, a well-known more recent auteur that everyone is familiar with. For my FMP, I did more thorough work researching his style but this was a good name to start off the unit with. Anderson has a very particular, precise visual style, defined by its colours, static camera work, synchronicity and dead span dialogue delivery. He also talked about adapting a book to screens is challenging mainly due to the run time. A book can take hours to consume whereas a film is approximately 2 hours and must capture the important beats of its source material. For this to happen, many changes must be made, which will likely involve cutting down a lot of ‘unnecessary’ details and story beats.
For Wednesday afternoon, we were joined by Zahra’s performance class, who are a larger group. They fell into a similar situation to the first class as they had been given the scripts that day so essentially they were performing a read through with us and Attila making directing comments. This was definitely uncomfortable and unfair on the actors, thus reinforcing my point that we should’ve left it a few weeks before interfering with their class. We more heavily thought about the context of the scene, a scene taken from four weddings and a funeral, and gave them a list of scenarios to ground it as its own scene. These scenarios included, acting like it took place in a coffee shop or train compartment, etc. This plays with the composition of space and varies the actors’ options in this workshop.
Moving on to the final day of this week, Attila provided another lecture on adaptations, peculiarly using an episode of ‘Cunk on Shakespeare’ which can be seen as an adaptation. Cunk is a documentary format where she asks all the wrong questions dead pan to create a serious interview based program with facts while also being entertaining and comedic. This is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s work in an unconventional way. It isn’t a story adaptation in the usual film way as it instead relies on the play material and themes to build her story of understanding the material. I have a collection of notes from watching this:
- Shock viewers to draw in
- Dead Pan comedy documentary
- Light percussion musical change for old black and white footage
- Title card for segment markers. Music changes for genre
- Rule of Thirds
- Insert and establishing shots to establish an area of her travels
- Still educational
- Jump cut to take off gloves
- Interaction with camera crew
Following this, we started work on our scripts for the adaptations. We had until the end of the next week to hand in this first assignment. Attila wanted us to use what we had learnt about shot sizes and focal lengths in the script to prove our understanding. This is an irregular method of completing a screenplay script but acted more as a technically script. I used this session to begin reducing the original play script of A Midsummer Night’s Dream down to the core characters I was going to use. In my adaptation, I planned to simplify the story and bring it to a modern audience. The original uses nobility and fantasy elements such as fairies and love potions which were areas I wanted to cut out. My focus was strictly on the four characters Hermia, Helena, Demetrius and Lysander who find themselves in an awkward romance situation as they each don’t find themselves falling in love with the person they’ve been arranged to marry. Hermia and Lysander run off despite the arrangements. Demetrius is the only one of the four who’s in love with who he’s arranged to be with: Hermia. Helena is left with no one except a love for Demetrius which is not reciprocated at first. I’ve renamed these four characters and updated the fantasy way the story changes trajectory, swapping love juice for spiked drinks, and thought in detail what I want my film to accomplish, using an additional story treatment to understand the overall stages of my new tale. For this assignment, however, I will only write and film a couple of the scenes so I can focus on the framing and manage my time well as opposed to a 20+ minute short film that isn’t consistent quality. Maybe down the line, after assignment test footage and successful filming, I can expand on the story.
In the afternoon, Attila allowed us to use the cameras and gather more test footage with them as we needed to practice and get used to their systems. I have quickly become competent at setting up the cameras and settings, helping other groups as well. We had an issue with one of the camera monitors as the HDMI cable didn’t work but apart from that we were able to establish two cameras as a large group, including monitors, external power supplies and rigging that we could use. This time, I didn’t want to take a directing stance as I’d done that for the previous week and wanted to use the cameras. For this, Finn took a lead directing but didn’t outline what he wanted with a plan or anything. This resulted in Josh and Kwyn running with various shots along the way. Finn would ask me for help on the direction so I’d ask him questions of what he wanted to accomplish to help him along. I also edited what we got together. This wasn’t the most successful shoot but it allowed me time to practice recording and establishing decent framing. Below is that video.
Josh runs .mp4To conclude the week, week 2 was slightly slower paced and I believe work with the actors came too early. My script is underway and will be worked on more thoroughly next week with my story treatment and reduced scripts analyzed. In future, after the assignments, I wish to complete a more thorough research page into Shakespeare’s original play and the themes presented to heighten my knowledge and care of the material. With filming our own tests on Friday, I think it would be useful if we were set something particularly to film as a task rather than having free reign.
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