NiGHTiNGaLE

ahhh don’t do it… unless hehe you wanna suffer the torture of Five L’s talking to you at once… ( i guess you would know who is L in this case, and no, he doesn’t solve crimes)

I don’t have a locally popular name.I’m drawn more towards melodramatics rather than the modest Singaporean way of life. People tell me that i have a different way of walking. It seems I used to walk alot faster than the normal leisurely pace that singaporeans are used to. Maybe its because i used to be very career driven in the past. It seems that 90% of the time when i go out, I would usually do so with a jacket on, even though its unneccesary, and i have this habit of wearing slacks all the time. I doubt anyone in this school has ever seen me in bermudas or shorts.. unless you count the time we had a sport and wellness module.I am not as thrifty as most other Singaporeans are, as i believe in spending for the moment and living it is the most important, although i do appropriate funds aside if there is a specific need to. Stuff like parties and friend’s birthday presents.

Hmmm, i kinda did a major renovation on the entire blog, . be sure to check the new stuff but really major ones would be most of the reflections, Gdine’s opener story and my letter to my past….

Well i would say i enjoyed this weeks lesson most of all… well maybe its because it had a bit of acting to do in it, and well its always fun to act, to become someone you’re not, and i’ve always enjoyed the high energy and adrenaline rush everytime i step up to the stage, to stare the fear full in the face and challenge the fact that the success of the whole performance rest on every single actor and crew’s ability to work together under pressure, and to improvise and deal with any mistakes smoothly that come your way, under the steady gaze of a hundred watchful eyes, that mark your every step, ears that listen to every word.
We did a mime to illustrate a lady who was made pregnant by a irresponsible boyfriend, and her good friend is angry at the fact of his running away, yet he stays for the lady’s sake to take care of her.i believe the lines that Mr Ryan gave us was “She’s pregnant, He’s not the father.” Actually, what i had in mind was to purposely make the subject of “he” ambiguous, so that the audience would ask questions, but then ah well, it kinda defeated the purpose of making it extremely clear to the audience what the message was.

Hmmm,, challenge in this latest assignment i guess would be actually how extreme is the person in terms of expressiveness of the emotion, only then could you try to get a story out from there, be it the beginning, middle or end. However i had fun trying to get as many stories as i could out of that face alone, well in a way sorta challenged myself to get as many interesting twists as i could. Hmm, since this is more or less the last mirror i will “hang” in this blog, i guess this will have to be a really big one that will show everything from where i stand now , all the way to the beginning of the hallway in which i have came from starting this class.

Well, before starting this class, i did not have any idea of how a story was actually was written, and only had a sense of melodrama to guide me. I thought i knew, but then I was shown that what i thought to be true and correct was in fact quite absurd, not to mention dumb. Later i learnt more about Aristotle and his contribution to the world of drama , by way of writing the book, Poetics in response to his own thought towards his teachers.
later,We watched films such as the election and transit which really made us think and challenge our deep thoughts with what really was fast and natural for the audience to understand.
We then moved on to the study of the importance of the character, and how his responses shape the story and how the exchange of dialogue can help to communicate information to the audience, information that could be impossible and costly to represent.
We then moved on to the usefulness of an action, and how it can engage the audience to feel the emotions stronger, and to deduce information in a fast manner.

The story is all about the action.
-any kind of activity ,movement, and interactions of characters with their surroundings.
-talking about the feelings is not quite as powerful as illustrating why you feel this way through your actions

Film is behavior
-Actions are simple the manifestation of behavior
- human emotions are understood by watching the actions and reactions of the characters.

Dyanamic action
-has the potentisl to enrich the experience of the audience by building ae emotional relationshop between the characters and the audience.

ELEMENTS OF DIALOGUE
Dialogue reveals more about characters, as they talk about themselves and what other people say about that character.

Establish relationships between character (characters establish attitudes and opinions that are in opposition to each other.)

Hence good effective dialogue communicates faces and information to the audience (conveying essential exposition and characters will talk about what happened establishing the storyline. EXPOSITION- it’s the way dialogue communicates extremely important (plot based) information to the audience.

It also ties the script together.

It’s not necessarily a v/o to the camera directly, it can be an exchange.

Bad dialogue
Corny dialogue
Too much telling, little showing
Character speaks in too “formal” a tone.
Spoils the mood of the show if used inappropriately

Common mistakes
Dialogue should be used sparingly, never telling the audience what they can see for themselves. (Dialogue is no substitute for action)
Dialogue Should No match conventional spoken dialogue ”real talking”`

Assignments for this week.
Middle aged man, went out after work with his friends for drinking/ or just goes out.. Didn’t tell his wife that he was staying out late and she cooked dinner for him.

The countdown is on… one more week till the holidays… Well, technically its the holidays… but then agian.. with a media course, you never do actually get a real holiday, cos the holidays are filled with homework and project work.. anyway, lets get down to business..
We discussed in class about the difference between a memory and an experience, and well i don’t quite remember if it was confirmed, but i said that an experience could be a subset of a memory, because a memory can be both a ‘past experience’ and yet can also be a friend telling you about his experience. However i do remeber that memory is processed through time, and can be altered into the preferred ending( a traumatised person can be made to ‘replace’ the shocking imagery with a more comforting one , in order to recover from the trauma).

We also covered a bit more on dialogue, in which we defined:
that it served to express the characters personality in which the way they communicate with their supposed society , etc.
It also communicates characters emotions, and also tells the audience what has happened already or what is about to happen.( like the characters fear of a monster pounding on a door)
It comfirms or twists the audience expectations and,( a sad scene may be twisted around when the character smiles, may portray evil intentions or that all is not quite as it seems in the scene.)
expresses the culture,place and time in which they are in by the way they communicate through the use of dialects and slangs, and pidgins( like in gangs of new york, the clothes, the behaviors and the way the natives held themselves superior to the blacks and the irish, and did not hesitate to say so.)

well, all i can say is that this week, i learnt more about the character, and how the tool of dialogue can be used to convey a message about himself or others. The notes are actually rather self explanatory in the way of what i understood in class, so all im going to give here is a visual example, and we shall be on our way to more general and whats-on-my-mind-that-i-feel-like-sharing matters.
Say we picture the movie of Constantine( my favourite movie there =) ), the scene where he recieves the information that he has an estimated six months left to live from a doctor.
If we did not have the dialogue going on, we would probably have thought that Constantine had just gone there to have a chat with the doctor, or perhaps just to recieve some bad news about someone else who is related to him having lung cancer or something.
So we need dialogue, as it allows us to convey information that could either be extremely hard to show to the audience,( which is quite a waste of funds that could be used elsewhere )but it must not be overused, as long minutes of characters yakking to each other could take its toll on the attention span of the audience, but im getting ahead of myself here… refer to MIRROR VIII.

To some Sharetime( to give this entry more of the personal touch…)

Anyway( i know this is quite random), i used to plan for myself to become a writer last time.
As a kid it really felt like a kind of a cool idea to me. Like HEY! all i gotta do is scribble a really cool story, and people will pay lot of cash to buy up copies of it, and i get famous in the process.

2 hours of scribbling= famous+cash

So why not be a writer?
I used to keep jotter books with creations of magical warriors (who never really got it made), hand written lists of all the mythical and godly creatures that mindkind has ever thought of, and plots that i thought of, but somehow never seemed to go anywhere with the the characters and creature combination that i used. In a way, it was like the dice game of dungeons and dragons, but there was never a proper challenge to me; the hero always won by his all powerful magical weapon, it was just to easy. So i kinda gave up the idea for a while. However storytelling class has kind of pointed me in the right direction, in a way and thought me what i had done wrong, in terms of the characterisation, plot development and writing style.

Nearer home..

So far, its been quite the rotten week, loads of deadlines. Main thing i can remember was that I was friggin’ crazy over the Photoshop test in this week. The thing with learning hands on stuff is that you kinda remember the procedere of how to get the final result done. but then you don’t quite remember the names of what are each and every part of the machinery and program that you are learning how to use. Hmm,also got the accursed flu from my sis.Took my camera out to shoot people @ the all new huge IKEA Megastore in Tampines to shoot different shots of freeze frame in between movement, eye contact, yada yada and now after Nick pointed out the flaws, i realise that most of my shots are either too blur, too dark, or just have too much distraction around the point of focus of my picture.

Bugger.

Well i’m gonna try to figure out a way to make my pictures work out.

Storytelling Techniques week 6

ELEMENTS OF DIALOGUE
Dialogue reveals more about characters, as they talk about themselves and what other people say about that character.

Establish relationships between character (characters establish attitudes and opinions that are in opposition to each other.)

Hence good effective dialogue communicates faces and information to the audience (conveying essential exposition and characters will talk about what happened establishing the storyline. EXPOSITION- it’s the way dialogue communicates extremely important (plot based) information to the audience.

It also ties the script together.

It’s not necessarily a v/o to the camera directly, it can be an exchange.

Bad dialogue
Corny dialogue
Too much telling, little showing
Character speaks in too “formal” a tone.
Spoils the mood of the show if used inappropriately

Common mistakes
Dialogue should be used sparingly, never telling the audience what they can see for themselves. (Dialogue is no substitute for action)
Dialogue Should No match conventional spoken dialogue ”real talking”`

ah… all i gotta say is.. i looked at my entire blog the other day in storytelling(the week we were supposed to read each other the Letters to the past) and just felt that this wasn’t well… it wasn’t a Blog, it was more like a turnitin upload (without the checking function) and well this just wasnt something that i was proud of. Felt that i wasn’t myself for the past few weeks.(oh yeah, Ryan here i gotta say I’m really sorry for not completing that letter on time, and i’m not gonna come up with some lame excuse for that, cos i know i screwed up that day)

In short, I’m gonna have to ask everyone to give me some time to sort my stuff out now that i have realised that shit has hit the fan,
and thanks guys really, for all the help you have given me.
(and i mean everyone including teachers and friends)

Cheers!:)