Tell Me a Story

It is best to begin any endeavor with a clue.

Today we will discuss narrative, and genres in preparation of the first project.

In terms of found footage creation, there is a process of composition and seeing how segments interact. There is construction. For each, the planning process is very different.

Determining what you want to say...
Juxtaspositioning
Point - moral of the story
Theme
Genre as vocabulary

The storyboard becomes the basis of your shot list. What kinds of shots? The long shot, the medium shot, the close up, the extreme (any of the preceding)...the detail, the macro, the fish eye.

There are moving shots: pans, zooms and dollies.

We'll look at each of these. The shots provide your visual language. If the narrative is your story, then your shots are your sentences.

Class Exercise

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

-Langston Hughes

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

- Gwendolyn Brooks

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; 25
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate; 30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go 35
Talking of Michelangelo.

- excerpt from The Lovesong of Alfred Prufrock
by T. S. Elliot