Posts tagged storytelling
delve
Fascinating Video Essays
Essential summer reading.
Fiction and nonfiction share two essential elements—imagination and emotion—and that’s where the use of reenactments in documentaries betrays the filmmaker. The essence of imagination is seeing what isn’t there—getting an idea on the basis of another idea—and the reenactment is, for the most part, a short-circuiting of imagination.
In “The Jinx,” whatever chill might be aroused by the notion of plastic bags filled with Morris Black’s body parts floating in a bay is dispelled by the actual vision of some other plastic bags, procured and filled and tossed on Jarecki’s behalf and filmed by Jarecki…
Such reenactments are insults to the audience—they assume that audiences can’t imagine anything like what the filmmaker is getting at—and they reflect the filmmaker’s own sense of impotence to create, by the assemblage of nonfiction material, an idea of what he has in mind. It’s a lack of confidence not just in the assembled material but in his own creative power.
Want and Need in Nonfiction
It’s great to see more people writing about storytelling technique in reference to nonfiction.
I’ve just finished Shawn Coyne’s book on storytelling which although aimed at authors is still useful for the nonfiction storyteller. Here he discusses how a fiction requirement - character wants and needs - can be transferred to nonfiction stories.
From the cutting room floor…
I’ve been working on a new video essay which is almost done. As usual, once a rough cut is done I end up reshaping and cutting shots and even whole sequences.
I’m still spending as much time as I can refining my process. One of the things I have realised just recently is that I have been mixing the creation and analysis stages of making a video essay together, which is a big no-no.
So I’ll often begin analysing a story design before I’ve even made a draft of it, and I’ll try and create and analyse on the same day. Your brain can’t switch from one to the other so easily, so now I’m updating my process to make sure church and state remain separated.
Here are a couple of shots which I dropped on Monday, after realising they weren’t essential to the story.
Deep into production on my next video essay for Fusion. I’m hoping to deliver a draft early next week.
Here are some snapshots of the story designs I’ve been working on for the story, including a script and thumbnail storyboard.
How to make anything fascinating
I’ve written a detailed story design analysis of the most recent video essay I published a few weeks ago.
I’ll do more of them if you’re interested!
Eileen from the Redbird Review got in touch a while back to ask if I would do an interview about delve. I agreed, and she asked some really great questions about creativity and the moving image.
You can read the full interview on their website, and here are a couple of my favourite questions:
You describe your website as being a quiet part of the internet, this is a good introduction to your work, which expresses ideas in a clear but contemplative way. Do you think that the internet is noisy with content because we haven’t worked out how best to use it for expression, or because we have so much to express and we haven’t learned how best to present it? Is it the internet or the users which lack clarity?
I think about this idea a lot at the moment. Stepping back a little, we can see that right now we are in the middle of what people call The Social Web. What matters at the moment is how popular you are - how many people share your work. So the people and companies that are successful (Buzzfeed is the prime example) have cleverly worked out how to engineer their content to be shared widely. All the major platforms we use, from Facebook to YouTube, reward people who are popular; everyone dreams of ‘going viral’. This inherently changes the dynamic of creation: to be successful on YouTube, for example, you must create a lot, which is why things are so noisy.
The way I see it, this obsession with popularity is a hangover from the 20th century age of mass marketing, which we haven’t quite got over yet. I also don’t think The Social Web will last forever - ten years perhaps, which means we are already half way through.
So I describe delve as being a quiet part of the Internet because I don’t try at all to make my videos popular (and, relatively, they’re not!) Instead I try really hard to make them objectively good. This attitude isn’t encouraged or rewarded by the Internet at the moment. Who knows what will come after The Social Web, but I hope it is an ecosystem that rewards quality not quantity; that is what I am building delve for.
Creative people view the world as a construct and so are able to play about with it, producing work that makes truth more palatable. Can you tell us a bit about your preference for video as a medium to produce palatable truths?
What a great question! I think all motion picture, whether it’s on a cinema screen, a TV screen or an online video is ultimately a medium of emotion. You could call it e-motion pictures. You can convey information of course, but video’s real power is in making people feel. Although my video essays are set up as educational, I am always trying to give people an emotional experience, maybe feeling inspired about their creative journey, surprised that computers are run on such a simple concept, or maybe even guilty that their habits of consumption hurt the poorest people. On the Internet most video makers use the medium in a very literal way: when they talk about a horse, they show a horse etc; but video is so powerful because it can be abstract and suggestive. You can make people feel an emotion by the use of almost invisible techniques in editing and image selection.
All storytelling, in any medium, when it is done well, is about manipulating the audience’s assumptions and ideas. But you do it to help people see a greater truth. And the best truths are emotional ones because they are so complicated and hard to define. I want to tell complicated truths; life isn’t simple and I think we do a disservice when we try and package life into self-contained blocks.
