Like I Was Saying…
Bombshell.
This afternoon I went out looking for something specific. And I think I found it.
Let me explain:
For the past couple of days, I’ve been binging on Sean Tucker’s YouTube channel. Hell, the guy taught me how to finally use the manual setting on my camera.
In one Sean’s Youtube videos he talked about photographers that inspire him. In talking about what he appreciated about some of the photographers, he kept mentioning the “cinematic feel” of some of the images he liked about it.
I liked that idea. So I made the leap about cinematography and writing. My specific question is how do you write a scene Roger Deakin’s would shot? I still haven’t answered that question, but…
…this lead me, after a few articles and YouTube videos to Filmmaker’s freedom; a website dedicated to indie filmmaking. And that’s where I found this blog post about this three minutes microfilm called The Undertaker.
It’s a brilliant little film by Brenton Oechsle. Really well done. And worth the three minutes it takes to watch it.
But that wasn’t the important part.
The important part was that the blog post had a copy of *The Undertaker’s* script. I was able to see the mechanics of the writing. And that’s when the lightbulb went off in my head.
I’m used to writing or let’s be honest, trying to write long feature narrative scripts or long undoable short films. I have/had trouble writing short (micro) scripts. I just had this block.
I’ve written sketches before, but they wordy and didn’t require a lot of visuals. I was relying on my “clever” dialogue to carry the heavy load.
But this script was using the visuals to carry the load of the film. Sure, there was some dialogue, but that wasn’t the main thrust of the script. But once I saw it, I knew if I tried hard enough, I could replicate it.
Then, I had an idea pop in my head. I wrote a little dialogue, but my challenge was to make it as visual as possible. Thinking about it now, I don’t think I succeeded, but I was trying like hell to make it work visually.
Thing is, I have a direction now. I think when I get back to thinking about film again, I’m going to go back to what I knew how to do: thinking visually.