Capstone Week 2: Screenwriting, Collaborateurs and Courting the Danish Indie Kids

I discussed this project with my friend Stephen, who’s going to be creating a Capstone next semester, and we’ve decided to collaborate: I’m going to write a script, and he’s going to film it. This makes going forward a lot less complicated, except for the business of deciding what I should be writing. But whatever the finished product should be at this point, I know it has to be filmable by someone with a very low-budget, and I’ve decided to start my research from there. (My entry in Screenwriting class was rejected for filming elsewhere because it was so intensely high-budget, so this is a weakness I direly need to shore up.)

The best resource I’ve found thus far on dealing with penniless-filmmaking is an online article in the magazine Script, written by Clive Davies-Frayne and entitled “Four Ways to Control Your Script’s Budget Without Compromising the FIlm”. It makes some points that were pretty obvious to me, like that you should film all of a location’s scenes all at once at that location, but also some that I’d never thought of, like that defining all your locations from the beginning saves time and effort compared to writing location-independent scenes that could be filmed anywhere. Some of it is based in the idea that the reader will actively be paying actors, and the slightly optimistic note that big names sometimes take on small roles for less money if the productions are interesting enough, but the meat of it is in its advice on making the most of your locations and not just writing long scenes to cover up a dearth of places to go. (This is one of the lucky things about writing a screenplay being shot somewhere you’ve spent four years living in.)

The article also lists items in the manifesto of Dogme95, a film movement started by Lars von Trier & co. in Denmark, the same year I was born. The manifesto forbids things like nondiegetic sound, props not found on location and complicated lighting, and styles itself as a vow of chastity on traditional means of directing. I’d heard of the movement through clicking through random Wikipedia articles a year ago, but I never really understood what they were trying to achieve; looking at it as a money-saving measure the way Davies-Frayne does, the whole thing comes together. However, it also forbids genre movies, and there are some things I’m not sure I’m willing to give up in this as-yet-unconceived script of mine.

Moving forward from here, I’ve found a bunch of guidebooks on writing low-budget scripts, and I know where to find the script of at least one of my all-time favorites, but once I have a concrete direction I’m going in I could take a deeper dive into the films and traditions my work will be trying to descend from.

Work Cited

Davies-Frayne, Clive (2013, Jan 18). Alt Script: Four Ways to Control Your Script’s Budget Without Compromising the Film. Retrieved from http://www.scriptmag.com/features/alt-script-four-ways-to-control-your-scripts-budget-without-compromising-the-film

Persuasion, Occultism, and Lizard-Thinking

The bit of The Persuaders that interested me the most was its look into the confusion and desperation of advertisers themselves. It’s easy to think of advertising as a kind of all-knowing conspiracy, given how omnipresent it is and how it conditions and affects us in ways we don’t really appreciate, but seeing the burden for any one group trying to actually pull it off makes it much less scary and more personal. The idea that advertisers are themselves unsure of the effects of their work, and that many of them are artistic people who resent having to work in the industry, fleshes out the profession in a way I never really thought about before.

There’s a kind of schadenfreude that comes from seeing people slowly fail at creating an ad campaign, but Rapaille’s seminars create a much bigger picture of the kind of soft mysticism that happens in the field. Having read his interview, his work on Nestle seems like a straightforward, smart campaign based on raising children with coffee, but it’s not very long before we see him as the kind of person who removes people’s chairs and makes them scribble out their memories to find out their “true” opinions. If you’re curious, the “reptilian brain” thing comes from the triune brain hypothesis, a theory of the brain which has been thoroughly criticized by people who at least seem to know what they’re talking about. (My pet reason for doubting it is that its idea of the primitive unreasoning reptile-brain doesn’t fit well with things like toolmaking crows.)

But the best takeaway from Rapaille, for me, is that it doesn’t really matter which underlying system he’s using. He could just as easily be starting with the eight-circuit model of consciousness, because he’s still going to get some lucky hits on the back of folk-psychology alone. The fact that any company with a diverse-enough ad campaign will never know if his advice worked would be enough to keep him afloat anyway, because he’s accomplishing for corporations what bad self-help books do for individuals.

Even modern esotericism takes these things deathly-serious, given its concern with ideas-as-supernatural-agents, although not much of it makes these kind of connections outright. This very blunt statement of it is taken from The Psychonaut Field Manual, Third Edition by Bluefluke the Arch-Traitor.

Ultimately, companies are often prepared to believe very superstitious things, and their tendency to go too far and create cultish structures is already well-discussed. I don’t mean to discredit it entirely when I call it “mysticism”, though, because even guesswork systems of the human mind can accomplish a lot when enough money and effort’s poured through them, and you don’t need a neurologically accurate picture of your customer to make them want something. I just think it’s important to understand that this is a very messy, groping-in-the-dark method of understanding people, and that ultimately it leaves a big gap in the way advertisers understand the world. Whether closing that gap and giving them a truly effective brain-model is a good idea is a question for another essay.

Capstone, Week 1: Finalizing the Concept - Problems, Solutions, Thoughts

I'm afraid I'm caught between a rock and a hard place in terms of what I want to create.

Ultimately I came into Shepherd because I wanted to get all I could out of its creative writing concentration, and I quickly moved from that into the Communications department when I realized that English wouldn't teach me anything that three dozen writing guides and personal experience wouldn't solve eventually. I chose this route because I wanted to be able to write anything and everything, to be the kind of jack-of-all-trades that every self-respecting desperate freelancer should be. I want to do justice to that.

Things are hectic, though. I'm taking six classes, and working a part-time job around 20 hours a week, and I can feel my circumstances tempering me but it still feels too often like there aren't enough hours in the day to do anything substantial. I hope it won't be considered lazy if I write something like a research paper instead of doing a project involving lots of people and moving parts and scheduling conflicts, but if I do that I need to have a place to submit it to.

And there are the idealistic and fun ideas, like building an alternate reality game or working with some other fledgling medium to prove that I have the basic principles down and I can intuit the patterns behind new modes of art and communication. ARGs are wonderful, but to have meaning with such a small audience one would need to be strongly tethered to the real world, and on a cleanly college campus bustling with young adults I can't think of many ways to integrate a game-narrative with the real world that wouldn't immediately be smudged / cleaned / graffiti'd over / destroyed accidentally / moved / replaced.

I should note that if I had complete control of the guidelines and my own time, I would write a book of essays about various media, find some way to tie those media into it, and either publish it at a small press or try to serialize it through a news-site somewhere. My tenacious English minor's showing, I'm sure. Given that, whatever I choose - and I will before the next few days are over, because I need to - the hard work of it's bound to mostly be writing, and I imagine the final product will be, too.

Jake Johnson and the Case of the Philosophical Visitation

Out of all the things about her visit, I was most interested in Ms. Corsetto’s manner. It’s very difficult to explain, but in my eye there has always been a vague demarcation between being a student artist and a true one. There’s something which confers successful creatorship which you can feel in an individual, the spark that differentiates class projects and creative writing workshop entries from published masterpieces.

It seems intuitive, that the world should act this way. Even if the spark manifests differently, there are people who just seem to have it. Neal Stephenson, Lawrence Miles, and J. G. McCrae all possess the aura of a creator. This isn’t actually a good thing, given that it’s hard to attribute a spark to people you know, especially yourself. I don’t think that I exude writer-ness, and it’s rare to find anyone else in this university who seems to, even if they have true talent. 

And yet Danielle Corsetto doesn’t feel like a creator, and she’s made a fortune by art standards. My map is full of holes, and it doesn’t match the territory, and her existence in my field of view helped me notice that. Being a success in a creative industry is something which can be accomplished without a prerequisite feeling, in much the same way that plenty of newly-minted adults don’t feel terribly mature.

(N.B. I've read Poorcraft now, and I have to say that it's an invaluable book.)

Comic Plans

For my 16-page comic, I'm going to cover an event in my life, rather than a friend's: my trip to Ocean City last summer. This was a week-long vacation taken by myself, my younger brother of 3 years and my mother, and it was in the wake of my father's death.

For him, a four-year battle with cancer ended when it spread to his brain, and because his last wish was to die in his home, the family basically revolved around him, and his mother and father came to help take care of him. I spent my nights staying up, sacrificing sleep to pace the basement and get a little peace of mind, but I was eventually found and put on the night shift, sleeping a few hours a day and spending the dark hours near a baby monitor, checking to make sure he was still breathing.

He lost the ability to speak properly, then the ability to speak at all, then the ability to communicate, then consciousness. I think the last thing he ever said was "No."

So, in short, we needed a break. My mother braved a gigantic metal bridge and we all put up with carsickness in order to travel to Florida while it was still bearable. We received the highest corner hotel room on the best hotel available, so big it cast shadows across the beach.

And the beach...

The water in the beach is all composed of the same type of atoms moving at roughly the same speed. It's connected to every river and ocean in the world, and if you wade into it you're touching millions of people by proxy. That water is the same water as rain, the same water as drinking fountains and soda, the same water as blood and urine. That water is older than living organisms, and has comprised all of them. The water in your body was in rainstorms that battered Rome, the guts of dinosaurs, and the roiling seas before the first cells. It comes from meteors and obeys only the moon, and when you see the way it moves you understand why cultures near large bodies of water seem calmer and simultaneously you feel like it's reaching out for you and you remember the dangers of being pulled out to sea by a current.

And then you see the sky and there's nothing else to make it seem closeby or dome-shaped, no clouds to give it distance or depth, but it rises from the horizon higher than you can see even though there's nothing in your way it's all there but you can't comprehend it just like the water there shouldn't be that MUCH of it there and it's so unnatural even though it is Nature and

I finally understood agoraphobia.

I slept on the couch, because there weren't enough beds to go around. And that week, I read On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony, which sounds symbolically fitting, but I though it was very flawed for a masterpiece. After the couple hours I spent on that, I spent the rest of the week reading all (at the time) 102 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It was 600,000 words, difficult to describe without sounding silly, and one of the three best things I've ever read.

Especially this.

Ironically, I never swam. I did try, during the evening, but no one told me that all the shells came in as the sun waned.
I couldn't step into the tide without being shredded by them, and eventually I had to give up and head back to the hotel. Walking the boardwalk was pretty fun, though, and so was the area in general. There are some great pictures of it in wintertime, where the whole area's closed and covered in snow.

That was one of the big seeds, I think, in my turn to travel. I'd love to go back there, someday soon.

Maus and Truth

In Maus, Art Spiegelman records the experiences of his father, Vladek, an old man who lived through the Holocaust. This book is regularly referenced as the reason that comic books began to be taken seriously as a medium, instead of being seen as a childish pursuit. The reason for this is obvious- saying that Maus doesn’t mean anything means criticizing the account of a Holocaust survivor, and so even people who loathe comics must change their opinions of them at least slightly to accommodate it.

Holocaust survivor stories are, by their nature, brutally honest, and Spiegelman makes the decision (at least, as far as the reader knows) not to keep anything off of the page. This doesn’t just extend to the account, however- although it first seems to be a framing device, the author and his father continually break immersion into the story to talk about tangential topics or to do other things which they did at the time of the interviews.

This raises the less obvious, but still challenging problem for Spiegelman of portraying his father as he really is. Vladek is prone to complaining and penny-pinching, something both his son and wife acknowledge in the course of the book. More than that, he’s overbearing and, at times, tries to manage his son’s life. People expect a Holocaust account to be full of graphic details and tell a truth they don’t really want to hear, but it’s another level of brutal honesty entirely to show that someone can survive these events and have a story to tell, but may not be a likeable person.

What’s more, Spiegelman shows his own family drama, the sort of things that even a memoir writer might choose to keep quiet, including Vladek’s relationship with his wife, or a comic book Spiegelman wrote following his mother’s death. These are uncomfortable, but not in a way we’ve been primed for. Plus, the controversy so big that it’s mentioned within the story itself:

Maus is a story that cares enough about honesty that it’s willing to seem completely racist in one of the worst possible contexts in order to tell its story properly. At this point the only question of ethics left is the question of whether it’s better to publish all of this or to hold back on some of it and save the risk to one’s reputation, and it’s clearly already been made. The very publication of the book is a serious statement, and as an attempt at getting uncomfortably close to reality, it succeeds all too well.

A Child's-Eye View of Revolution

It’s an old saying that hindsight is 20/20, but for the memories of childhood, hindsight can be positively transformative and seem downright wrong. Persepolis’ protagonist/author, Marjane, sees the Islamic Revolution not just through the eyes of a person who was in Iran at the time, but the eyes of a child who’s learning of extremely adult matters. 

This is very important to the story, and to giving the whole event its impact- without a person there to give us a view of the events, any historical event is reduced to an encyclopedia entry. And telling these events from the point of view of a child is especially jarring, and reveals the awful truth that in the scary parts of human history, children have experienced the same horrors as adults. In fact, it serves to show us a more vulnerable view of the world-at-large, one which cuts to the emotional quick of living through the revolution and the society that came afterwards. 

For the record, I’m aware that this wasn’t really a choice on the part of the author, but it does lend Persepolis a special weight. The Shah’s mass release of political prisoners is shown in the documentary “Fall of a Shah” as a political gesture, one of many in a much larger story, but to Marjane it was the time when people close to her were freed. Likewise, the Iranian secret police, Savak, are an unpleasant part of that society when viewed years afterward, but their torture and imprisonment of people gains impact when filtered through the imagination of a child.

Most striking, though, is what simply isn’t covered by the scope of the documentary. Communists are hardly mentioned in it, and yet almost the entire cast is made up of communists and socialists. What’s more, the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini is something that actively threatens them. When students take over the U.S. embassy, it’s not a footnote about what happened shortly after the Ayatollah took over, it’s the end of Marji’s ability to get a visa and escape to America- a closing instead of a new, interesting development.

These are significant changes in the larger tale of Iranian government, and meaningful on a scale of megadeaths, but for someone this small and human, they’re boiled down to moments of celebration and tragedy, joy and death. These are the footprints that big events leave on all of us, and they serve as the greater context for all our lives.