BSA 204 W15 : The Worst Film Crew and Improv Arcs

So we had this idea of what we wanted to do for a while now, where we show the world's worst film crew in action (DOP is blind, Soundie deaf, Chris Nolan on cable wrangling etc) and we were considering it as a potential social media addition to Neon Shrimps' facebook page.

Today I made a blog for 325 where I went over some BTS photos and annotated them, it was a lot of fun and gave me the same vibes as worst film crew, with us being shed in a very irresponsible and incompetent light.

https://bomyburgh2again.blogspot.com/2019/05/bsa-325-w15-infomercial-shoot.html

Transitioning these little vignettes straight over into a fake docu script could be exactly what we're looking for, at least for a first installment, not sure exactly how it'd work but I'm keen on trying to adapt it.

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We also filmed some stuff for Kiarne's third year film today and during it tried some improvisation. Matthew is doing improv as the focus of his project and as such we've been focusing more on how it actually works and how we could possibly make it good.

The thing about this that I realised today was that giving actors and arc to aim for helps a lot for narrative purposes, it made the direction the scene was heading in seem much more obvious. Usually we just give conflict or simpler goals, but providing a way for the character to change makes the scene feel more complete and more fun to play with.

It made me realise just how important character arcs are, I think its change in a film that makes it feel like a story was told.

This time the story was a guy revealing to his buddies that he's having a baby, something he hasn't said as its a sensitive issue for one who had recently lost his family in a tragedy. The third friend is gay so won't ever have biological children. The one who can't have kids anymore tries to convince the one who is having a baby to sell it to him.

To make this more entertaining we decided upon arcs the characters have to go through, so the main character had to transition from being selfish to not. This immediately added much more to the scene and everyone was more aware of what was important and where the story had to go. There was an unspoken direction for the scene as a whole and everyone aimed at the same thing, supporting eachother with what they said while still staying in their characters' shoes.

This is very similar to scripts, where we try to fake something natural, while there is actually a lot of technical pieces being moved under the surface.

On the infomercial shoot we tried some improv where Nik had become upset that Matthew was growing a beard as he felt that it was an infringement on his image. In that one the characters didn't really have goals or arcs and just the conflict wasn't nearly enough to carry it.

Basically this week I've learnt the importance of: character set-up and character arcs.