Owww, my nose!

Every Brady Bunch episode featured stories with negligible events but strong emotional consequences. So instead of stories like "Marcia's baby" or "Jan's bout with cancer" you'd see Marcia worrying about her prom date or Jan dealing with sibling rivalry. I think that was part of the show's charm. There was always something important at stake, but it was never a life-or-death matter. The Brady Bunch was all about potential emotional consequences.

It's an old adage that a film has to have something important at stake. So every summer movie has a plot in which the hero has to save the world. But after awhile, saving the world doesn't seem all that interesting. And what the Brady Bunch proves is that it's the emotional, not the life-and-death consequences that matter.

Noise film has always been about life and death but I hadn't fully thought through the peaks and valleys of Ben's emotions. Structuring the edit by asking "how does Ben feel" is causing me to shape the film so that the emotional consequences to Ben are always apparent. I'm hoping that this will help me to structure the film in a dramatic (e.g., anticipatory) way.

When I say "emotional consequences" it's important to clarify what this means. There's this idea that a film has to have characters that you "care about." I always thought this was dumb because fictional characters are not real! What I mean is that understanding emotional consequences is important because it helps us to comprehend a film. In other words, emotional identification with a character is less important than the fact that we use a lead character's emotions as an entry point into the story.