Plot
The plot refers to the events of the story. There should be some sort of internal logic framed by a natural progression.I guess at one point I naively thought that having a plot was enough. Wow, I was totally wrong.
Visualization & space
Film is visual. Ideas are not. So in my sort of film, I have to figure out how to visualize ideas. For me, I guess that's what the props are for. I found that situating and arranging the props in space was a good idea. Ben didn't HAVE to go to the desert to find a clue. But putting the shrine in the desert helped provide narrative clarity (something different is happening now), visual variety (look, we're outdoors!) and new narrative opportunities (oh no, birds!)
Time
Dealing with time has been the most difficult part of the project. The first question was how do I show something spinning for a "long time?" Mackendrick said that in film, there is only one tense—the present. My first attempt at working with time was literal, starting at day one then moving to day two and so on. If an event was important I expanded it, if it was unimportant I contracted it. But that's where I started running into problems. How do we define "important?" For the plot? For the characters? Also, exactly how much expansion or compression is necessary?
That's where the emotional consequences idea helped. In a film, it seems that time is generally subject to the lead character(s). In other words, there's really no such thing as "days and days went by" or "the spinner spun unwaveringly, hauntingly forever." You have to structure events that create anticipation from the emotional (literal or implied) perspective of the lead. If something gets in the way of an emotional arc in progress, you probably have to deemphasize it. For example, in the current cut, Ben says something like "the device remains unfixable." That bit of narration enabled me to get rid of a number of shots of Ben unsuccessfully trying to fix the device. Those shots needed to be excised because they were interrupting the emotional arc of the sequence.
Anticipation
I think I initially felt negative about anticipation because of the use of cliches that aim to create tension (scary strings, the cat leaps from the shadows, going back for the dog, etc.). But Mackendrick convinced me that film-drama IS anticipation. I had intuitively tried to create anticipation in certain places. In the end, for example, there's a fire and then a little later we creep closer and closer to Ben who is hidden behind a doorway. Why can't we see his face? Is he hideously disfigured? The narration, too contained a lot of phrases aimed at creating anticipation. It seemed like every other sentence ended with "but then...." At first it struck me that this was a cheap trick. Then I heard it used in the movie The Bad and the Beautiful, and it was invisible. I think in practice, there are a grab bag of techniques you can use to create anticipation—the narrative "but then...," the "bomb under the table" (dramatic irony), suspenseful music, slowly revealing something bit by bit. I'm sure that writers want the "but then's" embedded in the actual structure of the film. Can you imagine a script that reads, "and here, scary music tells us that something is about to happen...." But sometimes, you have no choice.
Emotion
In earlier posts I was always saying things like "I want to avoid emotion," and "we don't need to see Ben acting emotional." In the last few posts, everything has been about Ben's "emotional consequences!" I find that what I'm really against is the idea of film as an emotional roller coaster that "makes you laugh and makes you cry." Life already has enough emotion and drama. But a film does need emotional content. As I've discovered, without an emotional point of view, a film becomes difficult to grasp and comprehend.
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