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Friday Fundas

Voice of the Dialogue

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Voice of the Dialogue

Have you heard of the phrase when someone says “he has lost his voice”. It is used to imply a situation in which a person’s views are neglected or he is not convincing anymore. One of the most common reasons you would hear is people saying “he doesn’t sound real”. People disconnect with the person and his opinions at this stage. Now map this to movies. Your characters are already unreal and are a mere fictitious depiction on the screen. How can you have your audience connected? You could only do this by effective construction of the contents in movies. Out of the many contents, dialogues play a very significant part. In this week’s Friday Fundas I will explore the element of voice within a dialogue.

You would remember watching a movie and you were totally confused when a certain character speaks a dialogue that doesn’t fit well and it totally disconnects you from the movie and brings back to the reality. This is where the movie fails to engage with you. If you are an aspiring screen writer then you should be very careful in choosing the words your characters speak. Sometimes the sentence or the dialogue itself might be very powerful but the background and the personal nature the character would dictate if the dialogue would connect with the audience or not. For instance let us look at the movie The Matrix released in 1999. What if the dialogues of Morpheus were spoken to Trinity? You would feel it is totally absurd right? Most of the budding screenwriters struggle with this aspect. If you have written a scene involving two characters then interchange the names of the characters and read the script again if you don’t feel the abrupt change in way the characters are speaking then it is time to bring about the variation in the voice and distinguish the characters. If you don’t draw this distinction then all your dialogues will have the same voice even though it is spoken by different characters. One of the techniques many screenwriters use is to observe and draw inspiration from the desired surrounding. For instance, if your scene involves a restaurant sequence then you could go to a restaurant sit down on a table and observe the conversations happening around. You would start picking up various people talking in different style. Now pick up a style for one of your character and develop the dialogues. This would create the desired distinction you need. When the audience watches this on the screen they would subconsciously get involved in the movie and forget that they are witnessing fiction. In the Hindi movie Lagaan there are numerous of characters playing significant role in the movie. If you observe carefully each of the character has its own voice and is very distinct from the other. This makes the scenes very convincing. Hence voice of the dialogue is a very important aspect every screenwriter needs to pay attention to. Many of the movies employ a different person to write the dialogues for the movie while a different person is responsible for the screenplay. Next time when you watch a movie pay attention to the way the dialogues are constructed, you would appreciate the amount of hard work a dialogue writer and screen writer has put in.

Friday Fundas

180 Degree Rule – Can I cross the line?

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180 Degree Rule – Can I cross the line?

Let us consider you are watching a movie and there is a scene which shows a car running at a considerable speed. You see the car entering the left side of the frame and exit on the right side of the frame on a highway background. But now in the next shot without any transition you see the car entering the right side of the frame and exit on the left side. What would you feel? Would you feel disoriented in figuring out which side the car is going? And if the car is actually moving forward? Well to avoid this phenomenon the film making process has framed a guideline called as the 180 degree rule.

180 degree rule is going to be the topic for this week’s Friday Fundas. 180 degree rule refers to the spatial relationship between the characters on screen. Let us look a setup in which two characters are conversing with each other. There is an imaginary line called the axis that connects the two characters. As depicted in the figure below the camera could be placed on either side of this line. This is denoted by Camera A and Camera B.

180 Degree Rule
180 Degree Rule

The shots as taken by the Camera A and B are shown in the illustration of Shot A and Shot B respectively. You would see based on which side the camera is the characters left and right position changes. For instance the green person is on the left in shot A while in shot B he is on the right. If the scene involves dialogue between the two characters and then it is advised to keep the camera on one side of the 180 degree axis line. The camera can move to any position within the side but cannot jump over to the other side. If it jumps over to the other side then it causes the audience to get disoriented like our example on the car scene.

If the shot after the original shot has the camera on the other side of the line then it is called as the Reverse cut. This usually disorients the viewers and their ability to connect to the visuals is lost. However many directors have broken the 180 degree rule to give more conveying newer meanings. These are part of the new wave film making. At most care should be taken when breaking this rule. Some of the directors who had broken this rule and succeeded are Stanely Kubrick (Shining), Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) and the Wachowskis (The Matrix).

The Matrix Bullet Time
The Matrix Bullet Time

In the movie The Matrix the bullet time technique is used and while crossing the line the frame is frozen on that time and the logical arrangement of cameras produces a continuous motion to cross the line there by adjusting the orientation of the viewers as well. Many film makers use a buffer shot while crossing the line. The buffer shot would involve a shot along the 180 degree line which separates the two sides. This minimizes the jolt and help in re-orientation of the audience.

Gollum
Gollum

In the movie Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, Peter Jackson has crossed this line to show Gollum’s split personalities of the good and the bad. The shots in which the Gollum is speaking good, he is on the right side while the shot in which he speaks evil, he is on the left side.

180 degree rule is not a hard and fast rule but film makers should give due respect to this and use this diligently to produce a visual connect for the audience with the movie.

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Friday Fundas

Friday Fundas: High Concept

High Concept – refers to an artistic work that can be pitched very easily. For example movies that could be promoted easily with a one line premise generating enough interest in people wanting to watch it. One of the most popular movies with a High Concept narrative is Jurassic Park. The movie had a high concept narrative based on what if dinosaurs could be re-created. Mostly high concept narratives fall into the pattern of “what-ifs”. Movies like King Kong, The Matrix, Inception, E.T are all movies with high concept narration. High Concept movies are not just limited to western movies it has been very popular in the Indian Cinema as well. Some of the popular High Concept movies are 12B which dealt with what if you were to see alternate lives of a person by getting onto a bus or missing a bus. Ghajini is another popular high concept movie where in the audience where intrigued by the fact that a person with short term memory loss is trying to seek revenge. Most of Shankar’s movies are high concept movies Nayak (Mudhalvan) is a good example of this which dealt with what if a common man is made the Chief Minister for a day. His recent block buster Endhiran is another high concept movie which dealt with the concept of what if Robots have emotions.

Mostly you would see that the promotion of High Concept movies is very simple as the concept itself is sufficient enough to draw people. Jurassic Park just had a dinosaur logo in its poster. Ghajini had the protagonist picture sitting with tattooed bare body. The marketing of the high concept movies follow the guidelines of “the look, the hook, the book”.

The look: how it is visually appealing to the public. Aamir Khan / Suriya’s look for Ghajini eight pack / six pack abs, tonsured head, and tattooed body.

The hook:  the attracting force for the public. How a person with short term memory loss can seek revenge?

The book:  how the movie is promoted. Before the release of Ghajini many of the multiplexes had their ticket counter personnel sporting Ghajini hair style.

Source Wikipedia

Friday Fundas

Friday Fundas: Bullet Time

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Bullet Time: It is a special and visual effect technique in which a row of still cameras are used to capture the scene. They are activated either simultaneously or with a phase lag. Later these frames are digitally assembled together to produce an effect of changing the view point of the audience in an orbit going around the scene. Bullet time is a trademark of Warner Bros. This technique although had been in existence for a long time, it was popularized by the film The Matrix released in 1999. One of the unique points of the film was to show bullet time visuals of the actions happening inside the Matrix. In particular the scene in which Neo escapes the stream of bullets fired towards him had been very popular.

The technique although dates back to the 19th century even before cinema. The Californian governor had engaged in a debate on if all the legs of the horse is in the air when it gallops. To settle this Eadweard Muybridge had done some experiment with still cameras taking the picture of galloping horse by arranging the cameras along the race track  and each camera was actuated by a taut string stretched across the track; as the horse galloped past, the camera shutters snapped, taking one frame at a time. He then arranged the photographs in on a glass disk and spun it in front of a light source. Could this have been the inspiration for Thomal Alva Edison to invent motion pictures?

Now this technique is being used in Free viewpoint Television (FTV)  in filming live shows.  At the time of The Matrix FTV was not mature… the filmmakers still did an wonderful job of creating a whole new experience.

Source: Wikipedia