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1 Digital Filmmaking Lecture 2 a Story & Dramatic Structure Story Digital Filmmaking Lecture 2 A Story & Dramatic Structure Story & Drama Stories portray and depict a person or persons (characters/protagonists) (fictional or real) located in a place and time who are affected by an incident that triggers a series of sequential events that lead the character to a new state of being. Keep in mind that everything we allude to in this discussion refers to archetypes of storytelling and drama not stereotypes. These may appear formulaic but actually the recognizable elements we discuss have emerged over time as patterns in storytelling. The antecedents traverse different media from early spoken word drama, writing prose to film and television. Whenever we refer to rules we actually mean precedents. In order to keep your audience engaged, I believe any story combines archetypes with innovation. If all elements in a story are easily recognizable, the story will be a cliché. If nothing is familiar to the audience, the story would be thought of as an experimental film and if that’s not the intent of the author, the audience may shut down. I believe that the storyteller uses expectation and surprise to prod and coax the viewer’s attention through the experience from beginning to end. All rules are meant to be broken but to break rules with an understanding of how they work helps produce an original outcome rather than a mere mess. Dramatic Structure A film is built like a building. The various structural story elements you will use are- •Story Events •Beats 1 •Scenes •Sequences •Acts Storytelling and Filmmaking Cinematically, the main building blocks you will work with to build a dramatic story structure are shots and sound. Making films involves combining techniques borrowed from other types of dramatic storytelling with elements and tools unique to filmmaking – shots, sound, editing and special effects. The filmmaker orchestrates these Story Elements with Cinematic Elements into an overall experience. Story Events Not everything makes for a story. Here’s a story for you- This morning I woke up with a start. The alarm hadn’t gone off. I pulled myself up and staggered to loo. A few minutes later I emerged and made my way to the kitchen. Looking through the overhead closet, I searched and found a box of number #2 coffee filters. Opening the coffee maker, I pulled out yesterdays grinds and threw them in the bin. Placing the new filter in the maker, I went to the fridge. Opening the freezer, rummaged for my rapidly diminishing bag of La Colombe’s Ethiopian coffee. Pouring the coffee beans into the grinder, I closed the lid and pressed down. Tipping them ground beans into the coffee maker, I took the carafe over to the sink where I filled it up… How am I doing? Enthralling wasn’t it? Real fingernail chewing stuff! It should be obvious that importance and significance is vital to storytelling as opposed to trivia. This is important when it comes to choosing an idea and how to use story craft in communications and education. Accusations of over-dramatizing and eroticizing incidents are frequently lobbied at documentary, news and educational filmmaking. Character This should be obvious. Characters are persons, fictional or real, whom we will follow and meet over the length of the story. Principal characters are persons of chief interest, while Supporting characters have secondary importance though vital to the progression of the story. Extras, both speaking and silent, add texture and realism to stories. Time This dimension postions the character historically. Does the character’s story take place in the present day or is it an historical story or a futuristic one. Stories establish the story’s time early in the story. Space Obviously a character lives and occupies a place, a location where the events of the story will take place. Just like the dimension of Time, stories establish Space early most of the time. 2 Story Events Stories are about people we pay attention to because we catch them at a special moment in their lives where something important or significant happens! Anything a character experiences that has a significant impact on them is called a Story Event. Significance is central to stories. If it doesn’t mean all that much to the character, why should we, the audience care? Story Event can be of varying significance in a story. Major Story Events are called Plot Points, Inciting Incidents, Reversals, Turning Points and we will discuss them later on in these notes. Beats Understanding beats and how to use them is functionally very helpful to directing and constructing a film. A beat is a moment of significance occurring in a scene between characters. Characters (and the audience) enter a scene in a particular state of understanding. During a scene, the characters interact with dialogue and action observed by the audience. Because of the action and reaction, the give and take during the scene, the knowledge base and understanding of the characters changes as does that of the audience. The moments where these changes actually occur in the scene are called “Beats”. There are two types of beats: 1. Dramatic/Story Beats 2. Performance Beats Dramatic Beats emerge from the screenplay/script and can even emerge through the editing process. The effect of dramatic beats are usually on the story (the meaning of this particular narrative) and plot (the actual events seen by the audience) and the emotional and intellectual positioning of the audience in relation to the story. Performance Beats are word or actions shown by a performer that depict or betray a change in their understanding of the situation they find themselves in. Think of the moment in the scene in When Harry Met Sally when Sally is put off that Harry does not respond badly to the fact that she has a date. Her reaction shot betrays her disappointment. This is a performance beat. However, because of this performance beat the audience now knows that she is in love with Harry even before she knows herself. The audience has more information than the character. This omniscient and powerful position of the audience viz-a-viz the characters is what pulls in and maintains the audience’s involvement in the story. The audience begins to root for her and only feel relief if the couple comes together in love with each other (the climax and denouement). A director finds the story beats while reading and uses them to figure where the camera should be. A story beat is useless if the camera does not capture it. Once a director goes through a scene she mark beats into the scene (Beat 1, Beat 2, Beat 3 and so on. When she decides which beats are important she will make sure that she has a camera positioned to shoot it. It’s not surprising that beats are often in MS, MCU and CU. So Story Beats assist Shot Marking. 3 During rehearsals, directors work with actors who search and find their performance beats- actions and reactions to each other in the scene. Directors can re-adjust their story beats based on the actor’s performance beats. Documentary and non-fiction filmmakers must seek out and find story beats in the A-roll and B-roll footage. In a documentary, the filmmaker and editor, seeks out and use beats to construct the drama in the edit room. To be clear, I repeat that those producing documentaries will be looking to build scenes out of LS, MS and CU’s joined and spliced together using story beats to identify important moments to include in the scene. Scenes Scenes are made up of Long Shots, Mid-shots and Close-ups of interacting characters engaged with themes, goals and desires in a single location and point in time. The scene’s events (actions and plot) has its own beginning, middle and end leaving the characters and the audience at different state of understanding of what is going by the scene’s end. Long shots, mid-shots and close-ups are used to present Story Beats and Performance Beats that reveal the moment to moment changing state of the characters and the story. Sequence Groups of scenes (locations and time) that are connected by theme, action or story make up a Sequence. A car chase is a sequence because of the changing locations. Act Scenes and Sequences grouped together because of their role in the story. Act structure is the basic organizational principles derived Aristotelian and Freytag’s theories of drama. Another way to understand the role of the Act in story and drama is that the beginning and end of Act marks significance changes in the plot and story. We shall explore this further below. Aristotle’s Poetics Aristotle was born in Stagirus, Macedonia, Greece in 384 BC and died 62 years later in 322 BC. He was a student at Plato's Academy and later became one of the greatest philosophers of Ancient Greece. In one of his treatises, The Poetics, he outlines the Six Elements Of Drama, based on the Ancient Greek belief that tragedy was the highest form of Drama. This outline has become a guideline for many playwrights throughout history, and is especially emphasized in the works of William Shakespeare. The Three Unities The classical unities or three unities are rules for drama derived from a passage in Aristotle's Poetics. In their neoclassical form they are as follows: 1. The unity of action: a play should have one main action that it follows, with no or few subplots. 4 2. The unity of place: a play should cover a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place.
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