I've thought a lot about story and my love of it and fear if it and feelings of not understanding it and wanting to understand it. I've often felt intimidated or confused when film makers say that they're storytellers. "I'm a storyteller. I tell visual stories. I just love stories."
I do too. Don't get me wrong. I love movies and stories of every type. Something about the way my mind interprets the world I haven't always know what story is made up of. All the "plot points" all the "beats" the "act one-two-three" and don't get me started with the "point of no return". It's all tools and words and systems that have been confusing to me. I've read the books. "Screenplay" by Syd Field. "Story" by Robert McKee. "Three Uses of a Knife" by David Mamet. I've really delved and searched. "Poetics" for god's sake. But what does it all mean?
As I've started making these short films - the little 10-30 second ones I've been posting on facebook and Instagram and now cataloging on YouTube - I've had to ask what makes this diffrent from a photograph? How is this not just a picture? Just a portrait of an instant? A long portrait? I don't want to do just a sitting portrait. While nice, I think a photograph does it just as well if not better. So what is needed for it to be a film, and therefor have a story? A narrative?
I came up with these two things.
Hero.
It has to have a single subject. I directed a food photography workshop and the main takeaway I got from the excellent instructors was: choose a hero on the plate. They did a shoot of a bowl of chili and there was some garnish and a nice bowl and a nice table and nice light. But the instructor was very clear and unapologetic about taking about about five beans from the chilli and washing them and looking at them and deciding which was her favorite. Which was the hero? Then she placed those beans back in carefully and angled on the hero. Made sure that as the pictures started rolling the hero was clear.
So, that was back to photography, but it applies. Choose a hero of the story and don't forget who it is.
Now, what's the second thing that's needed?
Change.
Change is the crucial part that makes it an art in time. Tarkovsky - my favorite director - was famous for his long takes. He disagreed with Eisenstien and his theory of montage (editing creates meaning) feeling that deeper understanding of a moment comes from saturation over time during single takes (saturation creates meaning). What this means for him is tons of beautiful long tracking shots through forests, over streams, into the dark shadows of a bedroom as the hero, almost obscured from in the darkness, falls asleep. And into a dream. His memoir/book of essays is called "Sculpting in Time". In this way film is a temporal art. Like music, like dance. It requires duration to experience the change.
So in a single shot he achieves change. Hero, change.
That's what I'm trying to do in my small films. Single shot, hero, change. Even if subtle.
Because here's what it all boils down to, as far as I can tell. A story is the journey of a caterpillar to a butterfly. That's it. That's all I can really see as true. The hero caterpillar her begins the story, and is transformed through time in the unity of space into a hero caterpillar.
And what I love about this butterfly metaphor is that it implies the development into its essential self. Into it's deeper self. It's destiny. It packs in all the humanistic developmental excitement I could want in a single image. Luke Skywalker begins a caterpillar, farm boy who doesn't know what his life means, he ends a Butterfly: master of the force and reclaimer of his family's destiny. The stop light begins red, a caterpillar hero, it turns green: butterfly. A leaf begins frontlit, caterpillar, ends backlit and ecstaticly revealing it's inner composition: butterfly.
I like subtle. I think for me the essential guide is: if this is the caterpillar, when is the butterfly?
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