Not what they do, but what they could do

The conversation in a film school always seems to come round to whether directors understand what others on their creative teams do sufficiently well to collaborate.  I suggest that If setting up classes wherein the directors learn what others do, it is important to teach their actions in relation to drama and story, not in relation to production. 

·       Design creates the image of character and culture or ‘world’, and sets up the cinematographer to reveal visual tone and metaphor

·       The cinematographer reveals the drama, articulates perspective visually, and creates the visual expression of tone, metaphor, power relationships, time, and space, as set up by the designer.

·       The editor structures the audience experience of the drama over time.  They shape time, energy and movement of events, emotions and images to reveal the drama.

·       The sound designer further shapes the experience with perspective, tone, energy (dynamics) mood and specificity of aural world and texture.

·       The composer reinforces and articulates the structure of the experience, expressing all of the above (character, world, tone, time, energy, emotions, mood etc.) in an abstract form that binds all of the elements into a whole and complete expression of the drama.

·       The director interprets the script, articulating what, in their view the drama is, and how the characters reveal it through their actions.  He or she then has the task of conveying what the drama is, what the power relationships are, the perspective the production has on the events in the plot, and therefore the idea for culture or world, tone, metaphor, time, space, energy and movement to all collaborators.

·       The writer instigates the cinematic revelation of drama by designing and expressing plot, and the action of characters, culture or world through it. 

·       The producer elicits an articulation of the drama and perspective (commonly referred to as vision) from the director and watches over the process for consistency of articulation and interpretation.  Budgets and schedules are expressions of the ‘vision’ in numbers and the producer allocates the numbers through their coherent understanding of the drama and perspective. 

The topics of common study between all disciplines, therefore are (or should be) character, culture or world, tone, metaphor, revelation, power, time, space, energy, movement and dramaturgy.

In screen studies we look for how these manifest in a range of productions, genres, time periods, cultures, industries, and particular creative teams.   We ask the students to become fluent with these ideas through identifying and articulating them in existing works, and expect them to synthesize this learning by applying it, as a capacity for articulation, to their own work.  We do not distinguish between disciplines in our expectations for their capacities to identify, articulate and synthesise.