In this post I mash up a quote from Walter Murch with a commonly heard expression in edit suites "you have to kill your babies" to see what light they might shed on each other. 

In a special film made exclusively for screening at last year's Griffith University post production symposium, Walter Murch said: "Movies are much smarter than the people who make them".  What I took him to be describing is something that I have often experienced myself, and heard other filmmakers talking about as that moment when, if you can quiet your ego and 'listen', your movie will tell you what it wants to be.  This is a magic moment in the edit suite.  But it is not mystically magic, it is sensibly so.  It makes sense that a movie, which has had the contributing focus of so many forms of genius from artists in words, design, shooting, performing and directing can, at some point, when all of the egos are quiet, illuminate a pathway to synthesize all of these contributions into a whole and complete form.  The movie takes the intelligence of all of the combined contributors and synthesizes it into one intelligent being.  So of course they are smarter than any individual who makes them, they are the brains of all of them. 

So why do the movies always want the directors to "kill their babies"?  Well I have a theory, but first I'd better explain what is meant by "kill your babies". 

When the magic is not coming together in the edit suite, one thing an editor may have to do is to get a director to let go of the shot that he or she loves the most.  The one they blew way to much of the budget on.  The one they missed their grandfather's 80th birthday for.  The one they caught pneumonia standing in the rain perfecting.   These shots that the director is hanging on to, that are probably the most beautiful shots, are the ones that don't really fit into the evolving whole.  They block the synthesis, they just 'don't work'.  These shots are called the director's 'babies', and they have to be got rid of from the cut to bring the whole together.

But it is not enough to say that something just "doesn't work".  I want to know why.  So here is my hypothesis:

When directors articulate a vision, they are opening it to interpretation by others.   They are creating a space, by being brilliantly articulate about their intent, for others to be creative with their special skills in realising that intent.  They are allowing others in, and creating the potential for the movie to become very, very smart, by creating the boundaries for creative contributions.   And so the baby grows up with the genetic code of many, and becomes smarter than all of them.  Except for that one special shot.  The one special shot, the one the director loves the most and worked the hardest to get, is usually the one that he or she imagined right from the very beginning, the one that came to their minds before they opened up the idea to a collaborative process.  As such, it is too singularly owned by them.  It is their unadulterated vision.  But that word has a negative connotation.  Better to say it is their unsynthesized vision.  The fragment of their idea that didn't have enough input from everyone else to take on the collective DNA.  So it stays a baby, its doesn't mature and yield its singular nature to the whole.  And when the rest of the movie grows wise enough, smarter than the people who made it, it demands that the editor yield the ax, and the unsynthesised vision shots, the baby shots, or the 'diva' shots you might say - be dropped from the cut. 

Cutting a web series offers editors some interesting challenges in shaping audience experience - I look at a few of these in this post. 

Last year I cut a web series called "At The Fork" and found it really interesting from the point of view of structure.   Although the episodes are short – 2-3 minutes each, and the series is only 7 eps (the total screen time will end up being about 21 minutes) it is nothing like cutting a short film.   A short film has one major story arc that opens, develops and closes inside a single experience.   This one has seven mini arcs, each could stand alone, but they will be much better, like a tv series, when seen altogether, because there is a series arc that is only delivered by seeing them all.

One thing I’ve learned from handling this structure is how important it is for every scene to have a dramatic question.  This is something that also applies in short films.  In longer form you can maybe get away with scenes that don’t have anything at stake or don’t shift the power relationships or don’t advance the actions, they are just nice to look at.  But in short form, these scenes will tend to kill the energy of the whole because they take up so much more time, proportionally.   In webseries, if an ep (drama or doc, though not necessarily stand up comedy) doesn’t have a dramatic question that opens, develops, closes and points to another question for the characters, then it may well kill the whole series.  The eps are too short for moments that are just nice to look at, and each one has to compel the viewer to the next. 

This doesn’t mean it feels similar to cutting episodic TV.  Though I don’t have experience of this (and would love to hear from editors who do) I can imagine there are a lot of differences – story line complexity, character development within an ep, multiple plot lines.   This is not to say a web series couldn’t have these, but the one I cut only has one plot line, the characters progress within their relationships in each ep, so the story line is not complex.  It doesn’t operate the way a short film does, but it does feel more like a series of short films than a series of scenes within one story. 

One thing that is clearly different between a webseries and a TV show is that viewers take charge of time on the web in a different way than they do when they watch TV.   In a TV ep, the editor takes charge of the rhythm of the experience, including the pacing and timing of development from one scene to the next, and their proportional balance in relation to each other. The network, of course, controls the time limits of the whole and the ad break structure.   But Webisodes don’t have either of these controls.  Viewers decide if and when to get the next piece in the arc, they might decide to go out of order, which changes the arc in interesting ways!  Also, there is no time limit at all.

There are attention limits, but this doesn’t mean all episodes have to be short, it just means they all have to be good. 

One of the reasons I’m interested in the difference between cutting webisodes and other forms is that some of my colleagues and I have started thinking that getting students to make web-series might give them a better calling card than short films.  Web-series show that students can sustain a story over multiple eps, which might help them get work in television more readily.  Even more importantly, a web-series communicates directly with its audience – no gatekeepers, so it makes students more audience focused instead of funding body focused or festival focused.  Also, web-series give its creators direct feedback from their audiences – through social media or through statistics – audiences only click on the next one if they are compelled to by the first one!

“Convergence” is a huge question mark for industry right now, and there are plenty of signs that the distinctions between online and TV are collapsing.  We get and watch TV digitally.  Aggregators like YouTube and Blip-TV make channels, commission work with high production values, and sell ads.  Ads might clearly be labeled ads, or they might be branded content.  The models are shifting and potentially giving rise to new forms, certainly new structures of story telling.  This is, by my estimation, the biggest opportunity for developing the craft of editing since the rise of music videos in the 1980s. 

The questions for editors are not just about craft, but will of course also be about industry.  Employment for editors could increase as this form becomes more professional.  As my colleague Mike Jones writes “In the age of the internet a whole range of institutions have become 'broadcasters' and 'post production houses' that in the past would not have been so - museums, galleries, arts institutions etc. are now much more likely to have a team of editors in-house working on web-series, episodic productions all year round as well as often producing traditional Broadcast TVCs.”  My own view is that, like the Borg technology on Star Trek,  ‘resistance is futile’ so a pro-active stance that embraces the opportunities and guides them toward best practice is a better one for the guild to take than one which tries to stop the tidal wave. 

A few weeks ago my colleague Mike Jones wrote a blog post championing the return of the term "multimedia" to describe the new generation of screen stories that embed a lot of art forms into a single story experience.  He was talking about productions like The 39 Steps for ipad where there are cut scenes (short movies), text on screen (literature), interactive opportunities that allow the curious person to hunt around for clues (games) and of course images, sounds and music. 

Mike wrote that people might object because the word 'multimedia' reminds them of CD-Roms, but that is not why I object. 

I object because multimedia is a transitional term.   It says that something is not 'itself' but a conglomeration of other things. 

It is not unusual to go through transitional terms like these.  Movies, for example, were called moving pictures originally, suggesting that they were a combination of movement and image, which of course they are, but we don't call them moving pictures any more, they have their own name.  The word cinema is actually quite like the word 'movie' in that it draws on the Greek word 'kine' meaning movement.  Like "Movie" though, cinema is its own word now, it describes a particular thing which we think of as being a synthesized experience, not a combination of separate arts that are multiply making up an experience. 

So why can't 'multimedia' become its own word describing its own art?  Well, first of all because it has been used too many times before to describe too many kinds of experience.  Mike refers to the CD-Rom, but misses out on the stage shows that combine, for example, dance, text, lighting projections etc.  These were big in the 70s, and they are big again now, but the lighting projections are computer generated rather than cued and focused by hand.  And what about those free love 'happenings' in the 60s where projections of food dyes dropped onto glass slides were hazily synchronized with the acid driven music and writhing.  The good old days of "multimedia".

But more importantly, "multimedia" can't become its own word because it blocks synthesis.  It demands that the media stay multiple rather than being an entity, what the Germans might call a Gesamtkunstwerk .  Sorry to quote from wikipedia, but they basically have this one right:
"A Gesamtkunstwerk (translated as total work of art,[1] ideal work of art,[2] universal artwork,[3] synthesis of the arts, comprehensive artwork, all-embracing art form or total artwork) is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms "

The term is one that Wagner used to describe Opera.  But just as we don't call Opera 'sung drama' we shouldn't call an ipad app that uses a few things we are familiar with from other places a 'multimedia' work.   And I firmly believe that this tablet based beast, which we can touch and move and read and watch but cannot yet name is well on its way to becoming as legit a form as Opera. 

Finally, in addition to being a played out slut of a name, and to blocking synthesis, multimedia as a name blocks something else.  Something that Mike himself writes about a few posts later: "normalisation".   By continuing to call things 'multimedia' instead of giving them their own name, we continue to say they are not 'normal' media they are new, unnamed, and unnameable combinations of normal media.

I for one, would rather give them a name and move on to being creative within then, maturing them, experiencing them as part of my richly mediated life.  It is tempting to suggest something flippant, say "Frankenstein", for these unnamed genetic hybrids, but I would rather have something that speaks of and to my experience.  So what to call these apps that bring together social, personal, textual, visual, aural and interactive sensations into one?  What is most salient about my experience of these, what distinguishes them from the gesamtkunstwerk of, for example, movies or operas, is that I touch them to make them move.  I am in charge of time with my touch, and time is the real media in which they unfold. 

So here's a list of touch based names to start with, make your arguments for and against!

1. Touchtold stories
2. Haptic narratives
3. Tactile media
4. Boovies or Mooks (just kidding here folks, though my partner Richard James Allen and I are working on "a book you can watch and a movie you can play with"
5. Touch Media (and my guess is this one will shorten down to one word. Any bets onwhat that will be? Touchies? Touchms?)

and the winner is?

See, Hear, Feel, Understand.  These are the first four things I ask students to articulate when they look at a film.  What do you see?  What do you hear?  What do you feel? What do you understand?  This method of developing filmmaking skills through screen studies is based in a cognitive/phenomenological approach.  It asks about perception, affect, and cognition - in other words: how does a film impact on your body, your emotions and your thinking?   When students get used to articulating their insights through this approach (my acronym for it is SHFUA: see-hear-feel-understand-articulate)  they are able to articulate something about how a given film works; how films in general might work as active processes that invite audiences to make meaning; and, importantly, how their own films might work. 

But 'see hear, feel and understand' just don't quite describe all of the activities of mind and body that interactivity offers.  One could add 'participate' or even the obvious, 'interact'  but for purposes of analysis and creating work, these become specific to the mechanics of the property one is talking about.  They are about how you participate and interact, not why.   So, I'd like to kick it up a level and introduce: CONATION. 

Here is what wikipedia says the word 'conation' means:

"Conation is a term that stems from the Latin conatus, meaning any natural tendency, impulse, striving, or directed effort.[1] It is one of three parts of the mind, along with the affective and cognitive. In short, the cognitive part of the brain measures intelligence, the affective deals with emotions and the conative drives how one acts on those thoughts and feelings"
 
Although "The term conation is no longer widely known—it is in "The 1,000 Most Obscure Words in the English Language," it is highly relevant to interactive screen based entertainment and I think it should be brought back into common usage for studying and creating interactive properties. 

Mike Jones and I have been teaching interactivity in a series of workshops for the [imi] project and AFTRS students.  The workshop starts with asking: "what does an interactive screen story or experience need in order to get people involved?" 

The answer proposed in the workshop is:
 - motivation
 - action
 - reward

What motivates an audience to participate?  What action do they do or role do they have to play?  What is their reward?

What I realised when I learned the word 'conation'  is that these three things  - motivation, action, and reward - speak to the CONATIVE aspects of mind.

Put together with cognition and affection (understanding and feeling) conation adds volition, will to act, or, colloquially: an itch to scratch. 

This notion of an 'itch to scratch' is immediately recognsiable in puzzle games like Tetris.  When I see an unfinished line up of squares in Tetris I just want to line the squares up.  I have no emotional feeling about them, I don't get any any insight from lining them up, I simply scratch the itch - satisfy my conative urging. 

The conative becomes more complex in story driven interactive entertainments like Dear Esther where the aesthetics make you feel haunted,  and the story makes you want to uncover the mystery.  In this case the affective and the cognitive drive the conative.  Your 'itch to scratch'  - your will to act - is integrated with dramatic questions and sophisticated feelings states.

The Physical TV Company, Richard James Allen, Mike Jones, Nathan Anderson and I are developing a new interactive property called More Lies based on a book by Richard.  In this "interactive book/movie experience"  the conative is driven by a direct audience relationship with the central character - a charming but unreliable narrator who needs your help...  But when is he telling you the truth?  The interactivity of the proposition offers you a way to scratch the itch of wanting to know: what is a crazy, compelling lie he is telling and what is a crazy, compelling truth?   Creating More Lies will be an action research experiment in embedding the word 'conative' as a consideration in a creative process.  Since it is a story based interactive experience we'll be asking, at each stage: how does an element make you feel?  what does it offer to understanding? what conative response does it incite?  Watch this space for notes on the process. 

(p.s. AFTRS students can expect to be discussing the conative in upcoming workshops, because I'm changing my acronym to: SHFUCA - see-hear-feel-understand-conate-articulate - Shall I paraphrase the now famous line from the movie ARGO?  ARGO SHFUCA...)

 The analysis of film usually starts with story, so too does the teaching of film.  But is this the best place to start?  The process of making a film is a process of making decisions. In a traditional process these decisions are made first about story, then script, then directorial 'vision' (how something will be realized on the screen) then production decisions flow from there, what the design will look like, where to place the camera, how to cut it together, what the aural dynamic will be in sound and music.  Perhaps because this is the way it is made, it is also the way it is taught - we analyze the film first as a story and then everything else as a realization of that story onscreen.  What this tells is what decisions were made, but it doesn't tell us why in any specific way.  It leaves us with a lot of specific explanations but no operations or principles on which we can rely. 

In the end what we will hear anyone who works on a film say about their decision making process is 'it depends on the story' when in actual fact most decisions depend much more immediately on the specifics of the decisions that have been made right before them.  So perhaps looking at a film that way it is much more possible to extract guiding principles. 

For example: an editor may say that their decisions depend on the story, but in fact they are making decisions about the flow of the movement of story based on decisions that have been made about the qualities of movement in the shots and performances.  Stating it in this way allows us to ask: what are the principles of composing movement?  And to hypothesize, for example,  that if we have a lot of fast jerky movements in the shots these will trigger a speedy and percussive edit.   If we have a lot of lyricism in the shooting we will likely have the same in the edit.  We can then practice these two kinds of editing with two kinds of material.  These kinds of hypothetical principles are much easier to teach than the a more general 'it depends'. 

Teaching filmmaking backwards may offer us a fresh perspective on a film as a series of decisions, because teaching it starting from story positions the film itself, the story' onscreen realisation, as a fait accompli, as something which had to be the way that it is and could not ever have been otherwise when, of course, nothing is further from the truth.

I propose that: if we teach it backwards, starting with sound and music, and ask ourselves, what is the sound and music doing and why, we will quickly see that it is responding to something in the edit - it is building on, realizing, counterpointing, the flow of image, emotion and story shaped in the editing process.  We can then see it as a series of decisions made in relation to something specific.  

From there we can look at the edit and ask what decisions was that sound and music a response to?  We can look at cuts, at flows of scenes and sequences, of visuals and emotions and see how they create opportunities for any number of decisions, but also, of course, they too are responsive decisions.  The edits are only and always made in response to the shots.  Now we come to something slightly harder, but not impossible to unpick in a film: what are the shots that triggered the editing decisions?  Harder because, of course, we don't have access to the shots that are not in the film.  But not impossible because we can break down a scene into its component parts and quickly see that a particular scene is composed of X number of close ups, or angles or shot sizes .  We can see whether there is a master or not on the screen and we can begin to see, based on the material that is on the screen, what decisions the editor made  and the material from which they sculpted those decisions. 

Once we start to see shots, we begin to see decisions being made by cinematography and design, about light, about form, about pattern within the image and we can tell what prompted the pattern making of the editor.  We can also begin to ask about the basis on which the cinematographer and designer were making decisions.  Why did they put the light here, the furniture there, the stripes in the wallpaper, the close up on the lipstick?  We are, of course, now in more familiar territory of asking about the directorial vision, but, having come at it backwards, we can see shots and design as a series of decisions that generate a response from editing and also are themselves a response to something which has been articulated, something that the director is often credited for as being the creator of: the mise en scene.   But, in fact the director simply directs the creation of mise en scene as a decision making process on the part of his or her collaborators.  The vision is what provides coherence to the collaborator's decisions, but it is not what makes the shots - it is the source of the cinematographer's and designer's decisions and it is also itself a series of decisions, a series of responses to script or story and, of course,  to what is possible as opposed to what is ideal. 

And finally, we come to story, coming at it this way is not intended to diminish it in anyway, but to see it as a source of decisions and as, itself, a series of decision - decisions of what to carve out from the world , to frame and shape into a causal chain the evokes a sense of significance. 

The issue is that if we look at a film as a whole, we see it as something closed, but if we look at it as a process we can begin to see it as decisions, active choices to go one way and not another.  And this, of course, it what students and new filmmaker need to learn to do: to make coherent, motivated decisions.  To make them with commitment and confidence, which is something that takes practice.  Practice in doing and practice in seeing it done. 

Making decisions can be hard, but so can anything that you don't have a lot of practice at.  I propose that the point of a film school is to give people a chance to practice making decisions; to instruct in the frameworks that are useful for guiding decision making; and to generate articulation skills that can enhance decision making by giving it clarity and voice in collaboration. 

And one of the ways I'd like to start doing this is by analyzing films as a series of decisions - decisions made from a cause and having an effect.  So I'm going to start analyzing film backwards!

So far in this three part series have proposed two theories, the first was a challenge to filmmakers:  give artistic vibrancy a higher valuation in the process of measuring success by shifting our purpose, and the second was an opportunity for filmmakers: make onscreen drafts.  But I have not yet discussed the value of theory itself.

What is interesting to me here is that: as dismissive of theory as our industry is, it is built entirely on theory. Each time something is tried, it is testing a theory. Each time a theory works, it becomes a truism. Sometimes it is easy to see where theory is having an impact, for example in the 1970s the auteur theory directly influenced what got made and by whom. The theory that artistic works can affirm ideals is a much more ‘hidden’ theory though – it didn’t declare itself, but subliminally it is the theory which studios were acting out for many years. The Classical and Romantic theories of art are, as noted in the post about stating your purpose, locked in battle over who makes art, how and for whom, but these ideas are rarely cited in conversation.

Given this, my third proposal for measuring success by artistic vibrancy has to do with measuring much later – not only against the initial critical response, though this is interesting and valuable part of developing theory but by checking back a year or more later and asking: is your film being theorised? Is it generating theory? Has it done something significant enough in its process, purpose, stance, or interaction with the zeitgeist to generate the attention of someone looking back later and analysing?

Just a few examples of Australian films that have generated theorising include: The Boys (Woods, 1998), Priscilla Queen of the Desert (Elliot, 1994), Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan 1994), Somersault (Shortland, 2004), What I Have Written (Hughes, 1996), Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce, 2002) and, of course, earlier films from The Term of His Natural Life (McMahon,1908) through to Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975) and many more. Our industry’s artistic vibrancy can be measured in part by how thought provoking it is and whether its efforts catalyse ideas about changing forms, approaches, purposes, culture, making and consuming films.

It takes confidence to theorise or to make something bold enough to generate theory. Both of these actions involve sticking your neck out, stating your ideas unequivocally. It takes maturity to allow theory to be part of your thinking, but there is no need to fear that intuition will be squashed by theory – when considered and absorbed in a useful context, theory strengthens and supports intuition. Film theory, coming as it does long after the box office take, and being an indicator of the ongoing impact of a film is also a way of indicating my final specific proposal for measuring artistic vibrancy:

4. Influence

We push, we pull, we natter, we chat, we berate and exhort, in short we care enough to comment. It is remarkable how difficult it is to change someone’s view of the quality of something through rational argument – probably because responses to movies are not just rational, they are emotional and visceral, too. But perhaps the measure of success is ‘the care factor’. Does it register on enough people’s care factors to make a noise, a blip in cultural consciousness? Do people care?

This can be measured online, nowadays by how many hits, how many comments, how many people vote on the ‘freshness factor’ of a film on the Rotten Tomatoes site.

A longer-term measure of influence will, however, be the visible influence a film has on films that come after it. It is easy to see the influence of The Boys on Animal Kingdom (Michod, 2010), of Mad Max (Miller, 1979) on Hollywood actions films, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman, 1975) on Priscilla Queen of the Desert. There were two years, from 2005 to 2007, when every student I had would bring in a scene from Somersault to show their influences or intentions for how they would make their films look or feel. Influence is not intellectual, but it does promote a smarter film industry. There is no need to re-invent the wheel, it is a good idea to know what has come before you and how it shapes your own outlook as well as the outlook of the audience for your film.

It takes confidence to acknowledge your influences, but you rarely, if ever find an accomplished artist who is not very clear about what has influenced him or her and very happy to acknowledge its impact. It is sign of maturity to recognise your influences and of even greater maturity to be influential. Using influence as a measure of success actually promotes artistic vibrancy as a value and consideration as well as strengthening the signature of our industry.

Measuring Ourselves

5. Self esteem

It takes confidence to state your purpose. But,  it also creates confidence. If you know what your purpose is, you can activate the creative skills that will achieve it in writing, directing, producing and all other creative inputs into the process.

Certainly making onscreen sketches will build confidence, just as any rehearsal or preparation would create confidence for performance or testing. Drafting a work onscreen will create confidence that something you do with millions of dollars will be more likely to find its audience and art. Innovating in process will give our industry confidence to manage change and a battle plan for addressing change.

By spending less money and sketching, articulating purpose before production, valuing theory and influence as measure of success we could revamp the zeitgeist of our industry and eradicate some of the cultural cringe. We could also do something even more important: make fantastic, innovative, off the wall work. Make work that moves ideas forward, rather than following behind them, because we recognise the ideas we are working within.

My final argument is not so much an argument as an exhortation for courage and wildness. Purposes change – identify yours. Processes change - embrace the possibilities. Theory changes and changes the world we live in. Influences change and ours could be wider. We don’t make a lot of money, so we have little to lose and lots to gain by being brave, creating in new processes with strengthened purpose, bigger ideas and not looking over our shoulders. Confidence can be gained by measuring our success in these ways, and confidence is itself a measure of our success.

The proposed "reforms" to Australian Content rules has once again raised the question of the purpose of the Australian screen production industries, as the battle lines are once again being drawn to protect the telling of "our own stories".    The battle is important and I encourage you to sign the petitions, which you can find here.

But it is amazing that this battle has been fought so many times in Australia since the early 60s and yet still needs to be fought again. Perhaps it keeps coming up because its terms are misunderstood.  The  battle is not about telling our own stories. Telling our own stories is something we can do on Facebook and YouTube, we need high end television drama to make our myths.

To mark the occasion of once more entering the fray in support of Australian creativity on our screens, I  re-publish below salient excerpts, slightly updated, from  my 2009 essay, first published in Lumina, called Make Our Myths. 

The question of the purpose of film was once a hot button issue. It raged in the early 20th century, when the technology was new and people fought over whether its purpose was to be a visual art, or a dramatic one, or if it should be used to record the real or to create propaganda. Debates about purpose no longer rage, but they should. The question of purpose should be at the heart of every production, before cameras roll, before funding is secured. A production that knows its purpose has a much greater chance of achieving it, than one that does not. Just as an industry that knows its purpose has a greater chance of survival than one that does not. It is not just a matter of what is the technology of film for, but what is our film and television  industry for?

The purpose of our television drama industry is, at this moment, a question being pressed upon us proposed reform to the television content rules. 

Usually when the question of purpose is raised at the level of government policy making, our industry is justified as needed to ‘tell our own stories’. But this justification has worn out, if indeed it ever energised us.

The purpose of Australian drama production, I propose, is not to tell our own stories. The purpose is to make our myths.
What’s the difference? Three things stand out for me: scale, dynamics and ownership.

First scale. The potentials that are opening up for the crafting of large scale, long form stories in television series have begun to be exploited in Australia in the last few years.  Rake, The Slap, Underground, Redfern Now, are working on a cinematic scale to give substantive proportions to stories on our now not so small screens.  Australian creativity with cinematic scale in high end drama is just starting to be widely visible.  We are really only seeing the second generation of film and television creatives making their mark, and the first generation of Indigenous Australians having huge successes on screen since the Australian 'New Wave' of the 70s. This generation is making great films and great television because it has a history of creativity to build on, a genetic coding of creativity, creativity in its upbringing on Australian content. Cutting quotas now will mow down that creativity in our industry, and send us back, within ten years, to a culture where every wheel that would make an industry turn creatively will have to be re-invented.

This sense of scale we are beginning to master is also salient to myth making. Myth is, by definition, larger than life. The ancient Greek and Roman Gods who are at the heart of so many western story telling traditions are larger-than-life beings embodying human traits and living those traits in extremes for the purpose of testing their strength and understanding their qualities. They serve the purpose of making something that is abstract into something that is alive and kicking. And there are dozens of these gods and heroes who embody traits like foresight, chaos, wisdom, or trickery. When a myth is made about these traits it is ‘our own story’ in that it is the telling of a story in which some core human quality comes into conflict with another one or with a force that it must change or be changed by. But the story is bigger than just the person who feels chaotic or capricious. It becomes mythic when it embodies that quality on a scale that is potent, active, calamitous and consequential.

I am not suggesting that we should make movies or television about Greek gods, but that we should understand the scale of these qualities of humanity and make stories larger than just the protagonist’s feelings. If we just tell our own stories, we tell of little conflicts that might really happen to us, and use ‘might really happen’ as a measure of strength or truthfulness of the story.  When we make myths, we actively seek strength and truthfulness, not just at the level of our immediate circle, but at a larger level concerning what it means to be human. Qualities we struggle to overcome or which we celebrate, issues which concern generations, questions that have consequences.

We can’t really justify a show about a lawyer or a backyard brawl as myth unless we can explain how, for example, the fight between ordinary people from different backgrounds and cultural perspectives can resonate larger than life. My answer to this is that myth is also made through dynamics, and particularly, dynamic dramatic questions.

Dynamics are central, absolutely core, to the purpose of screen production. The Greek root word of ‘cinema’ is ‘kine’, meaning movement, and this is what we go to the cinema or watch TV series for: an experience of moving images, moving sounds and moving stories. Not static ones, but dynamic ones. Dynamics are the audience’s immediate, kinaesthetic, physiological experience of meaning. Change and modulation of force, and conflict or confluence of energies of life, emotion, image and sound are understood by audiences at an immediate physical level, a communication direct to the body that precedes our cognitive understanding of plot events.

Story dynamics are the rise and fall of movement and energy in the story events. Construction of these relies on construction of dynamic dramatic questions. A dramatic question is a question that implies action and has something at stake. It often starts with the word ‘will’ and it always has an active verb in it, not a passive one. Will someone do something, get something, achieve something, rather than: does someone feel or experience something. Action is dynamic, it forces change, movement of story, emotion, images and sounds. Creating dynamics is the reason for taking human traits and embodying them in gods. In ancient mythology gods give these traits a body and power with which to act.

Having something at stake is the other important half of a dramatic question. Stakes create dynamism by making us care. The more we care, the more we experience the movement between hope and fear.  We hope something will happen, we fear it won’t. These things, in a myth, have room to move dynamically. In real life, relationships that may have potential for hope and fear can stay the same forever. We don’t really want to live dynamics, we want to live peacefully – but we do but want to see dynamics make relationship myths on the big screen.

I have  argued that we should not tell our own stories, we should make our myths, and that the difference between our own stories and our myths are scale, dynamics and ownership. I have sketched out some ideas about scale and dynamics, but I have not yet made a case about ownership. This is where all of the ideas come together.

The notion of ownership is deeply embedded in the phrase ‘tell our own stories’ but the question of who the owner is needs to be confronted here. If the ‘owner’ of the ‘our own stories’ is the person or people with the money to make the screen productions or the producers who raise the money, then we are ascribing ownership to a very small, culturally prescribed group of people.   Myth on the other hand is owned by everyone it speaks to, and it speaks to humans more broadly than within specific cultures or societies. In order to be a myth is has to be a story bigger than ‘our own’. This does not mean it has to be an American re-run, in fact, quite the opposite.

American movies and television are based in American myths, and these are not the same as Australian myths. I speak from personal experience here: Americans believe in manifest destiny and Australians do not. Americans are raised to behave as though they could become the president of the United States and Australians are not. American screen productions uphold or critique uphold the underlying myths of pursuing your destiny or dreams, and taking individual action in the world. So, dynamics and scale come easily to those myth makers, which is why it may seem as though to argue for scale and dynamics is to argue for Americanisms.

But we have the capacity to make myths here, which is why what is really at stake for us in the reform of content laws is not telling our own stories but growing our creativity.   A creative culture is an engaged, responsive, innovative culture - just what a government fears most, in spite of any rhetoric to the contrary. Creativity in television drama made in Australia encourages a sense of 'can do' in people, a sense that their own creativity is being affirmed.

Myth making does not mean stories have to be happy or sad, smart or dumb, expensive or cheap, real or surreal. They must have scale, dynamics, and ownership by more than just their makers. Sign the petition, grow our creativity, make our myths.

This is part two of an essay first published in Lumina, the AFTRS Journal of Screen Arts and Business

Part Two: Making Onscreen Drafts

In part one of this series I challenged filmmakers to 'state their purpose' (see below).  Herein I propose that we set up a funding system that creates onscreen drafts - sketches if you will - of our movies, and measures their potential success in the medium in which they will ultimately be realised rather than as a theory on paper.

Here’s how it would work:

Screen Australia would set aside a fund of $500,000 through which it can fund 10 filmmakers a year to make a $50,000 ‘sketch’ of their feature film. The sketch is shot with a skeleton crew as an onscreen proof of concept. They cut together the theory that has so far only been on paper to see how well it holds up on screen. As a screen story does it entertain, enlighten, stir or excite? If not, where does it fall apart? They revise and shoot again. It is possible to use a digital camera and laptop as a sketchpad. No masterpiece of visual art is created without first making sketches. Great orchestral scores start out as ideas sketched on one piano. Why wouldn’t we, now that we have the tools to do so, sketch cinema, which is an art of performance, dynamics, images and sounds, not of words on paper?

A draft of a screenplay does not have to be finished to be sketched – sketching onscreen can actually be a part of re-writing and refining the script. In this way the ‘sketch fund’ encourages risk taking, allows for testing wild or unusual ideas, approaches, methods, and media.

At the end of the year, Screen Australia has 10 feature film sketches for $500,000 dollars. One or two of these sketches will be so good that they warrant re-making with full production. Another two or so will be good enough that they warrant post-production funding to do grading, music, sound, vfx and possibly some extended pickups. The other six have been worthwhile investments: they have developed the skills and talent of people who may go on to produce even better ideas.

The onscreen drafts idea is a variation on a system that is in place in Israel – one of the world’s most successful non-American cinemas. Katriel Schory, Executive of the Israeli Film Fund, spoke at Screen Australia in September 2010, about a system they have there whereby 10 teams a year get $50,000 to make their feature films. They get 300 applications for this ‘open door’ fund a year and if lucky they get a couple of good films out of it. Dr Ruth Harley, Chief Executive of Screen Australia, noted in that conversation that our industry is not structured in such a way as to make that possible – unions, crafts people, and distributors don’t function in that way, which is true. However, if we were to make $50,000 sketches, drafts, like script drafts but on-screen, rather than as finished products, then it would be possible to sustain the high level of craft skills and production values our industry can achieve, in fact put them to even better and more robust use, by applying them only to films which have already demonstrated that they are worth making. Further, we would be able to put the inexpensive digital technology, which is so powerfully shaking up traditional production methods, to good use. ‘Low-end’ gear could become a tool to help us make high-end productions better.

There is one other source, for me, of this idea for onscreen drafts, which is our current historical moment. It has been a truism of the industry for at least 20 years that the most important element of a movie is story. While I make no attack whatsoever on the importance of story, I would just like to pause briefly to note that this truism has not always been absolutely true. From roughly 1920 to the late 1950s movies were a producer’s medium, in America anyway. They were made by studios and the most important things were stars and genre. If the producer knew his stars and his genres then he (invariably he, never she) would know, in rough terms anyway, his story. It would unfold in a certain way, affirm certain things, have set pieces to entertain, and the absence of these would mean it wasn’t getting made.

As Matthew Campora describes in his essay: Financial Crisis, Depression and Other Uplifting Moments in the History of Cinema in issue 6 of Lumina, a change to the structure of industry in 1948, threw the studio driven system into crisis and made room for something else: a director driven system. The influence of the French New Wave films and theories had a tremendous impact on what got made and why. As is very entertainingly chronicled in Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, the first graduates of American film schools were concerned with story (which they also learned the theory of) but their primary concern was their directorial vision for screen storytelling. The revolution was in mise en scene, images, sound, performance, realism, message, iconography, meaning, cultural challenge – these took precedence over “story”. The writers were not the engines of storytelling the directors were the auteurs. Further, given the changes in culture and distribution modes available to them, these movies – Blow-up (Antonioni, 1966), Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967), The Godfather (Coppola, 1972), Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969), and so on, made money.

About the time Hollywood shifts away from auteur driven movies, screenwriting manuals begin to be published which declare the primacy of story and prescribe step by step ‘how to’ make a successful story. Since then we have found ourselves working within the notion that story is the most important factor in filmmaking, not mise en scene or directors vision, not genre, not stars.

But change is a constant in our industry, and times are once again, or still, changing. The idea for onscreen drafts addresses the possibility that the factors which have each had dominance in the last one hundred years - genres, storytelling and stories – might now all come together to be worked in as part of the drafting process. Making onscreen drafts may be a way of to acknowledge that great movies are a product of all three.

Making Onscreen Drafts adds to our arsenal of methods for measuring success by creating the possibility of measuring early, while it is still useful to the production to know how it is working. It minimizes the risks involved in creating something fresh and original by encouraging risk to happen in a draft stage, an inexpensive stage, a stage where if something doesn’t work it can be tried again differently. If we measure artistic success at draft stage, then we will be making the process of measuring success directly useful to filmmakers, while they can still do something about it.

NEXT POST, PART THREE: THEORY, HISTORY AND COURAGE!

This is part one of an essay first published in Lumina, the AFTRS Journal of Screen Arts and Business

Part One: Shifting Purpose from Artist to End User

Making films in Australia is not a very good way to make money, at least not for the filmmakers or investors. Making money can be helpful in some ways in measuring success, it may be a good thing to do, but it is not the purpose of our film industry.

Knowing that the purpose of a government supported screen industry can’t really be to make money, we fall back, instead, on a platitude to justify our existence: ‘to tell our own stories’. This is problematic for a number of reasons, some of which I discussed in my essay for Lumina 2, ‘Make Our Myths’, but here are two reasons I didn’t mention in that essay:

1. it sets the bar too low, and
2. it allows purpose to rest with the creator rather than the end user.

“Tell our own stories” sets the bar too low simply because there is nothing in the idea of telling our own stories that says they have to be good stories. Does ‘tell our own stories’ mean: tell any story as long as Australians, in Australia, tell it? Does it mean ‘speaking in an Australian accent’? (If so, my storytelling doesn’t qualify, nor that of any other first generation immigrant.) There is nothing in that stated purpose to say: tell good stories, stirring stories, entertaining stories, enlightening, exciting or affirming stories.

The other issue ‘telling our own stories’ creates is that it implicitly allows the purpose of storytelling to rest with the teller, not the listener. To tell is a verb, the action it requires is complete once ‘telling’ is done. The focus, therefore is put on telling, and the teller, the speaker, the artist.

This may seem insignificant, but in fact it belies the very idea on which our creative work is based, and to shift it would be much more radical than a simple change of wording would seem to imply. The notion that the purpose of art rests with the artist, the ‘teller’, expressing him or herself is a Romantic notion. It is neither universal, nor grounded in the deep history of our culture. In fact it is directly in conflict with the "Classical" principles of story organisation that many screen storytellers would say should guide their construction of story. This conflict, between formal structures and individual or even national expression of self is an unarticulated battle, going on beneath the surface, without acknowledgement of its battle lines or their implications for defining the purpose of our screen industry. As such it is beyond the scope of this essay to unravel, so instead I would like to propose a truce of sorts. Not that we return to the absolute stricture of a classical model at the peril of divesting our work of individual passion. Nor that we repudiate the Classical and embrace only the individualistic expression that Romanticism seems to promote. But that we find a middle ground by changing the words we use to define our purpose. In particular, shift our verbs so that they define our purpose as an action played on an audience rather than an action executed by an artist.

Rather than falling back on a cultural platitude to justify a production’s existence, what if all funded productions articulated their purpose as a verb, that describes what they want to do to audiences, and then employ known craft skills to achieve that purpose.

For example:

If a team states their purpose as being: to entertain, then their production needs spectacle, action, possibly humour, definitely pace and rhythm. If it doesn’t have these, it won’t entertain. If members of our highly skilled industry know that it is their job to produce these, then they have a better chance of doing so.

A production whose purpose is to enlighten needs metaphor – it has to be bigger than just the ordinary real if we are to see something differently. It needs pattern (aka structure) that is familiar enough to take us along with it, but fulfilled in a way that is fresh, that shows something in a new light. It needs to be about more than just the people, places and problems within it, by making those things metaphorical for the bigger ideas affecting humanity, the world and the challenges of life.

A production that states its purpose as: to engage the mind through innovation in form needs an innovative approach to story structure, image or sound. Producing something with this intent requires a very strong knowledge and understanding of the ways in which story and storytelling have worked in the history of cinema thus far, so that images, sounds and structures can be re-configured meaningfully.

If the stated purpose of a production is to stir, then the story needs some connection to the real - our emotion is stirred by empathy with something or someone we recognise as someone like ourselves (mimesis). It also needs hardship and triumph – release or catharsis has to be earned by overcoming hardship, working through obstacles for our emotions to be stirred.

An often un-stated artistic purpose of many successful movies is to affirm ideals. 20th century art movements, and their theory and criticism, have in some ways made ‘affirmation of ideals’ a passé notion, associating it with the bourgeoisie rather than the avant garde, criticising the ideals many movies affirm from within the framework of a Marxist or Feminist ideology. However, a movie with nothing to say, no underlying philosophical premise, nothing it believes in or ‘ideals to affirm’ can be a pretty shallow experience. In order to affirm ideals of any kind, filmmakers need to know what they believe, what they stand up for, what they have to say.

Entertain, enlighten, engage, stir and affirm are not mutually exclusive (and, of course there are many more purposes or ‘actions’ films can have). If these or other purposes are articulated, their achievement can be measured. We can say more than ‘it just works’ or ‘it just doesn’t work’ we can point to its intent and measure its success against its intent. We can describe what we know to the be factors something needs have to be entertaining, enlightening, engaging, stirring or affirming and ask ‘are these present’? Further, we can feel the films acting on us. We can be entertained, enlightened, engaged, stirred or affirmed and we will know it.

Stating purpose is an important aspect of finding new ways to measure success because it creates a measurable that is clearly aligned with the film itself rather than with a standard that is less relevant to that film. If a good Australian movie doesn’t achieve box office on the scale of a bad American one, but achieves its stated purpose, we can be clear that it is a success.

NEXT POST, PART TWO - OPPORTUNITY FOR FILMMAKERS: ONSCREEN DRAFTS

This isn't really one question, it is three: what is rhythm made of in film editing?  How is it shaped? And most importantly, what is it for?  This 2 minute video contains the 26 word answer to all three questions, which is quicker than reading the first four chapters of Cutting Rhythms though maybe not quite as useful!