ACTION!!!
When you are born, you have a beginning, middle and an end in your life. The same with books, with everything really, and it is no different in Film.
In film it is broken down to Establish:Crisis:Resolve. The start of the film is all about setting the scene, knowing where the film is taking place, introductions to characters. The crisis (middle) is pretty self explanatory, a crisis is going to happen, a war for example and then resolve, where you see the outcome and how everyone lives happily ever after! Or do they in some cases?? This can also be broken down into time, generally it looks like this....
30:60:30, the middle and end don't need as much time as the middle, this is down to the crisis is the main part of the film, its the action, what people want to see.
Let me take one of my favourite films and go into more detail, Avatar. If you don't like Avatar, then get off my blog!!
Okay, now we have said goodbye to the unfortunate people who can't appreciate an amazing film we can get down to business.
As you are more than likely aware, Avatar is a long film, the duration is over three hours, so where the normal case is 90 mins - 120 mins, this is longer so the timings for the three acts are going to be longer.
Avatar and many other films have something called a Protagonist. This is the hero, the main man, he is the dogs b******s! Lets face it, we all want to be him. You cannot have a three act structure unless you have the hero. This is because it all follows suit, the story. The end of Act 1 (the beginning) ends when the protagonist makes a commitment, this is what leads us into the crisis, (Act 2) the training and the war. This is the part of the film that people want to see, its exciting, emotional, it draws you in. In Avatar, he protagonist commits to more than one one film, so which is the cut off point, is it when he is going to and make the natives move to a different location or when he stands and fights as a native and betrays his own race? The cut off point is when he decides to betray his own race, this is the crisis, you see people die, things close to them get blown away. There is a inner story, and this what you watch, you see the hero grow as a person, mentally and physically, you get attached to him (the training)You want the hero to win, and the thing I love about Avatar is that you want the "blue monkeys" to win the war, you want them to defeat the humans which is our own race! It is a powerful film to do this. Then the resolving of the crisis, what happens next? How does it all end? Again, should last around the same time as it started. We need to no what happens at then end of the film so we can all sleep at night knowing the blue monkeys are victorious!!
Character Development
Why do we represent protagonist and villains the way we do? It is because we all stereotype. By doing this, we can appoint the characters to the audience before we even introduce them. For example, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vadar. The protagonist (Skywalker) is in white and the antagonist (Vadar) is in all black. This is going back to basics and subliminal messaging. It is easy for us to pick up on this. In Avatar, you have the purity in the Avatars, the lack of clothes, the native spirit, where as in the human, the antagonist has scars on his face, his voice, everything is representing the bad guy! Easy for us to see who the good guys are and visa versa.
There are different elements to character design.
1. Appearance- what they look like? The costumes? Colour?
2. Action - what the character does?
3. Interaction - how does the character relate to the characters ad the events in the story?
4. Rely on stereotype- we do this as much as it is cliche.
When all these are answered, you can develop your ideas and create the perfect protagonist/antagonist.
You also look into the dialogue, the way they talk, the vocabulary. E.G Darth Vadar's breathing. A typical stereotype of the antagonist. All in black with a scary helmet breathing heavily = scary!
Its what goes into the designs and how they convert to the movie. It should be obvious for the viewers to make judgement on the characters and realise who is who. If this isn't the case then the film is hard to follow and it confuses you.
THATS A RAP!!
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