We finally got to shoot the extra footage of ‘Gertrude’ writing her book on Tuesday night and I spent last night cobbling it together. It looks quite good.

Thing is I can’t quite get my head around what she should be saying in the voiceover. Still, I’ve plenty of time to think about it as I have a two week window before Darren returns from his holiday and begins on the sound edit in earnest.

Weird, I’ve spent so much time this week messing about with the blog, I realised just now that I hadn’t actually posted anything lately.

Jakob Nielsen struck again this week, his newsletter being the somewhat apt, 10 Design Mistake of Weblogs.

I realised I was guilty of more than a couple of these, so have spent some time rectifying the situation, reinstating the ‘about me’ section that I removed months ago and forgot to replace, and putting the entries into categories for easier searching of related posts.

All good fun.

I’ve been writing a lot as well, Architurusing away, really trying to focus on each scene and make it as dramatic and interesting as possible. It’s so easy to knock out a really turgid scene and not notice, because you’re stuck in the flow.

I stuck a post-it note on the top of my laptop monitor with the word ‘conflict’ on it as I tend to write people being nice to each other. Not great viewing.

I watched Garden State tonight. I really enjoyed it, but found the last two minutes a little disappointing. It seemed a bit rushed, or something, (having spent an hour an a half not going terribly fast). Some good acting and thoughtful direction though.

Being something of a webby type person during daylight hours, I get the e-mail alerts from the guru of Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen.

This weeks alert was about the new User Interface paradigm that Microsoft have adopted for next years release of Office 12. They refer to it as Results Oriented, or WYGIWYS – What You Get Is What You See.

Here the idea is not so much to start with a fresh blank page each time you create a new Word document or Excel spreadsheet, but to say to the machine, ‘I want to create a report for next weeks business review’. Word then scurries away and comes back with a selection of documents preformatted and filled in. You just need to change the contents to reflect what you want to say, the formatting is already there.

This way of doing things, Microsoft believe, will change the whole way we use their Office suite, and they have radically altered the menu and toolbars of the programmes as a result.

At first I thought, ‘huh, this is just templating, it’s not very new nor very clever,’ and got on with my work.

But then, as I was sat tonight playing with Dramatica, it struck me just what Microsoft might be up to. I realised that Dramatica is WYGIWYS, not only in terms of User Interface, but in the whole fundamental structure of what it does.*

You pump in all the information you want to end up with (the story settings) until you get to one storyform, and then it scurries away and comes back with the structure about which you hang your screenplay, novel etc. It isn’t templating (that’s just prettying things up), it’s about creating structure, something that we humans struggle to create very well, especially from scratch.

I wonder if Microsoft have taken the paradigm even further than just the User Interface, and started creating basic structures for the different documents, in the same way Dramatica provides structure to our stories? It’ll be interesting to see…

* I’m looking forward to seeing how the UI for Dramatica changes
with version 5 – a while ago I sent a very long, rambling e-mail to
Chris Huntley about how I thought they could improve things – I even
drew nice pictures! I got a very nice thank you note in response – top man, that Chris Huntley.

I’ve now completed my backwards pass through SToA and I’m much happier with the results. I’ve completely re-edited some scenes, looking for better performances from the actors and more dramatic ways of cutting it together, and others I’ve just trimmed and tweaked. It’ll still need further work, but for now I can concentrate on shooting the extra footage for the opening sequence.

I’m also reading through Kerl Reisz and Gavin Millar’s ‘The Technique of Film Editing’ at the moment, which is proving very useful. Even though it’s about 50 years old and been republished more times than I’ve had hot dinners, it still holds a lot of excellent ideas, some of which seem to be getting lost in our pop video culture.

It’s strange as I didn’t think I’d still be learning as much about the whole filmmaking process as I am at this stage. I thought it would be a case of simply learning how to use Avid, knock off a quick short and away we go. But the more I think about it and edit the film, the more I realise my shortcomings as a director and a writer.

I’m really starting to appreciate the whole idea of visual storytelling, and I’m learning things that, although I might have worked out eventually had I not done this, would have taken me a lot longer had I stuck to writing alone. In fact the editing stage for me has been the hardest and the most exciting, in terms of realising what I can actually achieve on future projects.

So I’m starting to err on the side of those who say that if you want to write for the screen, you have to have made a film. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t, but it’ll get you a lot further down the road than simply sitting at your PC staring at MMS or Final Draft or Sophocles. And it’ll give you a much better appreciation of what the other people you work with (directors, AD’s etc) have to go through.

The re-edit of SToA continues at a pace. I’m working backwards through the film re-editing scene at a time. Not sure why, I just felt like editing the ritual scene first, and then it made sense to work back to the beginning, at which point I could then shoot the extra footage for the opening sequence and then work back through forwards for the final edit. Probably won’t work out that way, but it’s as good a plan as any.

One thing for sure is that I’m just doing what I think is right and not worrying about what other people think (as I did on the first edit, only to get shot down on things and finding myself thinking, ‘damn, that’s how I wanted to do it, but I didn’t trust my instinct enough’). As a result, I’m much more satisfied with the results.

One thing I’m concentrating on is the visual grammar of the film. Alex Finbow made some comments on this front and it’s not really something I’d payed too much attention to (I guess I was running on my intuition whole we were filming). The weird thing is that I’m only starting to understand it now I have the footage there in front of me, which is probably a bit late, but so far, I’ve just managed to work with what I have and it seems to make sense. My only concern is that it could be a bit easy to justify poor choices of shots with well thought out, but ultimately useless, answers, which only serve to weaken the film.

When I make the next one, I’m definitely getting an experienced DOP in.