PART 1 - WRITING FOR FILM, TELEVISION AND MULTIMEDIA

Each of our lives has a beginning, middle and end; we relate to stories because we are ourselves stories. Once a moment in our lives has passed, our instinct is to preserve it and share it with others, contributing to the greater collective consciousness.

Writing has always been about answering questions.

How do we discover ourselves through self-expression? Through random acts of individual intention that make sense to another observer. Before we converted our picture stories into words we were locked into our tribal traditions. Even in contemporary daily news we can recognize the mythical elements of storytelling.

Ancient books like the Bible consist of legends and myths like Noah’s Ark, collections and repetitions of much older stories, handed down from generation to generation.

The story of King Arthur was first recorded in 1470 by a soldier of fortune Thomas Malory. He was arrested many times for theft, extortion, rape and abusing the clergy as he travelled England and Europe, joining in tournaments and territorial wars.

Malory based his writing on hundreds of years of literature that can be traced back to the 6th Century; in post-Roman Britain, blacksmiths lived in the mountains and forests, working in secret to forge sword blades from the four elements.

Ironically, Malory was an educated man who could read both English and French, the languages of his reference sources. His own writings reveal that he was a prisoner when he completed his literary tour de force Le Morte D’Arthur. These heroic ideals were exemplified in the early Elizabethan era and were rewritten and adapted in The Sword In The Stone and The Once And Future King by T.H. White in 1939.

Malory's writing spawned the cult of chivalrous Knighthood, its code of honour expressed in a sense of duty to one’s lady and public exhibitions of prowess with weapons. They invented the system of Heraldry to graphically indicate their locations on the battlefield, like team emblems/numbers on the sports field or icons on a computer.

“In times of radical change, it’s the mutants that make the difference.
Hackers can save us.”
from Viva Zapata,
a 24 hour action by electronic disturbance theatre Floodnet.com

WRITING: In its control over audience attention, film resembles the literary arts, which are also embedded in the matrix of time, and require that specific fragments of information be absorbed in a given sequential order. Film is also like literature in the freedom with which it operates in time and space, instantaneously transporting the reader from one point to another, eliminating intervening distances and moments, acting with the speed and fluidity of our thoughts.

There are obvious differences between visual and verbal mediums - Literature is confined to a one-dimensional linear scheme, in which objects, conditions, actions, ideas or phenomena can be presented only by listing the details separately. In contrast, film offers ideas and sensory stimuli at one and the same time.

Light, colour, perceptions of plane, volume, mass, density, and texture, movements and stasis, sound and silence, even different types of space - all appear simultaneously, creating a chord in which the tenor of one part is modified by all the rest. In its chordal character and its rhythm of change, interval and duration, film is very much like music.

Writing for film (or any moving image) requires us to have an understanding of the filmmaker's materials - SPACE, TIME, LIGHT and SOUND - and the methods for organising them into complex structures. Movement through space and time is what gives the film medium its extraordinary language and characteristic plasticity.

The principles of colour and tone, themes, structure, continuity, harmony and contrast are some of the most expressive tools in the vocabulary. All of these tools, methods and languages can be appropriately applied to interactive design.