How do you format a scene where you want to open on an image, THEN reveal where it takes place at? The rub lies in do you have to give away the suprise of where you're at in the first shot heading, OR can you like open on an image then in another WIDER scene to reveal where the first scene took place?I think it tracks. And you approached it pretty much how I would do it: Start on the tight image, then essentially pull back to a master shot, indicated by the primary slugline, to provide the context of the scene.
For something to play with I provide this.A BUSINESSMANSo... What I was trying to do there was open on the body. Get the misdirection of peace. Show the body's dead. THEN introduce the setting by dropping below the overpass at which time the oncoming traffic is visible. And finally end the scene with the shock of body crashing on vehicle on the highway.
lies on his back. Hands crossed on his Armani suit he looks happy -- might have even worked for Bernie Maddoff... Too happy. No longer breathing. Eyes glazed.
BRAKES SQUEEL, HORNS HONK from TRAFFIC BELOW. DOWN past the body to the gray cement of an overpass. The body shakes, it has been kicked. But now we're LOWER still to see...
EXT. DENVER, COLORADO - HIGHWAY OVERPASS - PRE-DAWN TRAFFIC
Headlights. Stop and go traffic. The morning commute made worse by the advent of white flakes.
And that's not all that's falling, as the DEAD MAN in suit comes back INTO VIEW as he falls off the overpass and CRASHES onto the ROOF of a FORD BRONCO.
Lemme know whatchu think.
I was trying to think of misdirection scenes from movies. Here's the scene where Jack Sparrow is introduced in the original Pirates of the Caribbean:
EXT. PORT ROYAL - HARBOR - DAYElliott & Rossio use the paragraph break and double hyphens to suggest the camera shot which pulls back to provide the wider angle -- and sell the misdirection.
The skeletal remains of four pirates, still clad in buccaneer
rags, hang from gallows erected on a rocky promontory. There
is a fifth, unoccupied gallows, bearing a sign: PIRATES - YE
BE WARNED.
The top of a billowing sail passes regally in front of them.
On the landward face of the sail, apparently high in the
rigging, is a man for whom the term 'swashbuckling rogue'
was coined: Captain JACK SPARROW.
He gazes keen-eyed at the display as they pass. Raises a
tankard in salute. Suddenly, something below catches his
attention. He jumps from the rigging --
-- and that's when we see that his is ship is not an imposing
three-master, but just a small fishing dory with a single
sail, plowing through the water -- the Jolly Mon.
And it leaks. Which is why he has the tankard: to bail.
GITS readers suggested some other scripted misdirections to check out:
* From flaris: How about Dexter? There are a lot of scenes at the beginning of episodes that use it.
* From Christina: How about the opening of French Kiss? We think the Meg Ryan character is on an actual plane, but she's really in a simulator and freaks out so much the "fear of flying" people give her her money back. :-) Funny! And a great opening.
* From Jeff: This is probably a rotten example but its the first thing that came to mind... the outset of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, wherein we begin with a typical Warner Brothers type short subject involving Roger attempting to keep Baby Herman in one piece. After a 'fridge lands on Roger's skull, we pull out to reveal us on a Maroon Pictures "set." I remember feeling completely taken aback and stunned by this shocking spacial reveal.
* From kgmadman: The draft of Zombieland I have opens with a pretty ingenious image.
It opens with a CLOSE ON the American Flag while "This Land Is Your Land" plays.
Pulls back and rotates to reveal the flag sticking out of the presidential limo which is upside down in a heap.
Pulls back further to reveal Washington D.C. in ruins.
Pulls back more as the guy holding the camera runs for dear life but is abruptly tackled and mauled by a hungry zombie.
* From Things That Can F Themselves: Team America World Police, the opening with fake, shitty marionettes in a movie with doll characters. according to Trey and Matt, studio execs freaked out pretty good at the first screening.
* From Just_Hiltz: "Raiders of the Lost Ark". Chase scene where Indy is chasing after Marion and he(we) knows she's in a wicker basket ...but then there are HUNDREDS of baskets in the bazzare as he moves into the new scene. Leads up to the 10' swordsman and he just shots him and turns away.
* Another one from Jeff: Blazing Saddles...
As the final massive war erupts between Heddy (THAT'S HEDLEY!) Lamarr's army and the townsfolk of Rock Ridge, the battle gets so massive, it spills out onto the entire Warner Brothers studio lot.
Things get so out of hand that a flustered director on a musical number (the late great Dom Delouise) screams, "This is a closed set!" to which Slim Pickens replies, "Fuck you, I'm working for Mel Brooks!" and punches his lights out. ("Not in the face!")
Then Jeff goes on to add this thought:
Comedy seems to use this tool frequently. French Kiss, Team America, etc. Is it possible that such a jarring spacial/reality disturbance would be too self-indulgent for any other genre???It's piqued my interest as well. So while E.C. can scurry off to find the scripts of the above movies and see how they approached setting up and paying off the misdirection, what about it: Is this type of narrative device something almost exclusive to comedies or can it work in other genres? If the latter, how about some examples?
Altman toys with us a little bit in both Nashville and The Player but, again, both those films are comedic in nature. PT Anderson kinda' tinkers with us as well in Magnolia but he's an Altman protege so cry foul again.
Fascinating topic!
Posts
5 comments:
Thanks for answering my question, and providing examples in produced scripts, Scott.
Happy Thanksgiving,
- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA
Hmmm...of course it works for other genres. Example...
"Independence Day"
Little Boy wakes up Will Smith and his girlfriend saying effectively the aliens are coming.
Will Smith takes a piss, goes out to get his paper and sees the alien ships freaking all his neighbors out.
Good device used sparingly, meaning, it better be something worth the viewers interest and used to move the plot and up the tension or else it's just LAME.
I think the best spin on this device I've seen was in an old animated episode of AEON FLUX.
We see a CLOSE ON a googly-eyed frog dangling his feet in a bright red ocean...a very silly, almost child-like image. It almost makes you want to laugh.
But instead of pulling back, the image separates, becoming shell casings, a boot strap, and droplets falling into a puddle of blood. It's as if somebody had been crossing their eyes and were now uncrossing them. We've gone from very innocent to ultra-horrific.
When the shot changes, we're looking into the face of a man lying at the bottom of a stack of bullet-ridden bodies. His eyes dilate as he dies, adjusting and readjusting on the casings and we're left to only imagine that his last thought is this very carefree construct of all these horrible things he sees.
The first time I saw that it put chills up my spine. The creator, Peter Chung, is a writer and a storyboard artist. He comes up with some amazingly clever visuals if you ever want to go back and watch the old Aeon Flux shorts.
In fact, I think all the old Max Flesicher "Betty Boop" stuff is paydirt if you're looking for inspiration for clever use in visuals. It's animated, sure, but a lot of these old animators were geniuses when it came to thinking way outside the box on using visuals... light years ahead of their time.
Interesting topic, this is a comment for EC Henry specifically. Maybe it's just me, but I found your example really opaque. I've read it five times and although I sort of get it, I'm still not sure exactly what you're trying to achieve.
You start on the body, then move down to the tarmac of the overpass. So what is the body on to begin with? You can't show someone lying down without showing them lying on something. Are they lying on the tarmac already? And then they are kicked over the edge to the road below where it lands on the Ford? And you say the traffic noises come from below, but how do we see that, exactly? And if the body is being kicked off the tarmac of the overpass onto the road below, doesn't it have to get hefted over some kind of parapet wall before tumbling down. Or maybe the body starts on the parapet wall already, and then when we go down to the tarmac of the overpass- not that we'll know it's the overpass because this is a close-up shot presumably - and then switch to the view below the overpass.
Sorry, I don't mean to pull it apart, I just think if you are going to try and do something fairly smart like that, you have to be really careful that you communicate the vision that you've played out in your head countless times to someone who hasn't seen it before and must grok it from your words on the page.
Happy Thanksgiving from across the Atlantic.
Terraling,
"You can't show someone lying down without showing them lying on something."
Response: YES you can! It's called a LOW ANGLE shot just not low enough to see the cement below. (I used to specify shot types in my scipts, BUT now I'm trying to wean off that, and just SUGGEST as much in lines of description)
Glad to read my question to Scott, and the scene I offered sparked your creativity, terraling, to build a better scene than I did. I spent a grand total of about 2 minutes constructing that "grok." Whether I succeeded or not, I did state VERY CLEARLY the affects I was trying to acheive.
I wrote this scene with some of the scene building sentiments the brilliant Karl Iglesias wrote in his book, "Writing for Emotional Impact." Set up questions in each beat in a scene (page 87). IF you wanna take your own writting to a higher level I highly suggest you buy that book and muse over the issues of screenplay construction that Karl brings up...
- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA
Post a Comment