Kyle's Super Swag Film Blog

Over the past couple of weeks I have worked to complete the pre-production work for my next film. It was difficult to work as much as I would have wanted to do on pre-production since I've also been working on my Eagle Scout project as well as doing work for my internship, Mini-THON, and other classes. Despite this, I feel that I have gotten a large amount of preparation completed and I am in good position to begin production. The following is a brief synopsis of my pre-production work. Concept For this project, I decided that I wanted to keep things relatively simple overall. I wanted a limited amount of characters, locations, and plot details. I made this decision to hopefully make this film an easier task than what I had envisioned for my previous film. The idea for this film came to me when I was listening to a whole bunch of old country and wild west styled songs. From them, I decided to have the story follow a cowboy/drifter character. While I likely could've taken this i

When choosing a film to watch, you might encounter the same film twice with one being labeled as a "Director's Cut" version and wonder what the difference is. You might also be re-watching a film that you've seen before and notice something that you didn't remember being there originally. The cause of both of these confusing questions is due different edits of a film being released in different ways. While there are dozens of different ways that films have been released with different edits, I will be outlining a few notable examples that I have encountered regarding re-edited films. Modified For TV If you have ever watched a film as it aired on a TV channel, you have probably noticed that it is a little different than you remember. Due to restrictions that determines what can be said and shown on TV, as well as the complications that arise from having a set schedule for TV channels, films played on TV are usually modified from their original versions. One of the

Visual storytelling describes the process of telling your story by only using visual elements rather than verbally. An easy way to look at verbal storytelling is to examine a children's book. The narration of a children's book bluntly tells the reader everything they need to know about what is going on. It tells who characters are, what they are doing, how they are feeling, and more all by directly telling the audience. Visual storytelling is the opposite as it uses only visual elements to broadcast the story to the audience, leading them to discern the story from what they see. Visual storytelling is a very general idea with different techniques to do so. Some of these techniques can be found below Visual Storytelling Through Framing Since visual storytelling is a visual form of telling a story, framing your shots within a film properly can convey your story without any dialogue. While most films use dialogue to enhance its story, the use of framing is so powerful that a film

As I started working on my outline for my project for this marking period, I wrote the sentence "This is a classic tradition story" which made me think back to the concept of there being a limited amount of stories to tell. While I was somewhat familiar with the concept, I decided to do some more research into the topic. The Seven Plots Christopher Booker in his book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories  tells of how there are seven total plots that are told within all of fiction. These seven stories are: Tragedy, Overcoming the Monster, The Quest, Comedy, Voyage and Return, Rebirth, and Rags to Riches. By looking at this list you can definitely understand Booker's claim. You can easily take the story of any work of fiction whether it's a film, book, show, or video game and match it with one of these seven plots. I have selected the two out of the seven that interest me the most and have given examples of the plots within film as well as examples of these plots