Story Meeting with Brian

I had a meeting with Brian about Story and film language etc.

He talked about what he thinks are the most important core elements of storytelling and will send me some slides focusing on ideas of theme conflict and character.
I got the book Story by Robert McKee to go through in more depth.

As a map for storytelling Brian described that as an Author/Artist you are trying to communicate meaning to the Audience.

Theme being central - what ideas are you trying to communicate

What media are you choosing to represent this

......


Story is based on the emotional dynamic.  If you have a contiguous set of ideas that progress in a way that the emotion is felt by the audience, or the ideas trigger the emotions that are contiguous.

Continuous flow of aesthetic emotion in fiction.

Look for the story beat.  The idea of the emotional interchange or a change of ideas that elicits an emotional impact.  Aristotle called it the idea of revelation and realization, apparently!
Whereas in real life a revelation may occur, the emotional impact may not follow immediately - in a dramatic moment, we want to bring the ideas and emotions together.  Aesthetic emotion - it's an aesthetic experience not real life experience.

In imagery what's ideas are we giving visually?  What are the values stated at the beginning? (someone sad, happy, etc).  This value system sets the themes you wish to deal with.


Practically

I want to be in the area of compositing, the subject matter I would want to look at is cinematography, film language, visual language.

Film language is a way of expressing storytelling as opposed to screenwriting.  If you understand how a screenwriter is setting up a script, the core structural elements, it will resonate more deeply if you understand this.
Brian described it best by saying I don't want to write a script, I want to respond to a script.
So what I can do is interpret an existing story as that's what I'd be having to do in my discipline anyway.  People have suggested doing adaptation before and I had hoped I wouldn't have to buuuuut.....
This will stop it from turning into a character design module, for instance.

He reiterated what Lynn had said previously that I shouldn't talk about VFX at the level of the application - try to look at the art of it at the higher level.

If you know what you're trying to produce you know what you can shorthand, what you can get away with and what artistic choices you can bring; what to emphasize, what to put in, what to read out.


Case Studies

Look at formal art criticism.
https://www.uwgb.edu/malloyk/art_criticism_and_formal_analysi.htm