How does it hold your attention and how does it continue to hold your attention. There was a moment presenting at Apple Store in London, when there was a shift from the audience. A comedian friend told me about this phenomena during his set when that moment comes when the audience mirror the artist, referred to as mirror neuron.
All storytelling involves an intentionality, but sometimes motives can be masked or suppressed because of conventions. Conventions are human generated rules bound within a time and space. But dependent on societal and cultural progress they atrophy, or are questioned (disruptive necessity) for something else to take its place.
Consider then this. News journalism quite often doesn’t cover an event that’s happening in real time. What you see on screen is an attempt to construct a story based on a thinking of events by the storyteller. Where, how and when people are filmed is made invisible in journalism for the convention. It may not have been an issue in the 1950s when TV journalism was coming on stream because there was good faith in the actors — those being filmed were respectful of TV.
How about today? Imagine someone telling you a blatant lie. Have you ever recorded your gaze/ eye movement towards them? Imagine you wanted to question them about it. “John can you come here a second, please?” You’re on the veranda between the coats asking what on earth is going on. The scene becomes quite animated.
Imagine now a scene from a politician named John. He chooses where he’s filmed, actually journalists through convention choose the scene, outside parliament. John’s interviewed some time after the event, so if he’s not in reflective mode has had time to consider his response.
And the framing, by convention, in journalism of John is via the rule of third. The rule of third is in fact NOT a rule in the sense of a fixed command, its a visual choice. The rule of third maintains you place John on the third part of the screen, leaving two thirds of space for where he’s fixed his gaze. It implies John is speaking to someone off camera.
Yet it’s also a shot that invisibly unconsciously yields harmony. Way before TV News was born, in his film Citizen Kane (1941) the director Orson Welles shows a compositional arrangement of the “rule of third” in an interview scene. Western artists discovered that post renaissance. Chinese art found different compositions for balance.
So now consider this. John your politician is lying, yet he’s decided with you on the power of the scene, he’s working a narrative and you’re making him look harmonious by your filming techniques, and the audience will interpret the scene their way aided by the invisible codes used.
There are solutions, and they require a broader discussion, just as the hand cutaway (convention) has been largely laid to rest. There’s no such thing as an innocuous cut away. That much became clear where in a scene many years ago, a corporate was feeding back on a question and then it cuts to the corporate rigorously tugging at his wedding band. Someone in the edit asked innocently does he have marital problems?
So what next? I’ll post news of a form that’s addressing issues like this and is gaining in currency.
