I’ve been writing with Sam and we’re up to a sequence set in a forest. I don’t live in a forest, or even near a forest, so sometimes I forget what a forest looks like. I wish I could spend a couple months trekking through the wilderness to address this problem. Photos are a more affordable solution.
Sam put me on to this fantastic resource that I’d like to also share with you, dear reader: www.ffffound.com. It’s called ‘image bookmarking’.
One of the arguments recently levelled against Australian films is that they tend to be too bleak or too miserable (Last Ride, Beautiful Kate, Blessed, etc.).
But many of the greatest films ever made are incredibly dark to the point you might label them ‘bleak’ or ‘miserable’.
So what makes a film ‘too bleak’? I don’t really know, but maybe;
Imagine ‘Dancer in the Dark’ without the dancing… that might qualify as ‘too bleak’.
In the most terrifying moments in film, there is always a face
Gore may be repulsive, but it is not frightening. Nothing is as frightening as a face.
And many others that I’ve yet to see, and more that I’ve no doubt forgot to mention. All in all a great decade for cinema.
Like the magician’s left hand…
Yesterday, at the beach, I saw a boy flying his kite. He let go of the strings and before his father could catch it, the kite took off; across the beach, across the road, and up into the power lines where its handle got caught. It kept flying.
A film that is based on true events but that strips away every last detail or moment considered to be inconsequential/insignificant, will seem totally and utterly fake.
It will seem fake because it is fake.
I never saw the point of blogs until I read some interesting ones. And I’ve had so many stimulating conversations with my friends over the years that I now wish I had kept some kind of record of.
This is a scrapbook to keep together all my thoughts about film and filmmaking. I’m happy to share it with you, my dear reader.
If I have one ulterior motive, it’s that you sign-up to my mailing list on the right. I’m not going to send you many emails, I promise you this. But I do want to tell you about some of the exciting projects I’ve got planned for 2010.
Yours,
Hugo O’Connor
Orchestration
An old friend moved cross-country and left me with a bunch of film books that I’ve been flicking through recently. I really like this idea of orchestration from Lajos Egri’s ‘The Art of Dramatic Writing’;
Maybe one of the reasons ‘The Wire‘ is so successful, is that the characters are so perfectly chosen – so perfectly orchestrated.