Cinefx’s focus is, naturally, on movies vs. writing. However, I have seen this video at least three to four times and it is one of the best analyses of what dialogue is. Watching this for the first time was enlightening.
I learn a lot about how to write from studying movies. After all, movies are just another form of storytelling. While writing a novel does not involve concerns like camera angle or stagecraft or background, there are commonalities with film such as dialogue, character development, and plot.
Besides, I simply love movies. I have probably seen a lot more movies than I have read books. I love the experience of going into a theatre and being focused on an immense screen reacting to the scenes in unison with the rest of the audience. Unfortunately, I have not been able to make it to the movies much over the last few years and Coronavirus has not helped matters. I haven’t been to the movies at all since well before the Coronavirus pandemic began.
Streaming movies on your home TV is just not the same experience as watching them in a theater. Even if you have a screen that is fifty feet across and a completely dark room. Odds are you won’t have the same size audience. Imagine going to a football game and you are the only fan in the bleachers. It’s not the same experience as when the bleachers are filled. Humans are social animals. While we often appreciate solitude, being in the company of others is our natural state.
Movies are an interesting form of storytelling. It must be, without a doubt, challenging to tell a good story in less than two hours. If you own any audiobooks, check the play time on them. Unabridged audiobooks of novels last anywhere from seven to thirteen hours or more. This is undoubtedly why a lot of movies are based on short stories or novellas or plays. A really long play might last three hours. Even if someone tries to condense a novel like Roots or Don Quixote into a TV miniseries, the miniseries will still not be able to cover all the nuances of the novel, though a lot of the novel’s nuances may be covered by the actors’ performance and the scenery which can be shown vs. being described.
These are some of the reasons I love to watch Cinefix on YouTube. It really helps me with my art of storytelling. I see things from a different perspective.
One way to look at this is that when you read a story, you probably visualize the events in that story just as you would see them in a movie. Both deal with the images that form in your mind as you experience a story. While with a novel, you have to imagine how the events are depicted, with a movie you eliminate this step and the events are depicted for you–hopefully in accordance with how the underlying novel or play was written. Filmmakers are notorious for changing endings trying to improve the storyline or to develop their own art.
By the way, when you compare the cost of going to a movie that will last for two hours vs. the cost of buying a novel that will keep you entertained for ten, you can see the novel is the better deal economically.
But I digress.
Anyway, let me know your thoughts.
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Hasta luego.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 