At some point, when I understand how to import the old records, my previous blog will be resurrected here in all its “glory”.
But today is not that day.
Instead, I’m going to write down some thoughts that I’ve had about the 48Hr Film Competition — specifically, the pitfalls of getting the genre “Musical/Dance”.
In my mind, the biggest problem is not the music or dancing, since there are a number of creative ways that you can handle that; rather, it’s the fact that the genre tells you nothing about the story.
This has a number of consequences. The first is that you have no story constraints; this means that the elements that all teams have need to carry a much greater burden than if you know that you’re doing, say, a buddy movie. It’s much harder to subvert the tropes of your genre, story-wise… unless you treat “Dance movie” as a subgenre of “Sports movie”, as the people who made the finger-dancing short did.
But in general, you have a much wider field of story to choose from, which is a real problem. I’d be tempted to have a look at the genres that were possible, but not used, and choose one of them — at least then you’d have something to aim at.
The next problem is the story. Singing or dancing takes up time, and you’ve only got seven minutes — which means that you’ll be pushing a lot of narrative weight into them. I don’t know how you’d do that with dance; but one saving grace of singing is that it’s okay to be a bit more on-the-nose than you would with ordinary dialogue, especially since there’s a convention of people singing their feelings while people politely ignore them.
We’ve dodged the bullet so far, but if we keep on doing this, we’ll get Musical sooner or later. So I’ve decided that I’ll go through the movies that we’ve made as Jenni’s Angels, and see how much work it would be to convert them into musicals. I’ll try to use the sorts of resources that I’d have to hand in combat conditions, and see how far I can get.
I still sometimes see people quoting “Be Impressed”, which Erik & I wrote… ten years ago, maybe? But I don’t think I’ll be inspiring anyone to remake “It’s A Wonderful Library” any time soon. 🙂
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