Steve's Workshop

Workshop day 2. We did cold reads of four people's scripts, which were, for the most part, successful. Steve wanted the scripts to have that sense of not directly saying or illustrating what you are trying to say...just letting the audience figure it out. Nearly all of the scripts we hashed through succeeded in this.

In my humble experience, it seems to be a recurrent theme of student films to try too hard to be overly clever or make a joke just for the sake of doing so. It was so refreshing to hear dialogue that was necessary and legitimately whimsical. Once again, to make a connection to other disciplines of art, I find this to be true in songwriting. I heard a song today called "Butterly" by Jason Mraz...ugh...that was just uninteresting and cliched because, rather than writing lyrics that were suggestive but still left room for the listener to figure things out, he wrote foolish, trying-too-hard-to-be-clever lines like "I'm taking a moment, just imagining that I'm dancing with you. You're the pole and all you're wearing is your shoes"...why don't you just sing, "I want to have sex with you. I really want to have sex with you"..it would fulfill the same level of interest. The same goes for a film; we never see much violence in Kontroll, but we know it has happened. We never see Laci slit a man's throat, but we know he did, and that's what's important. Even take Psycho-supposedly one of the scariest movie scenes in history, but we never even see the girl in the shower get stabbed. Brilliant.

I am fortunate to be in STAC, in a group of more advanced artists who won't make generic student films. I am also fortunate that we have the limitations of time, location, budget, cast, resources, etc. because limitations are what makes art good. If you can have everything you want, then you can make episodes 1, 2 and 3, of Star Wars instead of episodes 4, 5, and 6...which ones are better?

On a sidenote: I hoped to be working on the children's theatre script with Steve. Will that be possible at all in this workshop or should Cassie and I just talk to him outside of it?