Sunday, October 29, 2006

Maxing out on Bob's wisdom

This is just a taster from a latest Maximum Bob post.
We’re all familiar with the idea that there are only 8 plots (or is it 11?) in literature. Again, these are ways of loosely fitting any narrative into a particular mould. But the real interest in films (and books) is not in that they can be made to fit a mould, but in the way they’re made or written: the language used (including types of camera shot, lighting, movement etc), the characters (or the actors playing the roles), the dialogue, and the ways in which it all fits together (the editing, the sound, the music). If you concentrate solely on the mould (perhaps because you don’t feel very confident with the technical stuff), you just end up with something that’s more descriptive than analytical. You’re just re-telling the plot in another form of words. And the plot of a film is only a very minor part of it - and certainly not the part that makes it good or bad.
Just brilliant...

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