Incremental Success

Great success can be found through incremental efforts. I asked my team to write for twenty minutes a day this week about their experience working on Delta Phi. I’m completely confident that this will give them clarity about the film and about their own goals going forward. I myself have been setting aside half an hour every day this year to write about and research metafiction, and the amount of certainty I felt after just a week has me advocating for this method. One insight a day, even one every two days, gives you real progress in a month. I’ve always written every day, but setting aside focused time dedicated to a particular project or practice is something that I’ve neglected during other productions.

This past Sunday we had one of our longest days yet, and successfully gathered assets for four different scenes, including one reshoot. The holiday break refreshed all of us and made us sharper. We got to shoot in one of our more comfortable locations, and the beautiful weather brought out even more affection and generosity of spirit than usual. I did not move one from a shot until every member of the team was completely satisfied with the last take, and I can hardly believe how much we got through. Footage came out beautiful and strange, like minerals carved out of an imagined cave. Left me feeling in love and excited and a little nervous about sharing this thing.

All that said, it only goes to show how important rest is to making good work, particularly for long term projects. I know that the few of you reading this are likely still neck deep in your own projects. How’s it going? What are you making? Let me know in the comments.

Peace,

Ayah

#DeltaPhiFilm

Metafiction and Streaming Video

Let me tell you why streaming video is just right for metafiction. Look at its characteristics:

Streaming video is democratized: The audience can choose when they see it, how they see it and how much of it they see. They can save their spot, pause, rewind and fast forward at will. They can do this with any and all interruptions or lack thereof. The episodic structure works perfectly for streaming video because it allows the distributer to popularize multiple releases and it gives people a greater framework with which to discuss the story. They can frame their discussions based on how much they’ve seen. Long videos that can’t be viewed in one sitting are not as good a fit for streaming video.

All this leads to the wonderful world of binge watching: episodes that were written to be shared week by week can now all be viewed in a single day! And they often are. What does this mean? It means that the audience is not only getting the small arcs in each episode, they are perceiving the larger arc of the full story with ease. If a serial doesn’t have a big picture arc, it’s going to become painfully obvious once it’s available for streaming video!

You know what else is obvious in streaming video? Inconsistencies in character. It’s very hard to convince an audience that a character would have completely different values from one episode to the next once that audience is seeing the episodes back to back.

So now that the audience can fast forward, pause, add to queue, whatever, stories have a much taller order to fill. They have to be convincing. They have to have both small arcs and big arcs. And lastly, they have to have canon.

It’s easy to see what when you know what canon is and what it does. Canon is the rules and setup of a story. You can’t have any kind of serial without a rules governing the setting. In fact, canon is most important for stories that are iterated across installments and episodes. Just take a look at star wars, harry potter, a series of unfortunate events or any popular anime. Canon is especially important to those audiences.

Here comes the linchpin: canon is the primary way that audiences engage with a story. The rules, the structure, the TRUTHS of a story are a framework for the audience to make judgements on it. It’s what activates the imagination, intelligence and growth of the viewer. Even in a successful story that stands on its own, a dedicated audience will connect it to other stories for the sake of building a meaning, a language that can be construed as canon.

Now what makes canon, my friends? What makes something in a story a truth or a rule instead of just a coincidence?

Awareness.

Awareness of something on the part of the constituents is what makes it canon. If the characters know it, we know it. Even in the case of dramatic irony, something in the medium of the story is delivering information to the audience. If the character’s behavior contradicts a rule or expectation about the setting, that’s when you’ve lost the audience. The characters are there to validate everything about the setting, premise and culture of the story. Therefore, a structure that prioritizes canon prioritizes character awareness. And a story that prioritizes character awareness is just what metafiction needs.

Progress on Delta Phi is good; I have about forty two minutes of rough edit now. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to tell a story about Delta and Phi, they are having a great deal of fun! 

Peace,

Ayah

#DeltaPhiFilm

Character Affect

A character is more than the sum of their parts. But let’s start with the parts. The parts are just sensory representations. This image, this voice, this color all on a flatscreen, whatever. Maybe it’s a word. There’s something that we’re perceiving as audience that represents the character for us.

Now ultimately, the combination of representative elements doubles as an icon for the character. You want it to. Inu-Yasha wears red. Sonic the hedgehog is blue. Harry Potter has round glasses, that sort of thing. And then, when you change that character’s affect by removing some of the elements, something very special happens that I think most storytellers take for granted.

The viewer suddenly gets in touch with the extra sum of the parts; the thing in themselves that identifies with the character. 

This doesn't work if you do it too early. You have to represent a character a certain way, and then when the audience gets to know them well, they will know the character beyond the concrete elements. Then when you change or remove one of those concrete elements (i.e. Harry’s glasses), the loyal audience member is rewarded with a very primal sensation of knowing that character, and the thing about them that goes beyond the concrete representation. A bystander who doesn’t know the character or the story will likely feel nothing.

The first time I was able to explain this fully, I was watching Pokemon with a group of my cousins, most of them young children. There was a scene where Ash had no hat on, and was wearing a different outfit than his usual Pokemon trainer regalia. I immediately felt a comforting emotional shift in the room among us, a sense of intimacy. the oldest cousin who was in the room is an intensively subjective feeler with the guts to get invested in stories, so I paused it and asked him what he felt when characters changed their look. Sure enough, he validated my suspicions. I told him I thought it was happening because it forces us to connect with the part of the character that is learned within ourselves. It’s a nice sensation, and to be honest, I think we do it with real people in our lives as well, when we change our look or affect.