True Compositional Stories: Part 3 of 5
Contributed by David Mansfield on 11 October 2006 at 10:47So now I'm done researching. How did I set about outlining my paper?
It was really a three-step process, two of which I will go into here.
First, I looked for what common themes were emerging from my research. The main ones were:
* The viewer sees multiple characters watching the same scene and so cannot point to a definitive perspective.
* The point-of-view is restricted to one person's flashback, and yet events are shown that the remembering character could not have seen.
* The camera adopts movements similar to a human spectator's gaze, even when there cannot be a spectator.
* The use of eyeline matches becomes destablized due to these other techniques.
Without actually copying over all my sources and course notes I cannot really demonstrate how I came to these points. What's more important than how I did it is what I did; the crucial factor was determining what the main ideas of my paper were - in the awful five-paragraph format, these would be my three middle paragraphs.
The second step was to put those points in an order that makes the most sense. That fourth point (eyeline matches) clearly needs to go last, because it depends on the other points before I can argue it. The second point (restricted point-of-view) should probably go first, because it's the one that's clearest on first viewing of the films, making it both my most accessible and least original point.
The real issue is where to place the first and third points - the presence of observers and the camera movements. The point about camera movements mentions that there might not even be an observer to mimic - this is remarkably similar to the point about flashbacks. Yet there are also times where the camera does represent a diegetic observer, and in these cases the camera movements have more in common with the point about the presence of observers.
So I'll put the camera movements point in between those two. Thus, my very rough idea is:
*Flashback
*Camera movement
*Observers
*Eyeline matches
Return tomorrow where I craft a thesis and transitions and what not.