PART 1 : “Positions, Please!”
A few months ago, we were asked to be one of a number of production companies creating short films on marriage. Our assigned topic was marital roles, and certain parameters came with the request: the film needed to be in four linked parts that could fit between other teaching pieces; it needed to support the subject material surrounding it; it needed to use dancing in at least one part as a visual metaphor for marriage; and it needed to fit in a small budget. I find short films to be great opportunities for experimenting with different styles and methods, always hoping to do more with less. In this post, I’ve included the four parts of the film as well as brief comments on the experiments we did with narrative structure, camera style, directing method, and editing choices. It was a fun little project; I hope you enjoy taking a peek into it. [Click HD in the upper right corner to watch in HD; if it's loading too slowly, then turn HD off.] [click to continue…]
{ 0 comments }
I recently finished a draft of a screenplay for a short film on the roles of men and women in marriage. (We’re doing it for a family ministry to use in a new curriculum they’re developing.) One of their ideas was to use dancing as a metaphor for roles in marriage. I thought it was a good idea, so I tried to build the entire story around it. I set it in a ballroom dancing class for adults, and the more I pushed the metaphor, the better it seemed to work. By the end, it had become a multi-dimensional (if simple) exploration of the roles of men and women in relationships, including some of the ups and downs that go with them. What I did wasn’t anything new – it’s a method as old as literature – but I think it could be a useful approach to dimensionalizing complex and potentially abstract ideas in film. In literary terms, it’s called a 
