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Dear Mark,
Just look at this picture. There are at least six stories here. Take a close look at each character, their posture, facial expression.
Do you identify with any of them?
What do you think is in their baskets?
What does that say about their living situation, their pet peeves, their deferred dreams?
What do you think their plans are for the night?
If you were to write a thriller about one of these characters, what would it be about?
Who would be the killer?
What if the same characters were lined up in the same positions, holding the same body postures, but the setting was different?
Like waiting in line for a blessing from the Pope, or to enter a Haunted House, or to get finger-printed at the police station?
What if they were lined up at a place where no line up was necessary like in the center of a park?
What if you looked at the same scene from a different angle?
From the point of view of the checkout person?
Or the security cameras?
Or the shoplifter?
We all have our automatic behaviors and habitual body postures. Staging for impact is based on knowing each character’s ordinary impulses and finding unexpected ways to thwart them.
In “The Art and Alchemy of Staging” course, starting Saturday, July 9, I will analyze and deconstruct the staging of a variety of scenes from well-known films. The scenes range from highly charged ones to plain vanillas where nothing is happening. You will see how a tiny change in staging (a thwarting of the impulse for comfort, for instance) can create a completely different scene. It’s what I love about staging.
For your part, if you really want to get the gold of staging, you will immerse yourself into the weekly homework assignments. That’s where you get to experience the power and beauty of staging. Even if you cannot attend the live online sessions, if you do the homework and watch the replays, you will gain as much, or more.
The homework includes:
· Multiple stagings of your memories and true stories for other possibilities and other outcomes while keeping the events and dialogue exactly the same
· Solving problems by non-ordinary, dyslexic or counter-intuitive thinking
· Using timing and time distortion to increase tension and unexpected turns
· Collecting stories of people’s strange habits and ways of coping
· Creating a list of telling micro movements
· Improvising inner dialogues for nonverbal scenes
· Imagining interesting distractions, obstacles and impediments
· Unearthing the stories underneath the stories underneath
· Loosening the boundaries of your imagination to serve the spirit of your stories
· And much more…
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