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beccaelizabethI'm autistic spectrum, and it influences what kind of TV I like.
quite a lot of that is the intense and focused interests part, because I can't follow my favourite actors outside of F&SF even if I really try and concentrate. people in those stories just do stuff and things. borings.
but some of it is going looking for acting I can actually read.
I am better at that after 30+ years of actively practicing. But there's still going to be moments when the story is trying to do something, probably something intense and richly complex, and about all I'll get out of it is 'and then he has feelings with his face'.
The thing is, natural expressions are very frequently clear as mud. People are having feelings, sure, but they don't usually make a face like :-) or :-( about them, they're usually doing a whole bunch of stuff at once and not greatly resembling a smiley. it's the visual equivalent of everything being blahblah noises in the background, until some big high point goes !
So what I found I liked, quite often, is children's TV, and stuff from the 70s.
Not just specifically the 70s. Acting idioms change over time, and the specifically stagey interpretations developed for small screens and fuzzy picture quality were pretty highly stylised. It's like large print for body language and facial expressions. There's conventional means of expressing things, little shortcuts, and a tendency to play to the cheap seats that means you're unlikely to miss even subtle moments.
They are ac-tors. It's like translating.
In even more stylised representations, say things with masks or dance, then there's more to learn, but people at least recognise that stylisation is what they were doing. Pretty often with older acting people will just write it off as bad.
And the newer it is, the more people are acting in styles developed for television, for close ups, for ever better picture quality. It's not an abrupt switch, but at some point a particular audience are going to call that bit 'realism' or 'naturalism' when earlier styles look fake to them.
Only it's all acting. It's all some degree of fake. They're giving signals to tell people what's going on on the inside, and it doesn't match what you actually see on most people most of the time, because most people aren't that communicative.
What I've found with children's TV is it still has that tendency to make itself very clear. It's not that kids TV doesn't have emotionally complex plots, they're just more likely to have someone's face go :-) or :-0 or D-: for a moment so you know which emotion it's about to be complex with.
... not that I've watched very much kids TV very recently, but when I do (usually while waiting for cartoons or something Doctor Who related) it does the thing.
Cartoons are fun as well, you can learn the feelings like a book, and in some styles of cartoon they'll have one face that the other people in the scene are seeing and another that's showing someone's insides. or they'll have Emotions Dog, who has feelings so the stoic one doesn't have to.
Point of View has a lot to do with it too. If you're in a character's point of view, say with Ianto at the start of Cyberwoman, you're going to be shown more than the other characters in that scene will ever notice, not because they're ignoring it but because you are to some extent in a particular character's head. Or the just mentioned cartoons, it won't be everyone who gets mini cartoons of their emotional state, maybe just Spiderman. The more 'naturalistic' the style is the rest of the time, the harder those bits are to read though, some people won't see that in Cyberwoman at all. But if we're following the Doctor around in his own show, we'll see him have a whole emotional range that his enemies wouldn't ever see. We'll see him alone, for instance, having feelings in an empty TARDIS. So point of view in TV is about showing the insides of a particular character, as well as following them around.
In writing of course it's all a bit different. You've got the most highly stylised and conventional means of expression there are available to you - words. You can just say 'he was happy' and go on. Or 'he was a bit happy but with an underlying sadness and exhaustion, while thinking about lunch' which frankly is a bit much to ask an actor to convey. But I don't really like using the feelings words so simply, because it feels like a lie. That probably loops back to being autistic again, but it's only exaggerated with us, neurotypicals aren't actually mind readers and they're not even entirely clear on their own feelings. I might be terrible at noticing I'm hungry, or angry, or angry because I'm hungry, but I'm far from alone in that. But if I write about a character, whether or not I'm in their point of view, that they are hungry and angry, I feel like that's only ever a conclusion they've drawn from available evidence. So I'd rather write the evidence. Maybe their stomach growls, they think of how long it has been since they ate, they can't seem to relax properly and they keep tapping their fist against things. Which comes first, the feeling, the word for a feeling, or all of that?
but then what I've got to draw on to show all them feelings is going to be drawing on a whole lot of actors using established conventions to convey in shorthand a particular and select slice of feelings.
and how real that's going to seem to an audience, whether it draws them in or bumps them out, is going to be like the sliding cutoff of 'realism' on TV, a very movable target.
quite a lot of that is the intense and focused interests part, because I can't follow my favourite actors outside of F&SF even if I really try and concentrate. people in those stories just do stuff and things. borings.
but some of it is going looking for acting I can actually read.
I am better at that after 30+ years of actively practicing. But there's still going to be moments when the story is trying to do something, probably something intense and richly complex, and about all I'll get out of it is 'and then he has feelings with his face'.
The thing is, natural expressions are very frequently clear as mud. People are having feelings, sure, but they don't usually make a face like :-) or :-( about them, they're usually doing a whole bunch of stuff at once and not greatly resembling a smiley. it's the visual equivalent of everything being blahblah noises in the background, until some big high point goes !
So what I found I liked, quite often, is children's TV, and stuff from the 70s.
Not just specifically the 70s. Acting idioms change over time, and the specifically stagey interpretations developed for small screens and fuzzy picture quality were pretty highly stylised. It's like large print for body language and facial expressions. There's conventional means of expressing things, little shortcuts, and a tendency to play to the cheap seats that means you're unlikely to miss even subtle moments.
They are ac-tors. It's like translating.
In even more stylised representations, say things with masks or dance, then there's more to learn, but people at least recognise that stylisation is what they were doing. Pretty often with older acting people will just write it off as bad.
And the newer it is, the more people are acting in styles developed for television, for close ups, for ever better picture quality. It's not an abrupt switch, but at some point a particular audience are going to call that bit 'realism' or 'naturalism' when earlier styles look fake to them.
Only it's all acting. It's all some degree of fake. They're giving signals to tell people what's going on on the inside, and it doesn't match what you actually see on most people most of the time, because most people aren't that communicative.
What I've found with children's TV is it still has that tendency to make itself very clear. It's not that kids TV doesn't have emotionally complex plots, they're just more likely to have someone's face go :-) or :-0 or D-: for a moment so you know which emotion it's about to be complex with.
... not that I've watched very much kids TV very recently, but when I do (usually while waiting for cartoons or something Doctor Who related) it does the thing.
Cartoons are fun as well, you can learn the feelings like a book, and in some styles of cartoon they'll have one face that the other people in the scene are seeing and another that's showing someone's insides. or they'll have Emotions Dog, who has feelings so the stoic one doesn't have to.
Point of View has a lot to do with it too. If you're in a character's point of view, say with Ianto at the start of Cyberwoman, you're going to be shown more than the other characters in that scene will ever notice, not because they're ignoring it but because you are to some extent in a particular character's head. Or the just mentioned cartoons, it won't be everyone who gets mini cartoons of their emotional state, maybe just Spiderman. The more 'naturalistic' the style is the rest of the time, the harder those bits are to read though, some people won't see that in Cyberwoman at all. But if we're following the Doctor around in his own show, we'll see him have a whole emotional range that his enemies wouldn't ever see. We'll see him alone, for instance, having feelings in an empty TARDIS. So point of view in TV is about showing the insides of a particular character, as well as following them around.
In writing of course it's all a bit different. You've got the most highly stylised and conventional means of expression there are available to you - words. You can just say 'he was happy' and go on. Or 'he was a bit happy but with an underlying sadness and exhaustion, while thinking about lunch' which frankly is a bit much to ask an actor to convey. But I don't really like using the feelings words so simply, because it feels like a lie. That probably loops back to being autistic again, but it's only exaggerated with us, neurotypicals aren't actually mind readers and they're not even entirely clear on their own feelings. I might be terrible at noticing I'm hungry, or angry, or angry because I'm hungry, but I'm far from alone in that. But if I write about a character, whether or not I'm in their point of view, that they are hungry and angry, I feel like that's only ever a conclusion they've drawn from available evidence. So I'd rather write the evidence. Maybe their stomach growls, they think of how long it has been since they ate, they can't seem to relax properly and they keep tapping their fist against things. Which comes first, the feeling, the word for a feeling, or all of that?
but then what I've got to draw on to show all them feelings is going to be drawing on a whole lot of actors using established conventions to convey in shorthand a particular and select slice of feelings.
and how real that's going to seem to an audience, whether it draws them in or bumps them out, is going to be like the sliding cutoff of 'realism' on TV, a very movable target.
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Date: 2015-01-13 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-14 05:58 pm (UTC)Actors and Directors formulate the character in their minds and bring the character to life with emotion.
Anthony Hopkins was going to make Hannibal Lecter a very slithering snake-like person, full of pent up energy, a caged predator waiting to pounce. Then he watched 2001 and based his portrayal on Hal the computer. And it worked! But it came from his head, not the script.
Don't bog yourself down thinking of every single detail or you will never write anything. Just get a good plot, some words, and a setting down on paper and add to it from there :) xx