Untitled MA Film story and implicit agendas

 Following the lecture on story within film, I wanted to find ways of marking moments of implicit meaning within my project. The surface story will be clear from my ideas of storyboarding, but learning about making it relatable to the audience has started to make me consider how to animate in a way that flows nicely for a viewer. Aspects such as lighting and cinematography can aid the viewers perception of the narrative. In this post, I will outline some themes in the plot and ways in which to implicitly incorporate them within the film.

Utopias & Dystopias

based on a pun of the Greek words eutopia (“good place”) and outopia (“no place”) - Society’s esteem for utopian thinking has fluctuated with the times. (science fiction - Utopias and dystopias, 2021)

Many philosophers—Karl Marx included—thought that historical forces and the steady accumulation of rational knowledge would someday yield an “end state” for history. According to this way of thinking, the thoughtful futurist needed only to spot and nurture tomorrow’s dominant progressive trends and kill off the feudal superstitions of false consciousness; then social perfection would arrive as surely as the ticking of a clock. (science fiction - Utopias and dystopias, 2021)

Looking at this theme, I have highlighted first the implicit ideas of my dystopian world. Next, I imagined ideas of how these themes could arise on screen without being discussed, but rather through the visual narrative.

Without dialogue in my production, some of these ideas will be impossible to explicitly convey. This is one such issue I have been thinking about. However, our lecture on implicit agendas in film has given me ideas about how the themes can feed into the look of the film.,

Enjoyment of music and Multi-Modal experience

Multi-Modal experience can resonate with everyone. I want to convey the idea that music, accompanied with observation of motion and indeed, engagement of any of the senses can be a profound thing. This will also be implicit in the film.

the viewer is a “standard biological audio/video processor” (Anderson, J., 1998. The Reality Of Illusion. Carbondale: Ill.,p.12.)

“visuals are what the viewer tends to mostly focus on and the sound subconsciously alters how the visuals are perceived” (Blog.audiosocket.com. 2020. The Psychology Of Sound And Image: Why Some Songs Just Work – Audiosocket Blog. [online] Available at: <https://blog.audiosocket.com/psychology-of-sound/> [Accessed 11 November 2020])

My goals of looking at multimodality tie in well with the themes discussed in the lecture. As the reactions of the visuals to sound will be subtle. It was valuable to consider below the surface narratives. Other implicit narratives will involve:

Politics - The way the Government handles events in the film will reflect on aspects like handling of pandemic

Synaesthesia - When writing the treatment, I thought that the Protagonist would solely have the ability to see sound. Since the world has been established more, it makes sense for the whole society to have synaesthesia, but to have never heard music. Potentially part of the reason of the Government's suppression of it.