DZ-113: Tools For Filmmakers To Talk To The Audience

Listen if you want to explore how you can make your creative hand visible through meta-storytelling and structural choices!?!

In our final (ha!) episode looking at Talking Directly to the Audience, we turn away from character-and-text based craft tools to look at other ways that filmmakers - whether they be directors, writers, editors, or anyone else - can make the audience feel their 'hand' more. To that end, Mel, Stu and Chas dive into ADAPTATION, STORIES WE TELL and THE FORTY-YEAR-OLD VERSION.

We discuss structure (in particular how to structure more meta stories), the influence of TikTok and YouTube in portraying character authenticity, how to set up scenes where your characters can actually debate what your story is really about., and get into the gritty of where "in the story world" the communication from the filmmakers is.

Ultimately, in exploring these three powerful films through this lens, we discover that these tools give filmmakers more control in conveying their theme. Quelle surprise.

This episode brought to you by (drum roll) ArcStudio: go to https://www.arcstudiopro.com/draftzero for $30 off a pro subscription!

Thanks to Chris Walker for his excellent editing this episode.

As always: SPOILERS ABOUND and all copyright material used under fair use for educational purposes.

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→ Read the transcript for this episode.

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"I would guess that some of the most watched content in the world has people talking directly to the camera and that's stuff that people watch on YouTube." — Stu Willis @ 00:06:13

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CHAPTERS

00:00:00 – Cold Open

00:00:28 – The Meta of Meta

00:04:20 – › How filmmakers speak without breaking immersion

00:07:48 – › Mapping the craft levers for filmmaker-to-audience communication

00:11:01 – ADAPTATION

00:14:11 – › How filmmakers communicate through diegetic versus direct address

00:20:30 – › When fiction blurs with reality in meta-storytelling

00:29:23 – › Structural devices versus overt meta-communication across all three films

00:34:28 – › What the work wants from its audience

00:36:43 – Sponsor: Arc Studio Pro

00:39:40 – Adaption (Part 2)

00:42:23 – STORIES WE TELL

00:44:24 – › Exposing the apparatus of documentary filmmaking

00:49:44 – › Reconstructed Super 8 footage and the ethics of misdirection

00:57:07 – › Sarah Polley's absence as subject and presence as author

01:07:55 – › Mapping diegetic control across the film's storytelling layers

01:12:13 – THE FORTY YEAR OLD VERSION

01:19:29 – › Black-and-white cinematography and the Woody Allen inversion

01:23:13 – › Locating the filmmaker's voice on the meta-storytelling spectrum

01:33:20 – › Extracting portable craft techniques from autobiographical filmmaking

01:43:39 – › Authenticity, truth, and what each film is ultimately arguing

01:48:14 – Wrap Up & Key Learnings

01:50:48 – › Black-and-white, artifice, and meta-techniques as thematic anchors

01:56:27 – › Sound design, structural play, and further viewing recommendations

02:01:24 – Many thanks to our Patreons <3

FILMS

ADAPTATION (2002) — (w) Charlie Kaufman, Susan Orlean (d) Spike Jonze

STORIES WE TELL (2012) — (w) Sarah Polley

THE FORTY-YEAR-OLD VERSION (2020) — (w) Radha Blank

EPISODES IN THE TALKING DIRECTLY TO THE AUDIENCE SERIES

DZ-109: Talking DIRECTLY to your audience

DZ-110: Voiceover

DZ-111: Unreliable Narrators and FIGHT CLUB

DZ-112: Breaking the 4th wall

DZ-113: Tools For Filmmakers To Talk To The Audience

RELATED EPISODES

DZ-53: Antagonists! 5 - vs Audience

DZ-109: Talking DIRECTLY to your audience

DZ-110: Voiceover

DZ-111: Unreliable Narrators and FIGHT CLUB

DZ-112: Breaking the 4th wall

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