I like to read what interests me,
that sounds like common sense but I say that because sometimes that
takes me to interesting places. In this instance, I'm talking about
improv comedy. I've never done improv comedy, but it sounded interesting to me. and I wanted to read
about it. So, awhile back, I bought The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual,
where they break down their school of thought and theory in improv
comedy, and some of the games that they play. I finally got to read
through it this past week and barring a review of the whole book, there
were a few ideas that I really connected with.
One
principal that came up was "A to C'ing", which I had never heard but
I'm sure some of you are familiar with. Essentially in improv, you're
constantly heightening the stakes, and building off of ideas.
Everything put out into the world by your partner, you're supposed to
treat as a fact and then propel your thoughts off of that. It's
constant listening and response— an often overlooked portion of good
acting.
The A to C idea is that if your scene partner
introduces idea A (let's say they say the word 'truck'), rather than
jumping directly to a B idea (a direct word association or knee-jerk
response, like "driver") you go to the C idea, take your B idea and
compound that (something like "screw"). Suddenly the subject of your
train of thought evolved from a vehicle to a tool. It's an unexpected
move (which is often where the comedy lies), but has a train of thought
that could be followed logically, creating an organically complex
evolution of concept.
In the editing world, I see A to
C'ing as a method of avoiding on-the-nose storytelling where we are
talking about the idea and showing it at the same time, and instead
drawing correlations, metaphors or emotional representations on screen
of the subject matter. So let's say we're talking about domestic abuse,
rather than showing someone getting abused, or even "aftermath" of a
bruised and beaten person in the fetal position looking out the window,
we show an insert shot of a tea kettle whistling. It's in a home
setting, so there's a trace to the original idea, and the whistling is
emotionally disturbing enough that the dissonance of that conveys an
emotional thread that is true to the subject matter. It's better
storytelling.
A to C'ing is great because it goes back
to a principal of storytelling that I believe separates the men from
the boys, so to speak. This idea I'm talking about is playing to the
audience's intelligence rather than feeding them emotions. You allow
the audience to fill in the blanks and on a primal level, they become
more empathetic and emotionally available to the story. They're engaged
and receiving an award for slight cognitive work. It's active rather
than passive storytelling. I've often described it as "staying ahead of the audience" so they're constantly having to keep up.
I wrote recently about how
the feature documentary I've been editing had a big change in its last
revision where this very principal reared its head. Essentially, we had
a convention of voiceover in the edit that framed our entire story from
the perspective of our protagonist. Because we went that route, on the
surface it gave us the ability to hear the character's thought process
and psychology as he goes through his journey. It became a trap though
for two reasons. One, it became an outlet for information that wasn't
100% clear visually in the raw footage. So audience feedback was mainly
focused either on wanting more information, or wanting less dependent
on their personal taste. The more we tried to address those issues, the
less satisfied the audience was with the story. The second trap was
that the voiceover attempted to answer psychological questions and in
turn, alienated the audience by telling them what to feel. So in turn,
our feedback was focused on the distaste for our protagonist because
what he was feeling was not in line with how they felt.
So
the solution was stupidly simple. Remove the voiceover convention and
suddenly test audiences stopped asking to learn more about the backstory
and instead began actively participating in the here and now of the
story, and rather than being told how things felt, they could perceive
and deduce their own opinions on the conflicts of the protagonist.
We
moved the story from a passive framework to an active one and the
audience perceptions of the film completely changed. Suddenly they
engaged deeply with the material and were having meaningful discussions
after the fact.
I'm not totally poo-pooing
voiceover. I think it's a valid convention to introduce when necessary,
but perhaps not in an intimate film such as this one. It is a very
clear lesson for me though in the value of audience engagement.
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