The Real Fake Thing

How many of you watched Avatar: The Last Airbender?  Not the movie, the show.  Very different aesthetic for a Western cartoon, no?  I'm not what you'd call an expert on Asian history or art, but it seems pretty obvious that the animators deliberately based their creation off of actual Asian cultures.  They didn't just throw some kimonos and almond-eyed character models at the screen and call it a day.  Any of my readers who are experts can correct me on this one, but my best educated guess would be:

Air Benders - Tibet/Nepal
Earth Kingdom - China
Water Tribe - Mongolia
Fire Nation - Japan

This technique has been around longer than you think.  One of the first writers (I'm aware of) to use it is Robert E Howard who based the cultures of his Conan mythos, The Hyborean Age, on real world nations and cultures to create a sense of familiarity among an alien landscape.  Tolkien later did the same with Middle Earth, but with mythology instead of actual history and societies.  In this way, you have a frame of reference to wrap your head around.

Not to say it can't be done creating a mythos from whole cloth.  The catch is that it requires a lot of work and even then you'll probably be drawing on real world sources for inspiration.  A lot of good works have been created that way but you have to ask yourself if you're willing to commit yourself that fully to building a world.

I've written in my book "Exalt of the Weird" that a coherent mythos is important to verisimilitude.  If you're contradicting yourself every other sentence, then you're only going to take your audience out of the experience.  This is especially true for bizarrists and mentalists.

I bring this up because Halloween is approaching.  And wouldn't it be more impressive to your audience if you demonstrated something that actually referenced old superstition or local folklore?  Every place and culture has its stories, mysteries and folk tales.  Their own unique superstitions, blessings and charms.  So what is a ghost?  Do you have an answer for that?  You should.  If you want to get into character and scare people, you need to devote more thought to your mythos and give people the real fake thing.

Voice and Scripting Workshop

With this post I'm happy to announce the official launch of my first webinar and scripting workshop on Sunday, May 13th at 6:00 PM EST. During this 3-hour session hosted on tinychat, I will be teaching everyone to strengthen their voices and command a room just through sound. I will be working with everyone to fine tune their scripts and routines as well as come up with new scripts suited to their performing styles. I will also endeavor to recommend each person sources of fiction and non-fiction to help inspire them to write new original material.

However... there's a catch. This webinar is a private affair. Entry into it costs $20 and only 10 spots are available. It is strictly first come, first served. Anyone interested in this must send an email before the end of Saturday, May 12, after which I will no longer be taking in applicants. Send an email with your request to join the list of attendees with the subject line "Script and Voice Webinar" to alexander@witchinghourproductions.com and you will subsequently receive instructions on how to join the webinar and a PayPal request. If you send me an email and the webinar is already full up, I will put you on a shortlist of people who get first crack at the webinar the next time I host it. You will not be asked to pay anything until the new date has been scheduled. If there is sufficient interest, it may not be long at all before I do this again.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Hold Your Horses

In an earlier article, I talked about escalation and why it's a losing battle. In case you need a refresher, escalation is when artists pile on spectacle in lieu of actual creative inventiveness or innovation. The Star Wars extended universe is a prime example of this. And those of you who lived through the 90's probably remember Dragon Ball Z, which was about 10% animation and 90% insanity.

That in mind, I wanted to touch briefly on restraint. Restraint is a valuable skill to learn, especially when you start writing your own material. The less you say, the more valuable your words become. The less you explain, the more sublime the effects appear. This is especially true when you get into bizarre magic and mentalism. It's a trap I see a lot of new guys falling into, so I want to repeat this and for you to write it down and put it somewhere visible in whatever place you practice and rehearse in: Melodrama is NOT better drama.

Unless you're auditioning for a soap opera, there's no reason to apply the emotions, pathos and atmosphere with a trowel. Michael Cain once said for very tense dramatic scenes with a close-up on his face, he actually dials back his reaction, allowing the audience to impose more subtext over it. That degree of restraint carried him to the Oscars.

This is further evidenced by an experiment made by early Russian filmmaker, Lev Kuleshov. The Kuleshov Effect, named for him, shows that context is key. In the experiment, Kuleshov recorded a film clip of actor Ivan Mozzhukhin. Mozzhukhin was a star of the early silent films and very well-known to the audience. The footage of him shows him with an utterly expressionless face. He is not acting at all. Yet when that footage was juxtaposed with stock footage of a bowl of soup, a pretty girl, and a child's coffin, each clip used to make a different short film, audiences raved about the sheer depth of emotion in his face. But each time the emotion they perceived was radically different based on what the editing lead them to believe he was observing. Their brains were filling in the gaps and making sense of the context. He was looking at that bowl of soup with "hunger" because that's what you think when you look at soup.

I want you to practice some of your facial expressions and gestures in a mirror. Obviously if you're working on stage or busking, a certain amount of scale is necessary so the people further back can see you. But if you're doing close-up, show a little more restraint. Subdue your own reactions to events around you. Don't be afraid of a delayed reaction if it means you're giving thought to what just happened. You don't need a shark's grin to tell people you're happy. A regular one will do. Don't fidget constantly to show that you're afraid. Keeping a little tension in your body language does the same thing much better. And please don't try to toss off a snarky one-liner when an "implied facepalm" sort of expression (Google it) will do just as well.

Bigger is not always better. Less is more. Learn to dial things back a bit and you'll find that you're wasting a lot of energy doing things you don't have to.

Sleightly Negative

'Tis the season again! Apologies for the lack of posts, but the holidays have been keeping me derailed lately. I did want to get one post up before the new year though, but I didn't know what. Then I reminded myself that this is a season of peace and good will. We're all filled with positive thoughts. And then it hit me.

Here's something I'll bet you didn't know. The brain isn't very good at processing negatives. Really. Now, reading this paragraph intellectually you'll probably retain the previous negative of "isn't." But if you were in a more emotional state, the brain is going to be more inclined to edit the negative out and interpret the sentence differently. This is a trick political campaign ads have been using for years and something magicians can make good use of.

Let me illustrate. When trying to distort the sequence of events in an effect, magicians will sometimes say something like, "I didn't touch the deck at any point," or, "You shuffled the deck," planting in the audience's head that the magician was uninvolved in what happened. I find the latter to be slightly more effective because if I remove negatives and keep the attention away from what I did or did not do, there's less chance for their brain to accidentally edit out negatives and remember (correctly or otherwise) me manipulating the deck or whatever.

We already know that the brain is a very fascinating thing in its capacity for editing reality. So give this a try. Go through your scripts and routines and change any and all references to what you didn't do to what the spectator did. Even if it's a bald-faced lie, if they're emotionally involved and you say it with enough authority, their mind will edit the memory to match.

It's a bit knackier, but you can also use this phenomenon to your advantage by accenting and pacing a sentence in such a way that the negative being edited out by the brain helps the illusion. I myself haven't had a lot of chances to use this myself and wouldn't really recommend giving it a shot until you have more experience with the principle. It has to be used very deftly to create an embellishment and shouldn't be used as a main element of the deception.

So in the spirit of the season, cut out the negatives and be more positive. Happy holidays, everyone!

Silence, Magic and Music

Another mini-post. I recalled an old quote that goes, "All form of art endeavor to be more like music." It's an interesting observation. Regardless of how much you agree or disagree with it, consider an important part of writing melodies: rests, that is places where an instrument doesn't play any notes, are just as critical as the actual tones themselves. Think of that start-stop rhythm in Roxanne by The Police. Or the iconic riff from Smoke on the Water.

Actors call pauses in dialog beats. In the play or screenplay, a beat is usually indicating by an ellipsis (...). It's hard to point out a good example of the use of beats as you're not supposed to consciously notice them. Though I will say for a bad example, watch any movie Kristen Stewart is in.

Make it your homework to watch some really good movies this week and watch out for actors using silence, beats, and pauses to subtly increase the drama.