The truth is not your friend!

This was one of the messages I received in Saturday while attending the Raindance Film Making School. I should caveat the statement slightly with the prefix, "When you are directing for the screen (Film or TV).....", but still there were some interesting lessons to be gleaned from the event.

Overall the day was very interesting. I went looking to see what I could take from it and bring into my working world of leading business change. I wasn't disappointed. The day was four 90 minute sessions covering, story development and script writing, production, directing and how to break in to the industry.

The last session was not my main interest, but the preceding one about directing, by Patrick Turner, was very good. Before I go onto that there was something out of the story development that might have applications in my world. This related to the setting of the story.

We covered the four typical characters, hero, villian and their sidekicks who change allegience at some point. What was then said was that there were different settings, described as "wilderness", "village", "town", "city" and "oppressive city". In each the hero is a different. For example in a "village", where the buildings are all similar, everyone knows everyone else and if you stand at one end of the street you can see the other end, the hero is usually a stranger appearing out of nowhere or someone invited to come and fight some dragon/injustice/etc. In these situations the hero remains unchanged by the story and often rides out at  the end to do it again somewhere else. Sounds like a professional, journeyman project manager, eh? And the "village" sounds like a small to medium business?

In an "oppressive city", where the rules have changed, the hero is often some lowly person who spots someone "higher"(?) doing something wrong and sets out to right matters. Along the way they usually realise some of their own limitations and find themselves improved/elevated as a result of the experience. I think there are some parallels with very large corporates, but I need to work on that more.

I guess the real message was not all heroes are the same and each hero needs to be matched to its setting....as do project and programme managers!

In terms of the directing, the theme was that in order to look right on screen, the director often needs to cheat.

Here are two pictures of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh from "Gone with the Wind". Clark was 6'1/2" and Vivien was 5' 3 1/2" (without heels). I would suggest that neither of these pictures is "real" although the second is closest. The first, through staging, makes Vivien look taller and the second she looks shorter than her reported height, considering in life she would be wearing heels.

In each case the director thought they looked good and they do. If you watched the film, would you have spotted the difference if you had not been told?

There was much talk about compressing space and actors having to work really close in order to make head shots for two or more people work (nose to nose distances of two inches or less so that they couldn't even focus on each other!), really invading personal space and making it feel very uncomfortable, yet look good. There was also talk about need to change the actors sight lines in that often to see the two faces in a conversation the actors will not be looking at each other, but it will look good on screen. Watch good scenes now and check if the actors are actually looking at each other?

Avoiding eye contact and invading personal space are not good ideas in real life so let's leave those in the world of TV and cinema, but there was one other takeaway.

That was that good actors vary their volume depending on the size of a shot. They will almost whisper in close up, talk louder in mid shot and even louder in long shot and the best just adjust naturally. We saw examples of Tom Cruise and others doing this. The corollary was with George Lazenby, James Bond for one film, who is often thought of as the worst Bond. Patrick Turner's view was that George Lazenby's acting was OK, but he was just too loud and that is what set the performance back.

Patrick also talked about this low volume, almost whisper, as a way of drawing the camera and the audience in. Talk quietly in an interview and the crew will get closer!

I think there is something there for my change world. I rarely work on screen, but often the topics I talk about have differing scale. Also at times I want to draw my listeners in. I will be more conscious about how loud I am talking in future and see if I can achieve better results? Maybe it pays to be softer on detail points and louder on more strategic pieces? Certainly I will be more aware when with stakeholders, in small or large groups.

All this is very different from the stage and helps expalin why some actors do more screen work than others. Patrick admitted that actors can become type cast, but that was for a reason; they can do what is needed and make the director's life easier - so they get used again and again.

There is no slack on most production budgets to train new actors - you either get it or you don't and that is often the differnce between working and "resting".


All in all this was worth a day of my time.