Um... Wow.
So I haven't been here since... Wait, let me check again.
Ctrl-T
The end of June.
That's kind of saddening, in a way. But also not, because hey, time, distance, perspective, talking like Buffy again, these things, you have to reclaim.
In theory, this marks the end of something, too. Because the whole Diary of a Mature Student thing technically ended a week before the most recent posting, and your insert-deity-of-choice here above only knows that the whole Each Day, A Film format was, if not totally unsustainable, then overly difficult to keep running.
Sorry 'bout that.
The thing is; something's changed. And not in the fun sense.
Work this out, because I certainly can't; studying film has destroyed my ability to watch films.
In one sense it's to be expected; once you're taught how to view something in a different way, it's difficult - if not impossible - to turn those eyes off. So now, whenever I'm watching - and that's the wrong word, but we'll come back to that shortly - anything, from television to film to whatever, I'm watching it with - at minimum - two sets of eyes.
It's like designer schizophrenia in cinematic terms - if the Barefoot Doctor wasn't quite as sleazy after the whole 'sexing your patients' thing, I'd borrow his quite lovely term, 'Polyphrenia'. Electively having multiple selves that you can dip into and access rather than a singular ego, effectively - Grant Morrison hints at the concept in the final volume of The Invisibles with the whole MeMeplex thing (playing off Dawkins' The Selfish Gene).
Um. Hold on. My background reading is showing.
But let's take an example; I've been watching Hunted recently on BBC 1, and a better example of all the overlays I've been taught coming into play is difficult to find at the moment.
At any given time watching Hunted, I'm trying - desperately - to just watch it as a viewer, but at the same time I am - in theory, and sometimes in practice - 'engaging' with the 'text' as someone who's been trained - to a certain level, and certainly not to mastery, but trained nonetheless - to 'engage' on the level of the script, the production, the technical aspects, and a few other sundry bits and bobs (colour grading, I'm looking at you).
And let me tell you, Hunted is not a great experience if you can't turn the overlays off.
In the week before last's episode, I actually stopped, rewinded and counted the setups in one scene. A simple conversation between two people stood at a window - bread and butter, really, in filmmaking terms - ended up having eight different setups.
For anyone thinking 'oh, well, la-di-da, he studies films and suddenly he's using all the slang and whatnot', a setup is - to my mind, at least - a single camera position. Inside that position, you can pan, track, zoom, change heights, whatever. It's fairly versatile, especially with the new cameras and such.
So to have eight setups in one two-person conversation isn't simply over-the-top, or flashy, or different - it's bizarre.
And it's not the only time it happens, either. There's a thing - and it's not my favourite thing ever, but it works - called the 180 Degree rule.
Like so.
And it's boring, and staid, and simple, but it works. It's part of the visual grammar of how people are brought up to understand television and film. And because if this, if you violate this rule, it should be for a good reason - disorientation, jumps, etc - to shock the audience, or to get them to pay attention.
Hunted doesn't so much break the rule as violate it in every single possible way. It's not even funny; in a conversation between the Boss and his Second-In-Command, the line may as well not exist, which is bizarre in a normal conversation, let alone in a tense situation. So it's like starting a nuclear exchange with your neighbour country because they forgot to send a Christmas card; unnecessary, messy, and everyone's going to be looking at you funny at the UN from now on and not sending baskets of regional cheeses.
The strange thing is that Hunted is actually getting tense. The perennial problem is that you have first-season-hump - you have one episode to set up the world, one episode to dive into the season-long arc, then you just have... stuff happening right up until the final episodes of the season. If the show is well-written, the stuff advances the plot without it being obvious that it's doing so.
Otherwise, you just have A-plot and B-plot for an hour a week, with Season Arc going on in the background.
This is not a bad thing, because it's how we like our TV shows, and, again, it's part of the grammar of how things work; event follows event follows event because there's always a reason for narrative causality, and then suddenly the season is ending and you end with the following programming loop:
10: QUERY: IS SHOW CONTINUING TO NEXT SEASON
20: IF YES, INSERT CLIFFHANGER THEN GOTO 10 AT END OF SEASON
30: IF NO, INSERT WRAP-UP SEGMENT THEN GOTO NEXT TV SHOW
So Hunted is finally tense, but as far as I can tell, no-one actually knows if it's being renewed for another season or not.
If it is, perhaps they could decide if they want to give the viewer motion sickness or not? Because it'd be nice to know in advance.
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