ITAP - Week seven

This weeks lecture was based on film and moving image.  
The five principles were:

1) Story development - Three act structure.

2) Story development - The hero's journey

3) Pre-production Character Design

4) Visual Development -  Visualising information

5) Future Film - Digital storytelling 

The two principles I have decided to look at are the Three act structure and Character Design.

So what is the three act structure?
Basically, the three act structure is the under laying foundations that plots of films or books can be based on. It consists of three parts; an establishment, a crisis and a resolution. There is usually a 30:60:30 time frame, meaning that the establishment would last about 30 minutes, the crisis would last about 60 minutes long and then the resolution would last about 30 minutes. Evidence of this can be seen in many films today, though not necessarily in that order. Below is a diagram I have drawn to demonstrate how the structure works. I have backed it up with evidence of films that use the structure, one being Walt Disney's 'The Lion King' for an older example and the other being 'The Hangover' for a  recent example. 

You can see from the events I have written in the boxes that both these films follow the structure. Films with this structure tend to have a somewhat happy ending, although a character may have died earlier earlier in the film such as in the lion king, the resolution usually turns out happier than the crisis area, just maybe not as happy as the establishment. This structure is widely used because it is so versatile. It can be used for films with many different audiences, purposes, age ranges and genres. It is a strong foundation in film making. 


Secondly, I am going to look at pre-production character design. There are four main aspects of character design to think about when it comes to film production. They are as follows:

The protagonist: The main character

The antagonist: The cause of conflict

The Dialogue: The speech 

The Stereotype: Anything oversimplified

Within these aspects, there are 3 main areas you need to look at. 
They are APPEARANCE, ACTION and INTERACTION. 
To explain this I am going to use the example of mean girls. 
Mean Girls is a chick flick set in an american high school. The main character is just an ordinary girl who moves to the high school. She is the protagonist. She then gets dragged into and becomes part of the stereotype. The stereotype in this film is the mean girls themselves who are the girly, slutty, popular clique of the high school. The antagonist in this film is one of the popular girls ex boyfriends of whom the main character ends up falling for. This then causes a conflict between the protagonist and the stereotype.


Thinking about the design one of the stereotypical female characters you would have to cover the three areas mentioned above. For example:

Appearance: Fake, pretty, girly, skinny, lots of make-up

  Action: Bitchy, Selfish, Rude, Think they're better than everyone else

Interaction: Sweet, Secretive, overly friendly

This is a simple and easy way of knowing what you want from a character before you start to design them, therefore this is frequently used in film production. 

Mean Girls (2004)
Lindsay Lohan, 3rd one across is the Protagonist.
The other three girls are the Stereotype.