Research Journal
This is my PhD research journal for my Curtin University PhD thesis - Writing Cinema: Audiovisual phrasing and screenwriting practice.
It consist of an exegesis on the technique and material for writing audio in a screenplay, and a practice-based writing project: a feature length speculative script. This ‘active making’ will feed back into the critical analysis and realize forms and materials that will constitute new points of analytical departures.
The Kingdom of Ants is the practice driven creative component of my PhD exegesis. Its purpose is to explore and exercise literary writing as a way of putting audio into words in a feature length screenplay. I have always been fascinated by the aesthetic and synaestheic linkages (or cinestethics as Vivian Sobchack calls this relationship) between audio and the moving image in cinema and, specifically, in music videos. But in my PhD I look at how the written form of the cinematic screenplay can be utilised to represent the soundscape through the literary form.
The Kingdom of Ants is the practice driven creative component of my PhD exegesis. Its purpose is to explore and exercise literary writing as a way of putting audio into words in a feature length screenplay. I have always been fascinated by the aesthetic and synaestheic linkages (or cinestethics as Vivian Sobchack calls this relationship) between audio and the moving image in cinema and, specifically, in music videos. But in my PhD I look at how the written form of the cinematic screenplay can be utilised to represent the soundscape through the literary form.
Onomatopoeia is a literary effect in which a sound is written like it sounds. But does an apple falling on a roof go /th/ump or /b/ump?
A look at the three levels of Maurice Jarre’s score music, and it’s uses, in John Huston’s epic 1975 adventure film The Man Who Would Be King
A journey through the ten titles featured in the twelve drafts of my application for PhD candidacy, which provides a compelling and engaging procedural exemplary of my methodological approach.
“Only the river repeats itself, and repeats itself, without ever repeating itself”
Research Note on the lack of complexity in the delineation of sound elements in films, adding levels of complexity and specificity/detail to provide a list of sound forms.
The screenplay, which is the film’s procedural planning document and blueprint outlining what will be seen and what will be heard, is also a poetic literary text informing the dialogue between itself and the film’s creators by broadcasting mood, sensation, and feeling, emerging as literary representations of what Michel Chion calls, the film’s “audiovisual phrasing”: the placement of primary audiovisual synch points crucial for meaning and dynamics.
Walter Hill and David Giler’s Alien script flows like a punchy haiku poem or, maybe more accurately, takes on many of the characteristics of the prosimetrum compositional qualities of Matsuo Basho’s haibun poetry.
In The Garden of Edena: The Goddess Jean “Moebius” Giraud utilises a graphically represented voice-over to take us from a dream, back in time, while also placing us in the present, and then, through a cut, back into the next main narrative element.
Michel Chion’s notion of audiovisual phrasing and David Bordwell’s six-p methodology for uncovering the poetics of cinema, when joined, will provide a solid methodological approach for the location and critical analysis of cinematic audio-vision.
Let’s just, for a minute, assume that comics have audio. Of course, they don’t. We can’t hear the comic. But the use of onomatopoeia, and other expressive graphical representations of sound, allows us to read what we should be hearing. So, let’s assume we can hear the comic, that the comic medium has audio-visuality.
The Kingdom of Ants - CinefestOZ 2022 Questionnaire