If a movie had nothing but internet posts, messages etc. No dialogue, No characters?
Would we create our own characters and setting they were in? How much would we need to know about the character over and above the impression we got from the posts?I suppose I could but I almost certainly wouldn’t. I’ve played indie video games where a significant portion is reading chat logs or messages and it has bored me without fail. I couldn’t imagine 60+ uninterrupted minutes of it.
How much free beer are you offering?
If done truly skillfully, like Google’s Parisian Love ad, it could be superb.
Otherwise, no.
It really would be no different than just reading a book you couldn’t set down. So I guess in that sense it wouldn’t make much sense but the idea or challenege would be to see if simply following a conversation could hold interest that long.
It seems like you could squeeze in a lot more content and do a better job of isolating the subject matter. It would require some serious skills.
If the content pertained to as gripping plot, such as a crime victim’s texts, etc. it could work, but for something mundane, probably not.
You nailed it right there, I have something I find super dramatic and exciting. The problem is that it is a new and little understould concept. In order for the reader to grasp the concept he would have to sit through an extremely boring and mundane explanation that would be impossible to maintain interest in unless they had allready accepted the premises behind it.
Playing out different writing styles I found I was best able to carry a thought process through conversations. The thought occured to me that if I could minimize the importance of real characters as the only important aspect would be his online personna. The real characters would only be introduced near the end.
Well, YT and FB seem to be full of
…short videos that…
…have just one or two words…
…per page…
…and go on…
…for many pages…
…as if…
…that…
…makes the material…
…more interesting.
It doesn’t.
I have no problem with subtitles, for example. (We even watch a lot of British shows with captions on.)
But the trend in movies and TV shows to have a quick shot of someone’s phone screen is frustrating. We can’t read those, especially in the time given.
But …
The real issue is: Isn’t this a book?
Since film is an audiovisual medium, the question would be what can that add over and above simply presenting the work in text-based form.
It does seem that a book or internet site would be the best formats to present such a story.
But I suppose if you had it animated, showing text being typed out, hurriedly erased, and re-written, with meaningful pauses to add tension, and appropriate background music/sound effects to add mood (or even have the posts read out by voice actors) it might create a more engaging piece of art than a straight text-based format.
I think it would have to be a very short film though.
Otherwise you’re asking for a heck of a lot of patience and concentration from your audience.
I wonder what Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich would do with this idea.
Yes, it is a book. My goal is to write a book and a screenplay. As a non writer attempting to write I am looking for creative solutions to obstacles that a non writer faces. I have given up several times over the last few years but it is one of those things that just won’t go away. This last thing was more of a passing thought that I wouldn’t have even posted had I waited about 10 more minutes.
Hard to explain but I get on these creative rolls sometimes and I tend to get a bit goofy. I asked a few friends to work with me on an experiment and I liked the results.
I played the main character just as I am and it was my job to sell them on the concept of a mass social media collaboration site. They were instructed to mostly just be themselves but the conversation was guided. With some editing it looked pretty good.
I plan to just keep plugging away.
If I was a 19 year old millennial maybe. Not as a 47 year old curmudgeon. I fall asleep during action scenes now.
If I could control the speed at which the text was displayed and if I didn’t have to pay for it, then I might watch such a “movie” (which is actually a book, as noted above).
If I had to read the text at the rate of the slowest reader in the theatre, I would probably go bonkers. And I doubt I would pay $13 to read a short story.
In what way is the OP’s movie really different from sitting here on the Dope for an hour reading posts?
Many of us do that voluntarily and seem to enjoy it enough to do it again and again. If we can figure out why the Dope works perhaps that can help the OP.
OTOH, we recognize that long-form messageboards today are a specialty interest that are popular with only a small segment of the mostly older population. So, like opera, it may be *a *way to tell a story to a few people, but not *the *economically viable way to tell a story to a mass market.
That might be because most modern action scenes are actors prancing in front of a green screen and tons of CGI, not very exciting.
As a movie, I’d be looking for the FF button within 5 minutes.
What IS it with these “young people” of today, that want everything in video format? I see tons of product reviews that are video. Don’t people read anymore? How is a video review better?
We had a company training session the other day that must have been made by a 20 something. Bad animation of faux chattiness from “characters” not based on any real people, all in video - no text. The subject matter was evacuations in case of emergency. Why does that need video? Short attention spans, I guess.
Even subtitles annoy me most times so I’ll say probably not. Unless it has a lot of nudity and graphic sexual content in which case all bets are off.
No, but I would most certainly read the book.
You summed it up very well here.
My entire inspiration for this novel is based on special interest social media forums. I started off in these forums about 20 years ago. I have seen countless people go through dramatic transformations in not only their personal lives but their very identity. Their jobs got better, their families got better, and they got better. It was not hard to trace this back to a new sense of value they were attaining at these special interest forums. Their ideas and thoughts were for possibly the first time in their lives actually being heard and appreciated. We collaborate on everything with very few rules to keep us under control; it is rare someone winds up angry for more than a day or so.
What I was seeing here was the same thing I would every once in a while see in real life when someone would just stumble across the right set of circumstances that would send his life down the right path. The big difference in frequency was basically just opportunity and exposure.
For the past several years I have been monitoring a lot of the activities we are involved in, mostly online but occasionally meet ups. I have been studying the dynamics of what keeps these groups together and how and why they are attracted to each other. My goal here is to find better ways of exposing more of us to more things. How someone is exposed to something will have a lot to do with how they will accept or reject it. If it was a pleasurable experience, there is a good chance you will relate that activity to something good.
The theory is that men and women enjoy being accepted and appreciated, we also enjoy the thought they we are doing something good in the world. These are very powerful forces here. The internet has almost limitless resources when it comes to intellectual, technical and creative skills. If we could find a way for the right people to connect at the right times and under the right circumstances the implications of this are beyond the imagination.
I have a few examples of projects that would be sent out to develop and how the process went. ( lots of drama here) One example might be a guy wanting to build a better composting bin; another might be a group studying health issues and diseases, another hi tech, anything big or small.
The primary job of the site would be to increase the odds of a person adding value to themselves. Every aspect of collaboration has a value.
Contributors present ideas on a rolling board that falls off every 24 hours without getting likes.
Visionaries spot these good ideas and move them to the next level where hopefully an advocate will pick up your idea
An advocate would consult with you and possibly rewrite your post to attract the right people for development of your idea or thought.
If the post did not get knocked off by not being picked up it would continue up the latter. The majority would fall off most likely at different stages. When they fell off they would go back to the originator and whatever group he may have formed at whatever stage they were at when it stopped advancing. They could choose to straighten it out and refine or abandon.
The focus is not on the projects themselves as much as it is the lives of those involved in it. Establishing the premises that drive the whole thing will be the focus.
The fact that you don’t control what you read, what pace you read it at, or which order you read it in, and can’t go back and reread unless the movie chooses to go back. (Unless it’s in a format that you have pause, rewind and fast forward buttons, but then, what’s the point of doing it as a video?)
An epistolary novel where the format is messageboard posts rather than letters or diaries could certainly work (see Candle Cove for a short story version), but not a movie.