Essential Question: How can we talk about, and understand, film?

I’m going to be honest with you, whoever actually reads this: I didn’t really learn all that much. I didn’t discover anything new about my process. I’ve been watching movies for a long time, and watching a movie a day (sometimes 2 or 3) isn’t anything new to me. My habits, similarly, are things I’m very familiar with and, again, I haven’t learned all that much. Maybe that I like to watch movies in the dark, in silence, but that’s nothing new, just something that I’ve only now acknowledged maybe. I think I do it because I just want there to be the screen and me, like in a movie theater; I want to create the space for there to be an interaction between me and the movie and nothing else. Sometimes, if the movie is boring, you want to escape that interaction, but I try to force myself not to because I think that even a bad movie can teach me something. If a good movie can show me how to make a more engaging story, how to make a better film, then a bad movie can show me what not to do and how not to make a good story.

The only thing that was new to me throughout this experience was taking notes after I watched a film. Usually, I talk to someone about the movie (whether they’ve seen it or not) and my ideas come out as an incomprehensible dribble, just a collection of “oh and then there’s this cool thing here” and “but then, OHMYGOD, it was so great.” Taking notes, though, gave me the space to think and refine my ideas (even if they still sound relatively incomprehensible on the podcast) so I could more efficiently say what I mean and get my points across. As far as knowing what I don’t know, that doesn’t really make sense does it. Because, if I know it, then I don’t not know it. But, for the sake of the CR, I’ll go with it.

I don’t really understand what this means, actually. There’s a lot of things that I don’t know, and even more that I don’t even know that I don’t know. I don’t think that I did anything in the past 6 weeks that made me realize more things I don’t know, because most of them I already know I don’t know. For example, I know that I don’t know how they did the VFX and compositing in Baahubali 2: The Conclusion. I guess I realized that, but I’ve had very similar experiences with so many other movies that it doesn’t feel like something new that I don’t know, just a new example (watch a Karl Zeman movie and try and figure out how he made it). If the end goal of this section of the CR was for me to figure out if I’ve answered my essential question, then my answer is no. I don’t think my essential question is one I can answer, nor can I ever really be done with it. We designed it, purposely, in a very open-ended way so we could experience as many movies as possible from as many different places as possible, and I think we’ve achieved that. Still, no answer, because it really is an unanswerable question. We can explain it (how we understand movies I mean, and that’s the podcast), but there will never be a final answer.