Aristotle’s arc applied to interviews

Posted by adriana on
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 4:11 am

As we start to review our footage, my team and I started discussing how to bring these scenes together to form a storyline. According to Aristotle’s poetics, we need to center on an “idea-action”, to depict our hero through action. My first question was how to do that in a non-fiction environment, when you are filming primarily interviews. You are asking you hero to tell you what they think, what they are feeling, rather than taking our viewers through an action-filled journey that depicts him or her. Obviously, you can back up the narration with some “action footage” and use some music to help create the momentum, as we’ve seen in class. I think that might help in establishing the character, but not sure if it will be enough to build the “journey” of my hero without falling into a recount of the past – i.e. the story of how I got there. In other words, I am thinking of how to express/find that initial action that kicks off the story, and the subsequent ones that move it without relying too much on interviews or narration.

I thought of the short that Barry showed in class and how it was effective in building empathy for the Xbox player in one/two minutes. Not withstanding this was a fictional story; I noticed that the use of the bed-time-story technique from Amelie (or Delicatessen) builds empathy because it immediately connects us with our childhood. So I started thinking of other techniques that can quickly establish empathy with a hero in a story. What can one do to “move” a non-fictional story along in the present, when the action occurred in the past? Any ideas? Examples? (I’m trying to think outside of the reporting news format).

-Adri