This week’s class examined three pillars of screen storytelling: film language, narrative structure, and character roles. We began with continuity editing, the “invisible” system that keeps viewers oriented through graphic, rhythmic, spatial and temporal relations; Hitchcock’s Psycho supplies a classic graphic-match example. We then studied alternatives that reveal construction. Kubrick’s cross-cutting in The Shining knits two spaces into one tense location, while animation can openly display its artifice.
Next, we mapped the narrative arc: exposition, call, trials, crisis, and resolution, plotting it as a circle to spot where engagement rises or falls; flashbacks or ellipses bend that circle without breaking it.
Finally, we reduced character function to three roles: The protagonist supplies desire, the Antagonist supplies opposition, and the Mentor supplies tools. Animation’s freedom lies in hiding its artifice (the hyper-real believability of Snow White) or foregrounding it (the impossible metamorphosis in Steamboat Willie and Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video).