Postcards from Zambia: A New Photographic Response

Although oppressive times may be becoming scarcer, albeit remaining in living memory, it is time for a change in outlook; there have been developments in the mechanics of photography: a transition from film to digital photography enabling the simple and instantaneous production of images for newspapers, magazines, poster-prints, slideshows and websites, mobile phones, social media or the photograph album; photography is more a media for the masses than ever before.

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Writing Film Scripts 9: Facts of the Matter

Watch lots of films that you like and imitate them. Watch them twice or even three times. Figure out what the films are about and write it down. Look for and note down the inciting incidents and when they happen; find and note the nature of the transitions at end of the first and second acts. Or does it have five acts? Find the midpoint and note the winds of change in story direction. Watching one film once is not watching films. Look for events and observe characters and put them in your film. Do not copy dialogue unless its in the public domain and used as irony, “I’ll be back” famously from Terminator.

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The Zambians (3): Image and Realpolitik

Milk collection in Choma

The image itself

There are hardly any iconic pictures in public circulation and only a few in public exhibitions; so, now let us look at the rest of the world’s photographs and why they may be important. The saying is there are no new photographs: the blind woman or man, the people in the underground, signs, and others; they have all been taken by famous photographers of the past. If you take a picture of a blind person, it will be compared with Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, Gary Winogrand, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and others. This of course is irony by default - it has been done before - in its most unintellectual form.

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Writing Film Scripts 8: Read On

So now that you have written lots of scenes, you will notice there are distinct sequences, elements of story that combine to make the full story. Each Act is likely to be one or more sequences that are spaced by time and fade in from black and fade out to black. Tarantino uses these as Brechtian breaks. Have you discovered distanciation yet? Each element is a ‘Short’ film and can be written as such in the script, but there is no explicit formatting for sequences in writing scripts so I use colour coding in scene views/index cards or, in Final Draft, Format > Element Settings > General to start a new page with its own capitalised and underlined italics title for sequences or acts.
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Postcards from Zambia: Globalism, technology and social change

Despite the Polaroid camera being sufficiently developed to take positive colour photographs in 1964, the world’s press recorded Kenneth Kaunda taking Zambia to independence in October that year in black and white. Although this is where the Zambian colonial project ended for Britian, it is where the globalisation project started, a positive feature of a changing world for some, the domination of the Third World by the First World for others (Ashcroft, 101). 
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The Zambians (2): Events in Photography

Photo-mechanical reproduction

The arguments of whether a photograph is truthful, or whether it is art, really pale into insignificance when what really mattered for the development of photography was the capacity for mass reproduction; that is photographs being used in newspapers and magazines with the development of half-tone printing in 1880, which is part of the electro-chemical-mechanical means of printing photographs by printing press still used today. The unfortunate truth of demand for imagery in publications, however, is that few photographs are used and not necessarily fully consumed at that. Alternatively, photographers often print one to ten enlarged prints for sale, claiming to destroy the (digital) negative to increase the value of their photographs. This conflicts with the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s recognition of one of photography’s greatest assets in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

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Postcards from Zambia: Mass Tools (3)

In the 1920s and 30s, democracy and media reproduction emerged together, and photography and cinema were key mass media tools. In 1925, Ernest Leitz Optische Werke in Germany released Oscar Barnak’s lightweight 35mm still camera, called the Leica I, which used standard cinematic film but with a frame size of 36 x 24mm. With Dr Max Berek’s lens on the Leica, quick and quality photography became easier for newspapers and amateurs, and created opportunities for photojournalists like Henri Cartier-Bresson (Jeffrey, 243).

Bicycle Store in Mwachisopola.

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Writing Film Scripts 7: Filling it Out

Often, I do not have nearly enough to start at this stage, but I switch the left-hand pane to Page, so that I can start writing the script. I am not able to plan the whole screenplay as some people can, so I just start writing, nearly always from the beginning, which I am pleased to be good at! Not everyone can; in fact, most cannot. For those of you with starting difficulties, start wherever you can, anywhere in the script. Just CTRL-2 and type in the scene heading, whether it is EXT. or INT., the rough LOCATION, and whether is it DAY or NIGHT.

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The Zambians (1): Reality and Art

This is the second book on Zambia by Peter Langmead in which he continues to argue that the preservation of the nation’s social history is more important for Zambians and for global heritage than the persistence of Western post-modern indecisiveness about whether documentary photography is important or to be trusted.

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Damyna the Musical: A Brief Outline

A tranquil African village is thrown into turmoil when Damyna, a poor abandoned girl, becomes torn between her love for the boy she grew up with and the handsome, suave stranger who strides into her life. Damyna is brought up by a kindly ‘aunt’ who has paid off her father’s moneylender to secure the girl’s freedom. She grows into a young woman knowing that the aunt’s son, Por Phiri, is not her brother, contrary to his believe that they are siblings. Read more

Writing Film Scripts 6: Stuck in the Middle

The three acts and the inciting incident have been mentioned. Before that, in the film, the viewer should know what the film is about. Blake Snyder calls it the theme and wants it in the script on page five! Some sum it up too briefly as Love, but because this is a great piece of English literature, more thorough answers abound. The book’s title gives it away and it is thereafter enshrined throughout the book, which is superior in every way to stating it on page five, but do not underestimate this rule!