No Film School: One of the hardest things about writing something that takes place in another time, whether past or future, is getting the details right. Storytelling comes down to a few things. You have to have great characters and an engaging plot.
Both of those are built on the details you put into them.
2 comments:
Time period details are a really hard thing to nail down correctly. I feel like a lot of the time people make the mistake of thinking that, say, a show that takes place in the 1930s should have things that look old. In the 1930s, that 1930s style plate was brand new. Similarly, the house that the characters are living in in the 1930s was probably not built yesterday––it might follow the architectural stylings of the 1910s or even earlier. The characters’ social status might come into it; how new are their things actually? There are just so many different facets of this to think about in order to get it right. This article reminded me of these videos that BBC’s Merlin did where they took scenes from the show and inserted random modern items like a hair dryer or a cell phone. They looked very wrong. It was quite funny.
I initially clicked this article because I did not know what Anachronistic meant and was intrigued by the little blurb. After reading the article it really got me thinking about time periods and anachronisms. It got me thinking about all the movies I've seen where I've noticed these discrepancies. I thought of a lot of the examples mentioned in the article. I agee with the article when it said “Or you can use them to disrupt the tone and set the audiences' expectations onto a new course”, because I think that's something that we see in media and it can be really funny. Primarily I’m thinking about Monty Python. Overall, these sort of incongruities as a genre of film analysis are really interesting and I’m glad I know the word for it now! I love paying attention to these small details and now I can tell people there's a word for it.
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