. Filmmaking Imagination: Don't Tell Your Audience Everything Leave the story to the imagination Interpretations and assumptions Unfortunately, some filmmakers don’t give their audience enough credit when it comes to interpretation and assumptions. Many Hollywood productions oversimplify their films and give the audience too much information. They often do this out of fear that the audience won’t be able to use their intelligence or imagination to come up with their own assumptions and interpretation. A great example of this problem can be seen in the recent Hollywood production entitled “Dan in Real Life” starring Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche. For those of you who haven’t seen the film, it is a classic example of spoon feeding your audience information. The director tried to create a female character that the audience would fall in love with. Like most love stories, there is an element of forbidden love and the lead male seeks the love of a woman he can’t have because she is the girlfriend of his brother. The director uses the reaction of the family towards the girl as proof that she is really amazing. For a good 30 – 40 minutes, the director uses visuals and dialogue-based examples to showcase this women’s greatness. Some scenes are more subtle than others. It starts off with the family thinking she’s a “babe”, the father and mother threaten their son “not to mess this one up”. Next the woman plays board games with the family and leads them to a crossword puzzle victory. The purpose of this scene is to showcase that the woman isn’t just beautiful, but smart too. It also shows her working in a team setting and getting along with everyone. After this there are more visual examples of her acting like a good motherly figure by providing advice and companionship for the young girls in the family. There are then dialogue sequences where people are going into great depth to showcase how accomplished and well traveled this women is. At a dinner conversation, the whole family circles around her and bombards her with questions which all help reinforce just how amazing she is. Myself and many other directors would agree that this is over feeding your audience with information. Most intelligent audiences could have picked up on the women’s likability by her mannerisms, her passionate and sincere glances towards her lover, her gentle smile and maybe one scene of her getting along with the family. There gets to be a point when the audience says “Okay, I get it already… I’m supposed to like this girl and the family likes her as well… Let’s move on to the next part now”. In the end, it’s your call how much Q and A you do on one particular point. Showing cause and effect in greater detail is essential for some films because ideas and concepts are complex. (Generally speaking, getting the audience to like an attractive, intelligent, caring and funny woman isn’t all that hard and shouldn’t require 40 minutes). What most world renowned and respected directors do is work towards building some type of audience participation. Alfred Hitchcock is notorious and highly respected for this type of filmmaking. In our example of the man with the bloody knife, we allow the audience to make certain assumptions. In this case the assumption was that her kids were dead. The director doesn’t need to show the dead children, the blood of the knife and the women’s comments reveal our deepest worries. Audience participation in a film helps viewers become actively engaged in the film and can help retain their interest. Facial expressions are a great way to allow the audience to actively participate in the meaning of a scene. The scene could even mean different things for different people. This can create some interesting debate for the audience when the film is over. Audience participation can also lead to people watching your movie more than once. How many times have you heard “I would watch that film again just because I think I would see more things or learn more about the characters the second time around”. If you can get that response out of your audience then you’re doing a good job as a filmmaker.   Continue Below... Re-Establishing Shot Bridging Shots Without a Pivot Shot Manipulating Cinematic Geography Exploring Temporal Connections Lev Kuleshov Experiment Constructing Scenes Using Q and A without Dialogue How Much to Feed Your Audience More About Q and A and Cause and Effect Cutting in the Camera Vs. Open Approach       .

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