World Building and Compatibility

Making a movie can be a very tough thing to do.  I don’t know too much about making a movie.  The most I’ve done in that area was to help make two twenty minute videos in high school.  They were narrative videos with storylines, not thrown together sports clips with Drowning Pool playing in the background.  Those short films, if you could even call them that, are the closest that I’ve come to making a movie.  That’s not the point though.  The point is how difficult it is to make a movie.  There are many things that go into the process.  The one I want to talk about is writing.

In the majority of cases, a movie wouldn’t exist without the writing.  This is, of course, excluding documentaries.  A narrative movie tends to have some sort of structure; a plot is usually the minimum, with dialogue either written or suggested.  At least, that is how it is from my perception of the writing of a movie.  I don’t know the full details of writing a movie.  It could be completely different than that.  But the writing is the backbone of a movie, regardless of how it is done.

One of the major parts of writing something is to set a mood.  This can include movies, but also books, stories, essays, even a blog entry like this.  The mood of this is hard to pinpoint.  I’d say it’s something like “I’m writing!  Look at that!”  Anyway, for a narrative the mood is a rather important aspect.  The mood of something like Lord of the Rings is a tense, anxious, dire mood which makes you feel like the fate of the world rests upon the events that transpire.  The mood of the film I watched today, We Bought a Zoo, was sentimental.  There isn’t much more to We Bought a Zoo than the sentimentality.

The overall mood can change as the narrative moves on.  That’s normal.  That is much like a person’s emotions.  What doesn’t work, however, is when something is added amid a certain mood that clashes with what has been established.  To go back to the example of We Bought a Zoo, there is a character brought in as the zoo inspector.  He will decide whether the zoo can be opened to the public or not.  Up until that point, the movie was a sentimental relationship drama with any humour being added through the relationships of the people.  It was a natural humour based on the people knowing or not knowing one another.  This character didn’t fit into it in any way whatsoever.  This character was over the top, compared to the rest of the movie.  The jokes made from this characters arrival alone seemed to be from another movie.  It was a jarring difference between the rest of the film and the time this character was around.  It did not gel.

Basically, what I’m saying is that when you set a mood and a world, all parts that are written should fit within the scope of that world.  There should not be something introduced that is so out of the realm that you were presented with that you get taken right out of the narrative.  Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another example.  I don’t think I need another example to express my opinion on the matter.  If you’re going to get the viewer invested in the world which you are presenting, you shouldn’t toss in something new that doesn’t fit within that world.  It would be like throwing a bag of m&m’s into a chicken noodle soup bowl.  They both taste fine on their own, but the m&m’s don’t really fit well with the chicken noodle soup.  It’s better off to keep the m&m’s out of the soup altogether and maybe put some crackers in there instead.  There is a better way to write the scenes that don’t fit so that they better suit the narrative that has been presented.

That’s the basis of writing, which is the basis of making a movie.  Building a world and a mood.  Without those, you are lost.  And without building them properly with all components fitting into place, the viewer loses interest in what you’ve given them.  There’s nothing worse than an uninterested viewer.