Now a book, a film and books on tape…
I am spending the month of August in a house on Exuma, one of the Bahama Out Islands.
Let’s say it makes The Hamptons look like Staten Island.
I have taken to long runs every morning, and am up around 6 miles now.
My friend, Mark Bittman, also a runner (but far better than I), suggested that I listen to books on tape while I run.
As a result, I downloaded The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, mostly because it was a best seller and my brother in law, Ted, kept telling me how great the movie was.
So I started to run, listening to the book.
At the same time, before we left, I bought Lisa an iPad. She downloaded the movie The Girl With The Dragon tattoo.
So we started to watch the movie at night, laying in bed.
Now I found myself in the curious position of listening to the book and watching the movie at the same time.
This gave me a whole new perspective on video, writing and filmmaking.
Anyone who reads a book and then goes to see a movie is naturally disappointed in the movie. They have to be. A movie is 90 minutes ong. The whole book, read to you, is 28 hours. There have to be cuts.
What makes this interesting is that, if I keep running at the same pace, (and we keep falling asleep as fast), we are, at least for the moment, in sync between my book on tape and the movie.
So what are the differences?
The movie, of course, drops out a lot. A lot. But it drops more than just pieces of the story. The movie is almost a praecis of the book but cones largely with pictures. It’s the visuals that really drive the movie. If you took the movie and just listened to the track, you would soon be completely lost. Some scenes, I have observed, are 95% visuals.
Which leads me back to the construct of video.
Often, for convenience sake if nothing else, we build a video by laying down the audio track first, then covering it with pictures that match.
Narration and soundbite down first, pictures follow.
If this is the case (and it often is), then what we lose here is the power of the pictures to drive the story.
Which is exactly how the movie works!
If the producers of the film had laid down all the dialogue first and then taken selects that matched the dialogue, the film would hab been nothing.
If the books on tape people had simply taken the soundtrack of the film and passed it off as the story, it too, I think, would have been incomprehensible.
When we approach video it is like the film. I has to tell the story visually. We have to be driven by the pictures.
OK, now back to Stocking Island and a day of diving.
