As a prelude, I want to point out how cool it is that we’re closer to this idea being possible for me to do than we were five years ago. Maybe in another five or ten this would be easily doable. Democratization of media creation is awesome.
This is inspired in part by some of the narrative techniques I first noticed in Hero and Lost, but expanded a bit. This is one of those techniques that is medium dependent. I think it would only work in television, or possibly film. Though I’m not sure it would be workable in film due to the way I envision the time constraints working out.
Basically I want to use the filmed medium to make meaningful looks meaningful. There’s this thing that I don’t feel much fiction can demonstrate very well, but can only allude to. This is true of written stuff as well as ‘richer’ stuff.
The way you do it is to set up the look and cut. I see two ways of doing the cut, one I like better in theory but might not work. The way I prefer is to cut to the context between the characters that makes the look meaningful. Meaningful looks are meaningful because they refer to something shared. An old conversation, a memorable day, whatever. The simpler version, the one I like less but appreciate in a sort of ironic way, is to simply have the conversation in the cut. Whatever meaning was being conveyed in the look, convey it directly, and then cut back to the look as if nothing had happened. (This is why it’s only possible in a visual medium with editing, otherwise it’s just some form of exposition.)
The reason I’m not sure the first version will work is that I’m not sure it’s possible to convey enough context. Meaningful glances, like all forms of semi-private languages, are extremely information rich. I don’t know that you can workably convey what’s in them.
So, yeah.
Thomas
That reminds me of a scene in (I think) the first episode of Firefly. When Inara is with a client, there is a huge (intentional) un-synch between what you see and what you hear, to illustrate her boredom and detachment from the goings-ons.
It’s not exactly what you’re talking about, but it showed what/how the character was thinking instead of playing the scene as an inanimate (having no individual thoughts) bystander would see it.