Dispatch from The Quest: Emma Millions
Last week as we did here on GITS, the Quest writers focused on the subject of Time. Today’s dispatch: Emma gets all montage-y on us:
I’ve always wished I could travel in time. It’s a bit of an obsession. Since I can remember my little brain has pondered such time travel conundrums as “If time travel is invented in the future why hasn’t anyone traveled back to tell us?” and “If you go back in time and kill your grandfather do you cease to exist and therefore not be able to go back and kill him and therefore still exist after all?” and other such juicy time travel paradoxes.
But this week on The Quest I discovered that, as a writer, you can indeed travel in time. Anyway you want. Past, future and present are all up for grabs. You can flash forward or backwards, you can slow time down or speed it up, you can make time as non-linear as you want, chop it about and mix it up — as long as it helps you tell your story. I’ve always admired film makers who can tell their story in a non-linear fashion. Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, et al, have remarkable abilities to mess with time, and your head, and still have everything making sense in the end. In writing terms I’ve always been a kind of straight line girl. Which is surprising really since I am so obsessed with time travel. But my stories usually start in the present and move forward at a steady pace until they end at the appropriate time and place. Even when I have written about time travel, I have meticulously made sure both timelines (present and past or present and future) tick along in a nice orderly fashion. But maybe it’s time to start mixing it up now I have realised as a writer I have the power to control the clock and the calendar. Although one method of time control in a script I have a particular problem with… The Montage!
Team America (and South Park) put a nail in the coffin of the ol’ 80’s style of montage with the awesome montage song. After that how can anyone do a straight, old school, progression type montage without hearing “Even Rocky had a montage” being sung in their heads. And having grown up in the 1980’s when every film seemed to have one of these — and they all seemed to feature girls in changing rooms trying on outfits to a pop song of the day (epitomised by this scene from Pretty Woman) or someone training for some sporty type challenge to a rock song of the day (it doesn’t get more 80’s than this! Breakin’) — it’s not a tool I am particularly comfortable using. The very first film I ever made, when I was 14 years old and was allowed to hire a massive VHS camera as a birthday present, starring my dog as a mutant baby and my best friend as a mad scientist with a mono-brow featured a lad-based montage of the scientist making various potions in order to create the aforementioned mutant baby. If even 14 year old wannabe filmmakers in the 1980’s are using montages in their amateur creations you could probably be justified in thinking it was a somewhat overused and clichéd convention.
But seeing as I’m never going to grasp quantum physics to a point where I will be able to bend the space time continuum and actually travel in time, then maybe I should make it my mission to bend the montage tradition and reinvent it. If slow-mo can be reinvented as Matrix ‘bullet time’ and Christoher Nolan can invent Dream Time that plays with perception of both time and space in Inception, then I can reinvent the Montage. I’m sure it’s been done before and I’m equally sure it will be done again but, right now, here in the present, I’m gonna make that my mission. Well, my other mission, along with getting hold of some plutonium to put in my flux capacitor and get my Delorean up to 88 mph so I can go back in time and accidentally get my mum to fall in love with me. Or something like that.
Oh. My. God. That montage from Breakin’ is perhaps the ultimate 80s cliche. “You can teach me!” Wow. 1984 was such a long, long time ago.
The thing about a montage or series of shots: They never play as well on the page as they do on the screen. Never. You can not rely on a reader picking up your mental images. So your best bet: Don’t use them. But if you have to include a montage or series of shots, make sure you choose each image or scene super well. They absolutely must be entertaining, each and every beat. And they have to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end.
Excuse me while I go back and check out that Breakin’ montage one more time.
Tomorrow: Another Dispatch from The Quest.
About Emma: British based writer of ‘the funny’. Lover of cats and bad TV. Often found in pyjamas a bit drunk or a bit hungover. Occasionally does burlesque. Twitter: @emmamillions.