Communicating Through Film
We all have the power to send better messages.
Communication is perhaps the simplest and most complicated thing we humans do. Whether or not we’re paying attention.
When we are focused on a subject or a person, we miss the true meaning of what it, or they, express. Our perspectives are deep and complex.
As most children do growing up, I felt misunderstood. I saw the world in the way most children do. Everything was new and fluid. Nothing was static. Nothing seemed permanent. Except for some of the things that appeared to be. Our family. Our physical abilities.
Most children have a sense of security with those things, until they experience a loss. When they do, their world can be turned upside down in the most incomprehensible way.
Other children, like myself, seemed to have a life where almost everything was always in motion. There is constant change.
I developed a survival skill: adaptability. I moved with my parents across town and around the world. Proximity from one culture to the next; family, friendships, home, that was always fluid.
However, that skill did not come without stress or despair. The one constant seemed to be my memories and experiences. The stories within.
My motivation to write this today comes from a personal observation of myself. I sometimes enjoy watching foreign films without subtitles. When I was a child and moved to a country where I did not understand the language, I watched shows and movies without subtitles. I struggled to understand them.
As I grew up, I watch them without subtitles as an exercise in learning how to comprehend language, emotions, expressions and situations.
Stories are what we are made of.
If you want to make a film, it’s my opinion that the best way to approach it is through storytelling. Stories have a lot of elements which can be brought together in a film. Much unlike other formats or mediums.
I see a film as an orchestra. Instead of many instruments and sounds, pauses and cadences, it has sound, light and shadow, texture, emotion, time, and many more elements. Stories told through film are almost limitless.
Bringing all the elements together through precise calibrated time is how a story plays out on a screen. Our experience is not just watching but also listening. Becoming fully immersed. Most importantly, is feeling it—not only in the moment, but perhaps for a lifetime.
I consider film a form of communication. It’s both the sender and the receiver.
One of the things I believe deep inside my quest for everyone to make films, is how we could learn to communicate better with each other.
Because we all have a phone in our possession, or at least we have access to one, making films with its camera is accessible to all humans in the world.
Some of us struggle to get a point across. Some of us are very good with words. But art is a form of expression. The process of creating art, expression…these are ways which we use to communicate.
Communication through art is not always external. It can open doors inside ourselves which we didn’t know existed.
We can enter places within ourselves and explore ourselves in new ways. There is an invisible, and sometimes very visible, connection between our conscious and subconscious expression of who we are.
Our conscious and subconscious understanding of our stories are constantly shifting our perspectives. It’s important to understand them as you make your film.
Stories communicate messages through connection.
Not only is the process of connection taking place internally as you create your work of art to tell a story, but the outcome of what you have produced connects all of us. It connects the filmmaker with its audience and the audience with each other.
Empathy is a powerful message. It’s important to communicate emotions in a meaningful manner through your films, whether your story uses emotions to point to fear, rage, sadness, happiness or instability.
As children, we are not only fully engulfed in a story, but we are naturally telling stories as we learn to communicate with others. Expanding our creativity and imagination gives us as children an understanding of how we are perceived by others. I’m not a psychologist, by the way. This is my personal understanding.
Developing our storytelling skills allows us to break stories into pieces that can be reassembled. If a mechanic takes your car apart, they can put it back together—or so we hope. My father had a hobby when I was a teenager. He was collecting different models of a car and using them to build a working car. A “new” car.
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Someone like me, who has no knowledge of auto mechanics, could begin to take a car apart, but good luck with ever putting that car back together again.
When we understand stories are a means to communication, we can take them apart and dissect them. We can reconstruct them into new stories. We can alter the message. Tell old stories in new ways.
Filmmaking is a process which involves art and science coupled with technology. The camera in 1960 is not the same as the camera in 2024. The phone of 1999 is not the phone of 2024. But the stories have the same elements through time.
Understanding stories better helps filmmakers tell stories with any camera. A camera from 1960 or a camera in 2024, or a camera on a smartphone, regardless of make and model.
Communication through time has always evolved through storytelling. Film, in my opinion, is one of the best ways to reach the farthest and the most.
Using your ability to communicate in your filmmaking process, learning that process, and constructing the exact message you intend to send…that’s how you can stand out as a filmmaker in the industry whether you are one of a thousand, or one of a million.
Be inspired.
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