I attended the Adler Fellows gala concert tonight.
The Adler Fellowship is a program affiliated with the San Francisco Opera cultivating young artists, and by young I mean early thirties. We're not talking about Justin Bieber here.
While listening to aria after another, I couldn't help but think back to what Irina (my cello teacher) said a few months ago while explaining the proper phrasing for the piece I was working on: the goal is to tell a story; in a story, not every note has the same significance. It's just like talking - there are certain words we emphasize and others we gloss over. Giving every note the same energy causes can actually become overbearing.
I think I'm understanding that more and more. It seemed that most, if not all, of the artists tonight were doing their best to make every note and every syllable as beautiful and full as they possibly could. And when they got to a particularly important one, they went from 100% to 150%.
That was too much. Really.
I would have preferred 25 to 100%.
Of course, being the perfect student that I am, I naturally translated this concept to film making. I watched a movie called Ciao last night. It told the story of an Italian man coming to Dallas, Texas to meet his online chatting partner's best friend after the unexpected death of this partner. While successful in eliciting empathy for its two characters, the film had a serious flaw in its numerous lengthy dialogues covering subjects from the landscape of Dallas to a former encounter in Des Moines. Really not necessary. Really diminished the subtle energy of the story. It was as if the writers had all these ideas and lines from their own lives that they wanted to insert into the film, and the result was a diffused and awkward series of uninteresting words.
That's me. I am also that writer. As I reflect on my own screenplays that are based on my experiences and encounters, I realize that I too have failed to properly edit for the sake of a cohesive story. So it is with sharper and unrelenting eyes that I must return to my work.
Edit. Edit. Edit.
