Edith Cooper

 

 

Perhaps inspired by my love of Shakespeare, I find the 5 act structure (particularly as described by John Yorke) to be far more helpful than the three act structure. In this format, the third act contains the turning point, after which nothing will ever be the same. Mercutio is killed in Romeo and Juliet, Claudius isn't killed in Hamlet. However, in a short film it is perhaps easier to combine acts 1&2 and acts 4&5 purely due to time constraints. Yorke also argues that act 1 and 5 often work as mirrors to each other. In act 3 of Skylark, Anya hears news on the radio that changes the dynamic among the group. As Todorov would put it, it 'disrupts the equilibrium'. However, unlike Todorov's theory, there is no following attempt to repair the damage, and instead the characters move forward with a new, disrupted equilibrium. Much like Yorke, acts 4&5 can be seen to mirror acts 1&2. Acts 1&2:          1. Anya is alone, waiting. Silence.  ...

I knew from the beginning that music would be very important in this film - my main character Anya is a violinist - but the music choice came to define the script, even helping to name it. I wanted to keep the SFX to a minimum in this film, but I knew that throughout, Anya had to be playing a song on her violin, and that this would be the same music that played on the radio at the end of the film. I spent a long time listening to classical violin music, and there was one song that jumped out at me.  'The Lark Ascending' by Ralph Vaughan Williams . 'The Lark Ascending' was written in 1914, in response to George Meredith's 1881 poem of the same name. Much of Williams' work is in response to his experience in the war. He worked as an ambulance driver in France, but what really comes alive in both this piece and many of his others is a love of the English pastoral. Williams was a collector of folk music, and it is partly through this that he becomes intrinsically c...