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Elements of drama video12/25/2023 The various characters follow a pattern of interactions and movements through various stages of the plot. The clarity and coherence of the plot are essential to give the drama a logical and undisturbed flow. The sequence of events or actions in a play is called its plot. The action and its plot makes the audiences immerse in the drama and try to extract the theme behind it. It can be as direct as the title of the drama to very obscure and needs careful thought and analysis. To learn more about the best use of video in learning come along to our webinar on March 2nd – How to make the best use of video for learning.It represents the basic idea of the text. I’ve written more about this subject in my book Watch & Learn, and also in some of my What Can TV Teach L&D? videos. Here’s one about the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit that describes dramatic point of view in relation to that series. Then, as the story develops we increasingly need to see the close-up faces of the characters, and the protagonist in particular. We are empathising with character avatars and are drawn in first by understanding and relating to their situation and secondly by relating to the emotions they show in the situation we have fashioned. This will require what might be termed 3rd person viewpoints. If you are thinking about framing and where the camera will point, the director must first communicate the physical and to some extent the spatial relationships. The point is, POV is inseparable from the narrative structure. That’s the basic structure you’re working with. You can go further and show the results of that difficult choice which maybe leads to another even more challenging choice and on and on till you get to a dilemma. Drama doesn’t tell people what to do, it coaxes them to think for themselves. If you’ve done a half decent job, without prompting, the viewer will ask themselves, “If that were me, what would I do?” The viewer is stimulated to think about and around the problem of the scene, which, if you’ve designed it right, is an abstraction of the problem you want them to get their head around. The tougher the choice, the more engaging the video will be. Next we follow the protagonist as they are drawn into a difficult situation which becomes gradually more challenging until they are faced with a choice. Some of this can be achieved outside of the video, perhaps in simple text that is read in the eLearn before you watch the video. To do this you must tell a story. The story must first establish the characters, their situation and relationships. This is the set-up, the exposition. In learning, drama’s principle function is to allow the viewer emotional engagement with your subject. What are we trying to achieve with video drama in learning? If you were to be restricted to a single, literal POV to communicate a dramatic story, you’d be better off pointing the camera at the face of the protagonist. This is the main way that emotions are communicated and a character’s understanding is projected. Characters are like avatars that we project on to. This is why this common misconception is quite a serious issue that deserves to be called out. Somehow, in L&D, the misconception has been elevated to something approaching a common sense view of how dramatic POV is structured and it’s a blot on our industry. Yet having the camera in the literal POV of a character is very rare. One reason for this is that this device draws attention to itself and is thus anti-immersive within a drama. In your average Netflix drama the director flits from the point of view of one character to another and then to an objective position to carry the story forward. My guess is that it derives from the construction of POV in virtual reality or other “immersive” media. POV in this context is fundamentally about physical spatial awareness. In this regard, VR and it's cheaper cousin 360 video, beats regular video hands down. But POV in drama has little to do with physical or spatial relationships, it’s an emotional construct that uses a variety of devices for the construction of POV. This is a literal understanding of POV which ignores the subtle techniques employed by directors of video drama. One manifestation of this is the idea that literal POV, putting the camera in the position of the protagonist, equals “immersive” and anything else is third-person, so “not immersive”. In all that time I’ve witnessed a recurring confusion in learning designers about the construction and use of point of view (POV) in dramatic video. I’ve been making video drama for learning since the late 80’s.
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