Advantages of Notes On A Scene in cinema education

When a movie is made, you can see credits of a thousand people, all of whom have affected the movie in their specific way. Some – spectacularly, others – barely. Yet each person had its role. Some of them have the power to do or break the movie with just one bad decision. Success or failure of a movie can sometimes be explained due to a single bad decision. There are a lot of professions in cinema: “direction”, “scriptwriting”, “actors”, “producers”, “costume department”, “lighting”, “music”, “atrezzo”, “location”, “editing”, and many more. To show how one unique scene is composed, built, from the work of each and every profession in cinema, and at the same time be able to analyze whether those people in “direction”, “scriptwriting”, “actors”, “producers”, “costume department”, “lighting”, “music”, “atrezzo”, “location”, “editing”, … did each a good job, or an outstanding job, or a mediocre job, or scene- or movie-destroying job, you need to analyze one profession at a time, at each scene where its work shows, before coming to conclusions. How much could students learn from this analysis of each department’s work, one at a time, and how each of them did its job?! Then, after looking at a scene from the perspective of each profession, you can also analyze how the different professions intertwined with one another, or if there were “disagreements” in criteria. And obviously, teach students how to avoid thos missdirections to happen. That’s what they are there for. Do you have a tool to show them, beyond telling them? This kind of analysis can also help to review a movie in more detail. Notes On A Scene, by doing the analysis described above, can help you show which professions’ work was good and which was not so good, and contrast that with the budget or time availables, for instance. That in turn could lead to interesting conclusions – for one, that some countries’ cinema industries are unevenly developed (as if cinema were only directors and actors). Hence, movie industry quality could be explained in terms of countries’ budget constraints: investment in education of arts, quantity and quality of professionals, limitations in budget allocation, and so forth.