How many times have we seen scenes like this? Disaster movies are sure to have at least one “you need to see this” – some have close to a dozen. Is it just a harmless cliche? Or is it a sign of something worse: screenwriting advice mutated into dogma?

One of the first commandments of screenwriting goes “Show, Don’t Tell!” To be sure, that’s good, sound advice. Film is audiovisual storytelling, so your writing should be all about what can be seen and heard. But all advice must be combined with conscious thought. Otherwise you end up with insanely annoying characters that are incapable of telling each other anything. And all they can say is “I think you need to see this.”

Disaster movies are all about the spectacle. We don’t want to hear about the explosions. We need to see them. That doesn’t mean that every disaser movie has to be strictly formulaic in every scene. Sometimes a young officer can actually just tell the Colonel what’s up. It’s not always: Volcanoes = good, dialogue = bad.

An unthinking attitude to show, don’t tell, may lead to some problems:

1. Fragmentation. All scenes get steeped in spectacle, so the story ends up getting “loud”. May lead to your movie ending up as a string of explosive pearls.
2. Fear of dialogue.
3. Fear of monologue.
4. Characters behaving like cogwheels in a screenwriting machine.
5. Avoiding getting close to characters, and giving them depth.
6. Fear of ambiguity (what really happened?)

Keeping all this in mind, I still consider show, don’t tell, one of the best pieces of screenwriting advice you can get. You just have to remember that it’s not dogma to be followed blindly.

And that sometimes it’s really okay to tell, and don’t show.

This week I attended a masterclass with DSLR-video guru Philip Bloom in Oslo. Bloom has quickly become the go-to-guy when it comes to Canon’s excellent HD-DSLRs with 1080p video. The buzz is mainly over the 5DmkII and the 7D models – with the 5D already being used in big professional productions.

Bloom took a very concrete and practical approach to the subject. He took us through the DSLR workflow, and presented solutions to the various problems you could bump into – like rolling shutter and moire. The masterclass was held in an excellent movie theatre complete with a 4k projector, so Bloom spiced his lecture with several videoclips. We saw a couple of minutes of the much dicussed season finale of House, that was shot on three 5DmkII cameras, as well as a handful of Philips own short films, also available on his website.

How did these cameras perform on the big screen?

Amazingly well!

Undoubtedly the next generation of Canon HDSLRs will see further progress in video capabilities. In many ways we’re witnessing a video revolution here – and not surprisingly some grumpy naysayers are unhappy with the changes. How somebody can manage to be unhappy with small and relatively affordable cameras with excellent video capabilities, I really can’t explain. Of course the DSLRs aren’t perfect and still have issues with audio, codecs, bad HDMI-out, and so on. But it’s just plain stupid to focus on the small problems when the opportunities are so amazing.

Here’s an interview that NRKbeta did with Philip Bloom in Oslo this week:

NRKbeta interview and article on Philip Bloom (in Norwegian).