SXSW 2011 Interview with Jason Brush: How Filmmakers Can Evolve Film Language

Jason Brush from Possible Worldwide and UCLA gave a consciousness evolving film panel at SXSW 2011. The presentation, helmed by a lone star Brush at the boundaries of cinematic ideas, was "Evolving Cinematic Storytelling to Span Multiple Screens."

The concept seemed graspable at a conference like SXSW, where it's a melting pot of technology, film and music. Yet it became apparent the Brush was asking of filmmakers much more than just infusing their marketing with transmedia. Coining the term Elastic Cinema, Brush is pushing to see en evolution in film language as natural, but as profound as synched sound.

The burning question many filmmakers are left with in taking Brush's evolutionary odyssey: how is it done? He took some time aside to answer a formative question tomorrow's filmmakers need to embrace.

What are 3 essential things filmmakers can do to break their "film language" mold and evolve towards elastic cinema?

1) The Conceptual Leap: The first thing that filmmakers can do is to begin thinking of cinematic content outside of the constraints of traditional filmic formats.

Consider oral storytelling, or theater: it's expected that stories, as they are told, will shift in focus, tone and emphasis from telling to telling, based on the audience and the context. If you have five minutes to recount a tale, a talented narrator will be able to make that compressed version just as compelling as a rambling, longer version. Or, music: we don't expect a live performance of a song to be identical to the album. Part of the joy of seeing live music is in seeing how it's transformed, how it evolves.

For very many technical and practical reasons, filmic media has always been focused on rigid reproduction. It's been very far from the performative nature of oral storytelling, of theater, of music. Yet, the constraints that determine filmic media distribution are breaking down. The first thing a filmmaker can do to move toward a practice of elastic cinema is to look at his or her work from a vantage point that doesn't confine the story they're telling to one platform or media and break free from the predetermined constraints that each medium imposes today. This conceptual leap is the first, most important step to take.

2) Embrace the Medium: The next thing that filmmakers can do is to better understand the specific experiences that each medium excels at in contrast to the other. The surrender of all your senses to an overwhelming, visceral experience that you experience in the theater, versus the slow disclosure over weeks of the development of character on TV, which people make part of their daily lives, versus the quick, casual check-ins of mobile. Filmmakers should ask themselves, how could my story, characters and themes shift between these different mediums? What new vantage could I give an audience on one medium that they wouldn't get on another? Is there something about that shift that in and of itself says something about the message I want to communicate?

3) Experiment: Once you've made the leap to think about cinematic experience as something that isn't fixed, but instead flexible and performative and once you've internalized the core, intrinsic differences between presentation mediums, the next step is to experiment. The concept of elastic cinema is only going to come to fruition through experimentation. It doesn't have a language yet, but it's my hope to make the way in which a cinematic story travels from screen to screen part of the creative process for filmmakers. This contrasts the way in which today it's either ignored or reviled and this will open up new avenues to evolve the cinematic experience. What this means specifically for all the aspects of film language - writing, direction of the camera, cinematography, editing, performance and sound; still remains to be seen.