Obviously...

You gotta' love this, right?

You're looking--close up--at a log that lies on the beach at Stanley Park in Vancouver, Canada. I was staring out to sea earlier today trying to see the freighters (their foghorns booming like fell beasts...) out in the pea soup and, as I was watching the tide come in, I noticed this...

A log.

With 'LOG' written on it.

And I thought, "Cool, I should post that."

Here's why...

Sometimes you should put something obvious in your work.  Sometimes a sermon should just be direct and to the point.  You should hit the nail on the head.  You should just tell the truth, plain and simple.  You should call out the assumptions, prejudices and fears of your audience.

State the obvious.

With a film, it's a bit tougher 'cause it's so easy to crank up the cheese factor if you're not careful, but the thing is it's almost equally easy to come across as trying too hard--like a student filmmaker who thinks he's cool.

If you're over-subtle with it.

So, how do you know when to go 'on the nose', either with your dialogue or the way you've composed the scene visually or with your sound design or with the way you ask your actors to 'play' the scene.

(I mean not 'on the nose' but you know what I mean...)

Here's how I'm thinking about it...

When the scene is doing something big, or significant (like lost tankers finding their way home through a killing fog by foghorn and feel and fluky radar...) maybe pick a small thing in the scene, a look, a piece of the set you highlight in a certain way, a trick you pull with the sonics, and counter-program the significant.

Got it?

Play against the big moment with a simple, elegant, seemingly-obvious detail that only some of your audience will get on the first viewing, but one that--for those who do--enriches the experience immeasurably.

(I used to do the same thing in my sermons all the time--throwing in an untranslated word or a storyline detail connected to the intro that I didn't explain...)

Just and idea.

I'ma try it soon.

T