DZ-128: What even is a Character Arc?

So, there's a bit of a backstory here. I'm sorry. When I came out, so I, it's actually an important backstory and we can cut it. But my undergraduate, I did a combined degree with media and law. Really, my main kind of interest coming out of high school into university were kind of like, what I think you could probably call English literature. Like literature and music, right? And I think film ended up appealing for me because it combined like literature with the kind of time, like music, right? Music is about rhythm and construction and timing and all those things. And film has it. I mean, you know, Kubrick always spoke to me because he talks about music being, film being more like music than painting, for example, because it's a succession of moods. But when I graduated, I kind of. Kind of like early twenties, I was like, I need to work on my eye. Like I have some instincts about what works, but I want to get better at it because I think most of the time we think of film as a literary medium, not as an audio visual one. Right. I mean, we're doing a podcast on screen mining, not a podcast on shots. And there's a reason for that. And that's why Shot Zero exists because shots, don't really, talking about shots as a visual thing or editing doesn't really work in podcast form. Right. So there was this book I discovered called The Visual Story, which is by a guy called Bruce Block. I've read it. I ended up when I taught like motion design, used it as like almost my textbook. I threw out their textbooks and went like, I'm going to use this as my guide. Visual story applied a whole bunch of art theory, which I hadn't learned because I came into film from the literary world, not from the art world. And I think that is, in my experience of film, is that is actually kind of the two convergence points. A lot of DPs come out of art schools. A lot of, you know, wannabe directors and writers and maybe editors come out of, like, effectively the literary school of film. The core idea in it is the two principles, which he calls contrast and affinity. So he basically breaks down how they're the fundamental design principles of everything. Rhythm is constructed from on-off. That's contrast. You don't have rhythm unless you have contrast. But the repetition of turning that into on-off, on-off, on-off is actually the affinity that the rhythm gets its construction from the way it balances contrast and affinity together creates the rhythm. But it goes into a whole bunch of stuff. Coming into character, and one of the things then he goes into is tone. And the way in which we understand tonality and the way we map tone is how it is related to everything else. Our eyes literally adjust the way they tone map our environment based on the environmental cues, right? Which kind of, I mean, this is a whole other conversation, but the whole movies are getting too dark is like, yeah, because they don't give you a fucking bright highlight. Right? For you to understand that, like, I only understand that is really dark because you give me something super bright in the frame is like classic cinematography. And now we're like, oh, let's just dim it all down consistent. You need the contrast for us to understand. You need contrast to understand silhouettes. So I think one of the things I'm coming into with arcs is how are you creating contrast? Not just the contrast over time or forward from the character that they go from, they're hateful, now they're loving, which is, we'll go into the specifics of that, but how we even understand that as a thing. How do we understand that these characters' values exist is about contrast, that we, in that point of time, understanding that this person has underdog values, to use the Michael Hauge term, because he's talking about character arcs when he's talking about the philosophical stakes or the values. Oh, this is underdog values. Understand that's an underdog value you have to have contrast around it.