SNAPlab

Second day in Adelaide. I skipped the morning panel and prepared for my presentation.

Despite careful preparation, it didn’t work out for me this time. I talked about my postdoctoral research. I briefly described the experiment we did and tried to show how some elements of working with the audience’s attention, which can already be found in the scripts, even though they work in landscape format, change their effectiveness in directing attention when cropped to portrait format. Sometimes they are lost and sometimes they gain strength. In my opinion, depth of field was a stylistic device that, based on a qualitative comparison of data visualizations from the eye tracker, seemed to me to be more effective in maintaining attention when it was in portrait format. I will try to rework the lecture into an article and express it in a different way.

Karreen Ely-Harper immediately responded to my presentation with a comment. She first questioned eye tracking and emphasized the diversity of the viewing experience. I encountered a similar opinion later in the foyer. Strange. I didn’t really understand what bothered them. When I had the opportunity to talk to Karreen again later, I found that we agreed on many things. We both think that the vertical format requires a different approach from filmmakers, and we both agree that it requires a different approach to writing—more focused on space and position in the frame. And we both suspect that TikTok could influence how people think about narrative segmentation. We may disagree on the details, but I was glad that we found common ground for discussion and perhaps even future collaboration.

The discussion with Karreen was very enriching for me. She came up with the claim that it makes no sense for young filmmakers to strive to make a short film. It is much easier and more effective for their careers to make a micro-drama or a short video for TikTok. It’s cheap, fast, and it doesn’t hurt so much when mistakes are made. 

What else did I see at the conference?

I was on the panel with Brett Davies, who talked about Steven Spielberg’s television work. Yes, that’s how compatible our papers were. Apparently, the other speakers dropped out of Brett’s and my panel, so we were left on our own. But I didn’t mind. Brett talked about Spielberg’s series Amazing Stories, which I hadn’t had a chance to see and which made me quite curious. 

I also attended a panel on feminism and comedy-drama, featuring Deborah Klika, Susan Cake, Marilyn Leder, and Joanne Tindale. All of them are screenwriters who aspire to reflect their approach to their work. It was interesting to see the role theory has in their work. This was most evident in Joanne’s case. She took theoretical knowledge about the representation of aging women in films and used it to formulate principles that she herself wants to adhere to when writing characters. I don’t know if it will work, but in any case, that’s what I enjoy about the SRN conference—seeing how filmmakers think.

At the end of the day, I attended a screening of Elenydd (2025, Richard O’Sullivan). Before the screening, the author gave a lecture explaining his concept. I am probably too simple-minded to fully understand the continental philosophy of embodied ways of seeing the landscape. But something else caught my attention in the film itself. Most of it consisted of quite nice extreme long shots/establishing shots of the Welsh landscape. However, I noticed that in some shots I had the impression that I didn’t know where to look. It’s hard to say if that was Richard’s intention, but sometimes the shot seemed to lack a salient element. Most of the shots had it approximately in the center of the composition. But a few shots lacked such an element. It would be interesting to test whether others struggle to identify the salient element in the same shots as I do.

That’s all from the second day of the conference.