Emma and the Fairy Queen 48

Meet Mathilda, one of my favorite characters in this story.  (I say that a lot don’t I?  It seems every new character is my new favorite character.  Perhaps I am just generally pleased with a good portion of my cast, because I know this is not the first or the last time you’ll here me introduce a character as one of my favorites.)

I like the text free pages.  Not that I mind dialogue, but I feel that there is a lot that can be expressed simply with images and that a lot of  inexperienced artists, myself included, tend to rely fairly heavily on text to tell the stories.  I’m always pleased when I can do a scene without words.

It’s something I’ve noticed in my experiments with film as well; my first screenplay, In the Hand of Prophecy, relied on three scenes of pure exposition to tell everyone what was happening and then spent the rest of the film on battle scenes.  The exposition scenes are pathetic; some of the battle scenes are pretty decent.  When I stopped trying to cram the narrative down people’s throats things turned out better.

One of my favorite memories of showing that film was when my sister and I were sharing one of the few scenes that I had edited and which I was rather proud of to one of her friends.  There is no dialogue or narration in the scene, just my viola playing in the background.  The girl watching it hadn’t seen all of the rest of the movie, just a few scenes here and there.  By the second clip she was gripping the arm of the couch saying “Is that character about to die?  He’s going to kill her isn’t he?”

And yes.  It was one of the death scenes, and arrow flies true and the character falls.

Years later, I am still very fond of that scene.