Thursday, October 14, 2010

Toni, Tony, Tone


Welcome, Meat-Heads!

Tone. Ugh. What a bastard. Tone, in the simplest terms, is not the content of your work, but the attitude with which you approach your content. Take a torture scene for example. The way torture is approached in something like 24 is drastically different from the way torture would be approached in something like Reservoir Dogs. One is very tense, visceral and dark, the other quirky, twisted, and actually practically bloodless. What differs between these two scenes is the tone. The choice in tone that you make is very important, as it is going to inform the things your audience takes away from your work in a big way.

For me, finding the tone, or attitude, of Dead Meat was something I struggled with quite a bit. Originally, when I was still attempting to "write my friends," my tone was light, jokey, not very serious, and at the end of the day pretty lame. It felt very self-aware, and I decided that wasn't the approach I wanted to take, as I didn't really feel like I had a lot of stories to tell like that. Honestly, I felt like if I went with that approach, I would have been creating characters I would eventually start to hate--and not in the good "love to hate" kind of way. They'd just be annoying to write, and probably annoying to read as well. It was about the time that I started to re-design the characters that I really sat down and tool a look at what sort of tone I wanted to present for Dead Meat. I decided that there was a certain feel that I wanted my characters and my world to have. I wanted bleak, I wanted feudal, I wanted pessimistic, and I wanted my characters to reflect that so when characters with a more hopeful outlook were injected to the world, there would be more of a contrast among the characters.

This brings me to the most important aspect of tone as far as I am concerned, and that is consistency. Tonal consistency is incredibly important, because if your tone is all over the place, it can be very distracting and confusing to an audience. If we head back to the torture scene example, if you take the 24 torture scene and insert it into Reservoir Dogs it would seem very very out of place, and the same thing vice versa. However, a tonal shift can work to your advantage sometimes if you're using it to get across different points of view or something like that, but for the most part tonally consistency is something you should really try to get.

For instance, I was once working on a project that was completely lacking in tonal consistency. It would have a scene of visceral, straight horror, then the next scene it would have characters cracking jokes that were not in line with their established character traits, followed by flashbacks that were meant to be absurd, and then another scene of straight horror--it just serves to create confusion.

There's a lot more once can say about this subject, and many discussions to be had (and I encourage them), but to me, tone is a line on which to hang your ideas, and make sure that, as crazy as they might be, they don't feel out of place. This line can be very important as far as your relation to the audience goes, and in the end, the relationship to your audience is the most important thing.

Until next time,

Eat Dead Meat!

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