How to surprise the intelligent!

Do you remember that big, fat snake from Chandramuki? Let’s talk about it. Except, there’s not much to talk about because the only things it did was pose around an admirable chandelier and slither out noisily towards the end. Sad snake.

The movie had quite predictably drawn flak for needlessly dragging the snake into the ruckus but there had also been a refreshingly new perspective.

This perspective goes by the belief that snake was added to make the audience attribute the strange occurrences in the house to the presence of a ghost, while the real miscreant was in fact a traumatised woman gone cuckoo.

This is side-shadowing, the literal opposite of foreshadowing. Here, instead of leaving a trail of clues for the audience, we do everything to mislead them into anticipating something that doesn’t happen at all till the final moment of revelation. Oh, the power of all things pent up!

So the intelligent and the slightly chagrined may question the morality of lying to the audience but this is essentially a way to keep the audience from snoozing and if done tastefully, can make them last.

Some of you may still be wondering why they used the snake. Maybe they wanted to draw attention to that fine piece of ceiling décor. Or maybe they were putting to test their vfx team’s prowess or maybe they really had sideshadowing in mind. We don’t know and we’ll probably not know until P.Vasu speaks up ☹

But this snake does stand for something else- the open-ended nature of life. Just like the snake we do not find closure to many things in reality.

So that’s another things side shadowing accomplishes, it mixes the real life elixir into the film. The reason why small talk and seemingly useless pleasantries in movies is because well, who talk philosophy and rocket science all the time anyway? And the truth is, reality doesn’t have a happy or a sad ending, it doesn’t have an ending at all because as they say, the end is the beginning :’D

Witcher 3, an action role-playing video game effectively makes use of side shadowing. By making one of its female characters unattainable (defying the traditions Witcher 1 and Witcher 2), it kept its players baffled and of course, hooked.

So if there’s ever a time you want to outsmart the smarts, or simply make dumb add a dash of side shadowing, wave your wand and your wish shall be granted :D

Don’t be confused that I was cheerleading foreshadowing in the previous article and now I’m swinging my pom-poms to the other side. The imperative difference between both is that, foreshadowing (and symbolism) help our story, but sideshadowing helps our storytelling!

So there’s not a need to pick the greater of the two, but just what you need the most.

Here’s a little challenge for those of you who have watched the widely acclaimed Marathi film ‘Court’.

If you watched the movie well into the end, you would’ve seen that the thus far static camera showing the court blacks out for about 2 minutes.

Could this be a symbolic for injustices staying in the dark?

Or could be side shadowing because it helps the telling of the story of injustices in the Judicial system?

We can find the answer to this from an interview with the Coen Brothers on the cat from ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’. While most of the audience thought Llewyn to be a symbolism to the life of the cat, the Coen Brothers revealed that they added the thought arbitrarily without the slightest idea of the symbolism that it would carry!

My point here is that, whether your scene plays out as symbolism or foreshadowing or sideshadowing depends on the audience’s perspective. Same goes for the Chandramukhi snake, some argue that it may have been a symbolism for the psychological problem existing, playing up and finally ending just like the snake’s presence.

All this points to the fact that symbolism and sideshadowing are overlapping and in the end, they all help to add multiple layers to your movie.

Happy filming! ☺