The Protagonist, The Filter, & The Electronic Device
A filter —
Is anything you place between a character on the screen and action or speech that character is experiencing. A film audience is already distanced from events in a film story because a film audience is experiencing events second hand: The audience is sitting in a chair watching events on a screen. That distance, the separation of self from a character on a screen, is the first filter between an audience and events in a film. The audience is not actually experiencing events. The character on the screen is.
The trick for the person writing a film is making story events happening to a protagonist and characters in a film story so up front personal in your face, the distance between the characters’ experiences on a screen and the audience members watching the screen fades for audience members and an audience member feels the events on screen personally — regardless of the fact an audience member is in a chair watching events happen to characters on a screen.
The fastest way to insure that does not happen is to add secondary filters in the story, putting more distance between an audience member watching the story on the screen and the story on the screen. Those secondary filters are electronic devices —
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