FilmmakerIQ.com

The legality of using someone else’s fictional character?

Mark Galsor and Jesse Saivar tackle the question of what’s legal when dealing with fictional characters from other movies.

…Q: My company is producing a film which has a character that is taken from another very well known film. This new story has absolutely nothing to do with the […]

Approaching Character: The Circle of Being

by Syd Field
Henry James, the great American novelist, in an essay entitled The Art of Fiction, asks a rhetorical question about the nature of character: “What is character,” he writes, “but the determination of incident. And what is incident but the illumination of character.” The key word of course, is […]

The Principles of Drama

by Linda Cowgill
Synopsis:
It’s a lesson worth learning early: there’s more to successful drama than just a string of vaguely related sequences.
Stories are how we understand the world. An encounter with a surly bus driver that we relay to a friend at lunch, a fairy tale we read to a child […]

Paul Haggis Screenwriting Lesson

Acclaimed writer-director Paul Haggis has been a fixture of television and film for over 25 years. In this wide-ranging interview, the Oscar-winning co-screenwriter, director, and producer of Crash (Best Picture 2005) discusses a three-decade career that led from writing for sitcoms like Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life to […]

Writing Lesson in “Hang ‘Em High”

“How to make your readers love your character.”
In the first few seconds of the Clint Eastwood flick “Hang ‘Em High,” we see a beautiful example of a dramatic tool Blake Snyder calls a “Save the Cat” scene. This connects the viewer emotionally to the main character, and makes us care […]

Situation Based Writing

The most important bit of writing advice for the beginning writer, every scene you write needs to be a situation, no exceptions. You must create interest before you can accomplish anything else, and situations create interest. The two basic ways situations emerge: circumstance and strong character need.
…Talking about drama is […]

The Lure of the Dark Side

by Pamela Jaye Smith
What is it that lures people over to the Dark Side?
Your audience wants to find out how people and things go bad, so in your story, be sure to reveal some of how the characters become the way they are — not to excuse their behavior but […]

Motivate Audiences With Motivation

It’s an age-old question: What makes a movie a domestic box-office draw?
…There is one common denominator in movies that draw crowds and earn big bucks domestically: Motivated characters. Many of the characters have strong motivation, even some who appear in only one scene. The characters in Saw have a strong […]

Writing the Action Script

by John Truby
With a good Action script you can write your own ticket. But Action is the most deceptively challenging genre in Hollywood. What may seem simple and straightforward on the movie screen actually requires careful planning and extremely creative solutions from the screenwriter.
Action films are deceptive in a number […]