Posted on August 11, 2010 in Story | No Comments
For the last 30 years, screenwriting has been dominated by a mechanical approach to creating story. For example, the so-called “three-act structure” is really a mechanical imprint from the outside that is laid over the top of a story. Act breaks are completely arbitrary. They don’t actually exist in the story.
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Posted on April 14, 2010 in General Screenwriting, Story | No Comments
by Kim Hudson
The title The Virgin’s Promise has two meanings and in a nutshell, it describes the journey of the Virgin. The first meaning is the community’s belief that the Virgin has agreed to live up to their expectations. She has made a promise to them. The second speaks to the Virgin’s unproven potential [...]
Posted on January 17, 2010 in Legal & Copyright | 2 Comments
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 previously established film, is not [...]
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Posted on December 22, 2009 in General Screenwriting, Story | 2 Comments
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 “incident;” what the dictionary defines [...]
Posted on July 30, 2009 in Story | No Comments
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 in bed, Tolstoy’s epic historical [...]
Posted on July 28, 2009 in General Screenwriting | No Comments
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 his breakthrough screenplay for Oscar-winning [...]
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Posted on July 15, 2009 in Story | No Comments
“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 about and enjoy the story.
This [...]
Posted on October 22, 2008 in General Screenwriting | 1 Comment
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 not the same as drama…
…The [...]
Posted on August 4, 2008 in General Screenwriting | No Comments
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 to get us engaged with [...]
Posted on July 14, 2008 in General Screenwriting | No Comments
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 motivation to escape, or identify [...]
Posted on July 13, 2008 in Story | No Comments
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 of ways. Many people think [...]
