annerocious: writerlyn: The deadlines for the Nicholl Fellowship and Scriptapalooza and Page awards and Austin Film Festival and sundance screenwriters lab (okay not so much on that one) and big bear film festival are COMING UP SOON! reblogging every day. bring it on!
Read moreUNIVERSAL MESSAGES
Universal messages are the comfort food of film language. They are the reason you will do better with a story about love fixing all your problems than a bully beating you to death for standing up to them. A lot of writers discuss this issue as a moral quandary about selling out. It isn’t. Casablanca succeeds…
Read moreSophie, the girl, is given a spell and transformed into an old woman. It would be a lie to say that turning young again would mean living happily ever after. I didn’t want to say that. I didn’t want to make it seem like turning old was such a bad thing — the idea was…
Read more11 Steps to Write a Scene
via johnaugust.com
Read moreFree Film Class taught by Jeanine Basinger
Free Film Class taught by Jeanine Basinger lifeascaty: If you’re a fan of Joss Whedon then you’ll probably want to check this out. If you’re not a fan of Joss Whedon, you should still check this out. (Jeanine Basinger taught Joss Whedon while he was at Wesleyan University. You can read more about their continued…
Read moreIT’S GENRE, NOT DEEP STORY
Genre is the best place for deep story and huge themes. That’s what sci-fi is actually for. Ask Octavia Butler. Action, horror, comedy…those are all playgrounds for big story. Bourne is about individual identity and free will. The whole Marvel universe oozes deep story. The Exorcist is about rejecting evil, Groundhog Day is about becoming…
Read moreTHE PROTAG’S FLAW IS…NARCISSISM
Don’t paste on flaws to satisfy conditions of the plot. If the flaw is narcissism or untrustworthiness or cowardice, then that is what the story is about. All of the elements in the story treat the question of the flaw, which is the writer’s angle on the theme. It’s not something you tack on.
Read more5 STAR ESCALATION
Escalation keeps the story interesting. An individual escalation really works when it is set up as the thing we hope doesn’t ever happen. Then when it happens, we know the most shit has just hit the biggest fan. Rinse, then repeat until the end of act two.
Read moreBy the way
writerlyn: The deadlines for the Nicholl Fellowship and Scriptapalooza and Page awards and Austin Film Festival and sundance screenwriters lab (okay not so much on that one) and big bear film festival are COMING UP SOON! reblogging every day. bring it on!
Read moreborednerd: i loved the fargo premiere until i didn’t. another story about the poor man ‘mocked’ into being this huge piece of shit we’re supposed to sympathize with, no thanks. at least in breaking bad we’re given both sides of the story but in this garbage his wife has literally no redeeming or human qualities….
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