Terry Gross: When you started directing as well as writing, what was the most difficult thing for you to learn about directing? Paul Schrader: Visual logic. I know – I’d come from a background which believed that ideas were in the province of words. If you had something to say, you used words to say…

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wickednonstop: 129 Of The Most Beautiful Shots In Movie History alternate title: break your addiction to dialogue!

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audiaphilios: The kind of thinking I like to see, the kind of thing I like to think about– and tell my students to think about. Amazing how much a movie could be fixed by telling it from the woman’s POV. EDUCATIONAL AND COOL (Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

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Story is Transformation

Here’s a quick rule of thumb for your protag. Move as far as you can between the before and the after. Start like this. And use the story to get to this. Transformation is what stories are about. The bigger the better. It’s easy to make the transformation dramatic when the distance between before and…

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Do Yourself a Favor

And write for actors. Not long monologues and foaming at the mouth, necessarily. If you think like an actor, which means creating a sensible string of motivations and reactions and plans so that the character behaves like a person instead of a mechanism to move the plot to a given point on a given page,…

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Visual That

Is it more cinematic to listen to a person explain how boring their job is and how stupid the customers are, or cut right to stupid customers in action, ruining the day of our (now very relatable) protagonist? Why get together at lunch to discuss how badly a date went when you can just show…

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redneckkungfu: lush is fine and they have nice soap but going in there is like a minefield of bohemia like if one of the employees doesnt lunge at me asking me if i wanna sample goat lotion or whatever the shit i end up wheeling into some woman dressed in five blankets and knocking the…

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Hey, you’re awesome, thanks for existing, basically ^_^ Anyway, I wanted to know if you have any tips on how to write different personalities? My characters (all of them) always end up with the same default personality that I fall back on. Thanks!

lets-get-fictional: Thanks for your question, darling!  I think most of us have struggled with this – after all, we’re conditioned to one way of thinking, feeling, and acting for as long as we live.  That doesn’t necessarily mean we write characters like ourselves, though.  In fact, many of us have a “default character” that’s sassier…

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