The mentor is the character who helps your hero learn how to defeat the villain. Typically the mentor has a painful history that he or she needs to confront and overcome, and this process of striving for this goal gives the mentor the chance to teach the hero. The most important character in any movie […]
The three most important characters are your villain, hero, and mentor. All three of these characters need to have goals of their own and the combination of these goals helps create a complete story. Your three most important characters are the villain, hero, and mentor. Your villain defines your whole story and typically pursues a […]
In a typical story, the hero starts off with a character flaw, learns to overcome it, and then lives happily ever after. However in rare instances, the hero doesn’t change at all and remains the same from start to finish. In most movies, the hero changes. The person the hero was at the beginning of […]
One of the best ways to study story structure is to read children’s stories. Not only are they entertaining in themselves, but they let you clearly see the structure of the story and what makes them so appealing in the first place. Roald Dahl wrote both adult short stories and children’s stories including “Charlie and […]
In many bad movies, there’s a tendency to throw everything at the viewer and hope that by some miracle something will work. It won’t and here are some reasons why. At one end of the animated movie scale you have Pixar films. On the other end, you have everyone else. Disney is the only one […]