Every weekend Hollywood trots out their latest movies and every weekend, a large majority of those movies aren’t very good. Rather than try to find what makes a good movie, Hollywood prefers to keep following the same process that routinely cranks out mediocre movies. Yet if you study classic movies throughout history, you can see […]
Here’s something to keep your eye on. It’s a new term called neurocinematics where moviemakers use neurofeedback to help refine film elements such as scripts, characters, plots, scenes, and effects. Princeton University psychology professor Uri Hasson coined the term “neurocinematics” where he concluded that certain types of films (e.g. horror, action, sci-fi) produced high activation scores […]
The surest sign of a mediocre movie is when secondary characters don’t change. In “Maleficent,” then fairies guarding Sleeping Beauty never change and Sleeping Beauty never changes either. In “Hercules,” there’s a whole group of characters supporting Hercules, yet they never change and you never really get to know any of them. There’s a woman […]
Watch a mediocre movie like any of “The Expendables” trilogy and you’ll see lots of explosions and gunfire with nobody getting cut. “The Expendables” is meant to be a fun action movie, but what sinks all the action is the lack of emotion behind the action. If we don’t know what’s at stake behind the […]
One of the best ways to make a character feel real is to show them in a vulnerable situation. In “Guardians of the Galaxy,” Rocket Raccoon complains about how he was ripped apart and put back together again. This statement only lasts a few seconds, but it highlights the pain of his past and makes […]
There’s an old saying about story telling where you put your hero in a tree and then throw rocks at him (or her). The basic idea behind this saying is that you need to put your hero in a horrible place and then make it worse. When writing your screenplay, make sure your hero’s dilemma […]
The past always causes problems for the hero. Every story is about the hero trying to fix his or her life due to a problem from the past. Sometimes the problem from the past can be a traumatic event. In “Casablanca,” the hero fell in love with a woman, who later broke his heart. Now […]
Study the best movies and you’ll notice they include two P’s: the past and a parallel story. The past has created a problem that the hero needs to solve in the present. The parallel story involves a secondary character whose goals are nearly identical to the hero’s. In “Her,” the hero is a lonely man […]
No matter what type of story you’re creating, the key is to show us something new. You can be outrageous and show us something fantastic like a science fiction world of the future (“Avatar”), a supernatural twist on our current world (“Twilight”), an exaggerated warped vision of our own world (“The Purge”), or a world […]
One crucial element of any story is that the hero often needs to overcome a problem from the past. This past problem haunts the hero in the present and gradually gets revealed over time. In “Thelma and Louise,” we gradually learn that Louise got raped in Texas so that’s why she won’t drive through there. […]