In every scene, you need conflict. More importantly, your entire story needs to be based on conflict between the hero and the villain. To maximize conflict, you need to define several items: What does the villain want? What does the hero want? What deadline does the villain create? How can we tell who wins? Every […]
The past is crucial. A story without a past basically has no foundation to build upon. Every story needs a past but there are two ways to reveal that past to the audience. The most common way is to hide the past and gradually reveal how that past affects the present over time. Think of […]
Every scene tells a story. First, a scene has to grab our attention. In the above scene from “Pale Rider,” the villain has arrived to confront the hero (Clint Eastwood). Right away the villain has a goal to drive the hero away. Since the villain has a goal, he first tries to achieve this goal […]
Watch an old movie and in many cases, it feels so slow in comparison to today’s movies. For example, the 1971 “Dirty Harry” was a breakthrough in its time. Yet if you watch that movie now, it feels slow and one-dimensional. That’s because “Dirty Harry” focuses solely on the hero. In contrast, today’s movies not […]
Many people think that comedies are light-hearted, fluff stories lacking all seriousness. Yet what makes comedies funny is that they’re often loaded with seriousness and there’s nothing more serious than death. In “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” there’s the constant threat of war and murders along with constant gunfire. But death alone isn’t what makes comedies […]
Nothing should happen to the hero by chance unless it’s disaster. To keep the story moving forward, the hero must always be responsible for taking action that causes something else to happen. In the above scene from “A Clockwork Orange,” a government official is touring a prison to look for test subjects for a new […]
In every scene, something should go wrong. There’s nothing more tedious than watching a scene that acts like normal life where nothing exciting happens. Just watch people in any public area and you’ll see people eating lunch, shopping, and talking on the phone. In most cases, nothing happens because there’s no sense of a problem or […]
Ideally, every scene should be interesting, especially the beginning of each scene. Remember, movies are show business so you want to make each scene beginning as captivating as possible. One way to do this is to have your characters behave in unexpected ways. In “The Bridge On the River Kwai,” a group of British prisoners of […]
A story is about change. The most basic element of a story is a scene, yet even in a single scene, there’s always an intriguing opening, conflict, foreshadowing, and a cliffhanger. The intriguing opening grabs our attention right away. The conflict defines a problem that a character is trying to solve. Foreshadowing hints at the […]
Every story has a history. Your hero has a past that directly influences the present. Your mentor has a past that directly influences how he or she influences the hero. Your villain has a past that directly influences his or her goals that directly conflict with the hero. If you ignore the past, your story […]