Most movies follow the same formula. An underdog hero meets a mentor who leads the hero into a new world where the hero meets an ally who helps the hero. In return, the hero helps the ally. Sometimes the mentor dies, leaving the hero alone to face the villain. While this formula often works exactly […]

Every movie can teach you something, whether it’s how to properly structure a story (“The Incredibles,” “Wild,” “Guardians of the Galaxy”) or how to avoid mistakes in structuring a story (“Maleficent,” “Tomorrowland,” or “San Andreas”). When you watch a good movie, it not only entertains you with visually interesting images, but it also strikes an […]

Ideally, you want to make your story as logical as possible. Unfortunately, completely logical stories can often get extremely boring. Hollywood once made a movie called “The Hanoi Hilton,” which was about the experiences of American soldiers taken prisoner during the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, the story followed the actual facts of the real life stories […]

The first time you meet someone, you know nothing about them. By talking and watching them, you can get a rough idea who they are, but you may still not care about them. What makes you care about a stranger is when you get to know them beyond a superficial basis. One way to care […]

You can learn from both good and bad movies. One classic good movie to study is “Star Wars.” Despite its relatively simple special effects, it’s the story that captivated the world. Now study a bad movie like “The Seventh Son,” which was a recent fantasy film loaded with computer-generated special effects and lots of action. Unlike […]

Act III of any story should be the biggest, most exciting part of the whole movie. That’s when the hero risks everything against impossible odds to pursue a goal. Watch a bad movie and you’ll see that Act III typically has the hero charge at the villain to fight with lots of special effects, explosions, […]

Think of every story as two halves where the first half is the opposite of the second half. In the first half of any good story, the hero is trying to accomplish something and finally succeeds. Then the second half is about where things start rapidly falling apart despite the hero’s success. That’s why the […]

Here’s the formula for creating a flat, one-dimensional screenplay. Focus on your hero. Here\’s the formula for creating a multi-dimensional screenplay. Create multiple goals for every major character to pursue. If you watch today’s TV dramas, you’ll notice that they often have multiple storylines. That keeps our interest up because as soon as we tire […]