December, 2015 - The 15 Minute Movie Method

The Tortured Hero

December 31, 2015

The biggest battle is never between the hero and the villain. Bad movies make this mistake all the time and think that if the battle...

Make the Villain Likable

December 28, 2015

There’s nothing scarier than a villain you admire. If you make a villain totally evil, it’s easy to hate him, but if you make the...

Keep Compounding the Problems

December 25, 2015

In every story, there’s an initial problem that the hero wants to solve. If that’s the only problem in your story, you’ve got a dull...

The Lessons From “The Good Dinosaur”

December 22, 2015

Pixar usually makes decent movies. Yet one of their latest movies, “The Good Dinosaur,” had a troubled history. Apparently Pixar animated most of the film...

Telling Stories Like a Comic Book

December 19, 2015

To help you visualize your story, think of how your story might look as a comic book. Doing this will force you to focus more...

Analyze a Scene in Three Ways

December 16, 2015

Every scene is one of many building blocks to create your overall story. Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link,...

Dialogue is Spoken Action

December 13, 2015

There’s a reason why characters speak and it’s never to give out information to the audience, although that’s the side effect. The main reason characters...

Bonding with the Emotional Change of the Hero

December 10, 2015

All the action in the world means nothing if nobody cares about your hero. So how do you make your hero sympathetic? You do it...

The Hero is Someone Special

December 4, 2015

Your hero usually starts off as a nobody and winds up as someone special in the end. You can see this transition from zero to...

The First 15 Minutes

December 2, 2015

Watch the first 15 minutes of any movie and then stop. If the story is structured correctly, you should have hints of how the movie...

The 15 Minute Movie Method

December 2015