The best stories tell both an interesting story while also showing how a hero changes emotionally into a better person (or in tragedies, into a worse person). When a story focuses solely on plot, you wind up with melodrama where action takes precedence and everything is a visual feast of gunfire, explosions, and special effects […]
Watch a bad movie like “Justice League” and you’ll see a perfect example of a pointless scene. Early in the movie, “Justice League” shows Wonder Woman fighting a bunch of men trying to blow up a building with hostages inside. Wonder Woman naturally defeats these villains and saves the day. Unfortunately, this scene has absolutely […]
DC Comics movies seem to have the same problem. Watch “Suicide Squad” or “Justice League” and you’ll notice that the movie starts off slowly and keeps repeating itself by going over exposition time and time again. In “Suicide Squad,” every member of the suicide squad gets their origin story told multiple times. Isn’t of telling […]
Every scene needs to be interesting in some way to keep the story moving forward. The simplest way to make a scene interesting is to create conflict between characters in a scene. Scenes are boring without conflict so if there’s no conflict, that scene must go or be rewritten. If you lookout deleted scenes in […]
The best stories are those that move us emotionally, and the only way that can happen is if the hero changes emotionally. If the hero does not change in any meaningful way, then the story will feel flat no matter how much fighting, gunfire, explosions, or special effects the story crams in every scene. Watch […]
Every scene must be interesting and hold the audience’s attention. Any scene that fails to do so simply hurts the overall screenplay. One way to make sure a scene holds an audience’s attention is to change a relationship. The two types of relationships are between characters and between characters and the audience. Scenes must change […]
The purpose of the villain and mentor is to change the hero. The mentor offers positive lessons to help the hero learn a different way of living that’s more effective. The villain offers negative lessons to force the hero to change. Both are necessary. The mentor teaches the hero the story theme through a lesson […]
Every story has a plot. The plot basically defines what happens to a character such as the hero. However, what’s far more important is who the plot happens to and how that person reacts. Many stories share the same plot. “Rocky” is about an underdog boxer. “The Bad News Bears” is about an underdog baseball […]
What really creates added tension and suspense isn’t more violence, sex, or special effects, but relationship triangles. This occurs when two people want something from the same person. By creating a relationship triangle among your characters, you increase tension and suspense because audiences want to know who will win in the end. In romantic comedies, […]