There’s no formula to create a great movie, but there is a formula for creating a bad movie. If you want to create a bad movie, the fastest way to create a failure is to create an incomplete story. An incomplete story is one that leaves the outcome of one or more characters dangling. In […]
Every story needs conflict. Sometimes that conflict can be life and death struggles such as James Bond trying to survive against multiple assassins, but sometimes the conflict is more mundane, such as a student trying to pass a note to a friend without the teacher catching him. Although the intensity of conflict can change, the […]
A typical 120-page screenplay represents two hours. If you divide it into four equal parts, you’ll get four 30-minute segments as follows: Act I — Exposition Act IIa — Positive rising action Act IIb — Negative rising action Act III — Climax Act I introduce the problem and the characters. Act IIa is where the […]
Every story needs conflict. Without conflict, you don’t have a story. Where mediocre stories fail is that they have conflict, but that conflict is completely unrelated to the story’s theme. In “Long Shot,” the theme appears to be true to yourself. Unfortunately the conflict within the story often completely ignores this theme. In one scene, […]
Every story is about the hero, but the hero isn’t the sole focus of any story. In every story, not only should the hero change emotionally, but the hero’s mentor and ally should change as well. This helps create a complete and satisfying story. When you risk focusing solely on the hero, then secondary characters […]
In the beginning of every story, the hero’s stuck in a dead end life, often through no fault of his or her own. When we first meet the hero, the hero must yearn for a clear, physical goal. While the hero knows what he or she wants, what’s stopping the hero from achieving this physical […]
Conflict is the heart of every story and that means the hero needs multiple enemies to keep him or her from achieving a goal. The four common types of enemies where the weakest enemy is at the top and the strongest enemy is at the bottom include: The environment Other people Friends Self Out of […]
If you want to make your stories more emotionally engaging, there’s an excellent book by David Freeman called “Creating Emotion in Games.” While the book focuses on techniques for adding emotional engagement to video games, the principles apply to screenwriting as well. One technique is to begin with a fake out scene, which appears to […]
Every hero wants a physical goal that he or she can see, but in reality, they need to achieve an emotional goal that they often cannot see initially. To get the physical goal, the hero typically deceives others. Now the tension throughout the bulk of the story is how long can the hero get away […]
Watch a great movie and you might not be conscious at how all the elements of the story work together. Although every story consists of multiple subplots, all of those subplots are essentially telling the same story in different ways. In “Legally Blonde,” the hero is looking to find love and learn to become a […]