Story Structure
Conflict and Mystery
How do you grab an audience’s attention and hold it? Show them conflict and mystery. Conflict implies a battle between two people while a mystery makes you want to know what’s happening so you’ll stick around to see more. The beginning of every movie needs this dual combination of conflict and mystery. There’s an obscure […]
Keep Raising the Stakes
What makes a movie drag is that nothing important seems to be going on, there’s no reason for anyone to do anything, and nothing seems connected. To hold and maintain the audience’s attention, you need to keep raising the stakes for the hero in three areas. First, the hero must begin stuck in a dead […]
The Three Big Questions
As soon as possible in Act I, but definitely before Act I ends, you must pose three Big Questions: What is the villain trying to do? Initially, this will be a mystery but as your story unfolds, this will become clearer. What does the hero want emotionally? This can be something abstract. What does the […]
Keep the Mystery Going
The beginning of your story should create a Big Question in the minds of your audience as they try to figure out what’s happening. Then as they try to figure out what’s happening, you throw in even more mystery. Finally, you explain what’s going on. Then you resolve the problem you’ve created for your hero, […]
The Big Question
Every good movie should start off with a big question that grabs our attention from the start and carries through until the end. If you watch a bad movie, this big question is often omitted, which means you have no idea why you’re seeing anything in particular so there\s no sense of direction or purpose. […]
What Every Scene Needs
The latest bad movie in theaters right now is the Chinese film “Grandmaster,” which tells the story of Ip Man, the legendary martial artist who taught Bruce Lee. “Grandmaster” tries to tell Ip Man’s story, but instead bores us to death with the lack of anything interesting. When you study a movie that nearly puts […]
How to Make a Dull Movie
Bruce Lee’s martial arts teacher was a man known as Ip Man. One of the latest movies to tell Ip Man’s story is “Grandmaster,” a Chinese film that is visually stunning but deadly dull as a movie. Here are some of its faults and how you can avoid these same problems. First, people love movies […]
Using Story Templates
When you first start creating your story, you may try to create an original story, but there are no original stories. Instead, look at existing movies and try to create a different variation of that story. For example, there have always been stories about underdogs in sports, but “Rocky” helped define that genre that quickly […]
Slowly Reveal a Mystery
One of the best ways to build suspense and anticipation is to create a mystery, and one of the best ways to create a mystery is to reveal something a little bit at a time. In good movies, there’s more than one mystery. First, there’s always the mystery of the villain’s goal. Most movies end […]