Helping you tell better stories

Helping you tell better stories;

closer to your vision than you ever dreamt possible.

Sunday

Seth Godin on why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department


This has been my favourite marketing lecture for a few years now so I'm not sure why I haven't posted about it yet. It's a really stunningly good talk from marketing expert Seth Godin, who you may know from his TED appearances. It's an hour long, but surprisingly easy to watch all in one go.

The talk was delivered in 2008 to a conference of software developers, but his expertise and message cuts right across multiple industries and has huge relevance to the film business and particularly to you and me. I strongly feel the industry will soon be divided into people who understand this stuff and succeed... and those who don't, and repeatedly fail to stand out in the marketplace.

His basic thesis is that as content creators we have to give up forever the idea that we can just make our product and then hand it off to someone else to figure out how to sell it. Any film producer who's laboured for years and/or put their own money into making a film, only to fail to sign a sales agent or find distribution will understand the significance of this.

But I'll go further: with global online distribution at our fingertips we now have an unprecedented opportunity to reach audiences just as large as any Hollywood studio's. Not that we need to of course – our budgets are far lower – but by getting people to talk about our films, and share them using (for instance) the Distrify player, we create the option of opening up huge markets.

Self-distribution aside – what does your sales agent want you to bring them every single time? Simply put they want something they can sell to their buyer. And their buyer wants something they can sell to their buyer, and so on down the line. If you always give your customer something they think they can sell, you will always be able to make money. This simple concept alone, if understood universally within the film industry, would revolutionise the supply-chain and create a lot more prosperity for everyone virtually overnight.

And what's the best way to achieve this? Create something remarkable. Literally something that, while in some vague genre sense feels comfortably familiar, is simultaneously something that people feel compelled to remark upon. Similar but Different. Build it into your film from the outset. I'll let Seth take it from here, as he explains why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department:








This is how the studios do it. This does not apply to us.

We all live on Highway 11. Do something remarkable.


Please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

Friday

Lincoln – Trailer Analysis





How do you write an issue-based film? How do you logically arrange and present the various arguments? How do you structure a series of events – either real or imagined – that best delineate and describe the points you want to make? Indeed how do you even decide on which points you want to make and what to leave aside? What are the themes? What are the characters’ values? What are the main points of conflict, and what drives the story forward?

The mark of a really good screenplay – at least if you judge it the same way the screenwriting members of The Academy seem to – is that it actually be really about something. That’s how to get your film ranked in the high echelons. But what precisely differentiates a great Oscar-worthy film from something frivolous like, say, American Reunion?

I think it’s got to be the long-term implications – to an individual or society – of the events and of their resonant themes. Thus a film like Precious can be just as emotionally powerful and moving as something on a grand scale like Schindler’s List, because the long-term implications for the protagonist are immense.


It's almost as if a film is one long sprawling debate two hours long. A heated argument made up of smaller arguments, each valid in their own way... from the perspective of those fighting their corner.

(Interestingly in a film like Precious the arguments the protagonist uses are arguments against herself – yet another reason why the film is so moving and powerful.)


- // -

As luck would have it, the trailer for the new Oscar-bait Spielberg movie came out last week and it’s certainly got lots of big and powerful stuff going on: the end of the American Civil War, and Lincoln’s continued attempts to reunite the nation while simultaneously abolishing slavery... pretty heady stuff. Here it is if you didn't get around to it yet.



I thought it would be fun to break down the dialogue in the trailer and see what themes we’re dealing with once Janusz Kaminski’s photography and John Williams’ rousing score have been stripped out:


LINCOLN (V.O.) – We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. [Final words of the Gettysburg Address]

FRANCIS PRESTON BLAIR (Ally/Mentor) – We can’t tell our people they can vote yes on abolishing slavery, ‘less at the same time we can tell ‘em that you’re seeking and negotiating peace. [Incidentally – newspaperman and advisor Blair is played here by Hal Holbrook who was Abraham Lincoln in the 1976 TV series Lincoln. Here he lays out for the audience just what the main conflict is – how can you unite a nation at war while at the same time proposing laws unpopular with the South?]

SECRETARY OF STATE WILLIAM SEWARD (Ally?) – It’s either the amendment or this confederate peace – you can’t have both. [Seemingly intractable obstacle. Which will Lincoln sacrifice?]

ALEXANDER STEPHENS (Vice President of the Confederate States of America – Opponent!) – How many hundreds of thousands have died during your administration? [Making it personal.]

UNSPECIFIED OPPONENT #1 – Congress must never declare equal those who God created unequal! [Insert Lincoln's wife Mary Todd Lincoln and her African American friend, Elizabeth Keckley, looking on dolefully from the viewing gallery. Re-assertion of the values and power of the opposition, putting a face to the oppressed underdog group – a stakes character.]

UNSPECIFIED OPPONENT #2 – Leave the Constitution alone! [Shouted. Vociferous opposition.]

LINCOLN – We’re stepped out upon the world’s stage now - the fate of human dignity in our hands! Blood’s been spilt to afford us this moment, now, now, now! [The slavery issue is his priority.]

THADDEUS STEVENS (Ally) – Abraham Lincoln has asked us to work with him to accomplish the death of slavery. [It seems an ally might have come to the rescue.]

MARY TODD LINCOLN – No one’s ever been loved so much by the people. Don’t waste that power. [Another ally, but this one is both encouraging and warning him, so perhaps she’s also a mentor. And the stakes are big for her too – her family was torn apart by the opposing values of the civil war. She had brothers who fought and died for the South.]

UNKNOWN – This fight is for the United States of America! [Pretty specific reminder of the stakes.]

LINCOLN – Do we choose to be born? Are we fitted to the times we’re born into? [Self-doubt with a metaphysical curiosity, signifying a deep and philosophical mind.]

SAMUEL BECKWITH (Ally) – Well I don’t know about myself... YOU may be. [His contemporaries were aware of his special place in history.] [Interestingly this is the only actual dialogue exchange in the trailer. It speaks volumes about the tone of the film and to some of its themes. Best of all it contrasts the actions of a celebrated historical figure with his internal struggles and self-doubt.]

LINCOLN – This settles the fate for all coming time! Not only of the millions now in bondage, but of unborn millions to come! Shall we stop this bleeding? [African American characters applauding emotionally, and so are we, the viewer at home, because we know how it turned out... eventually.]

- // -

So that’s how you do that. Identify the salient issues of your story, make sure all your characters have a position, strong values, beliefs and great passion, and give your protagonist inner, outer and societal conflict. Boom. I’m being frivolous of course, because this stuff is really, really hard. But having said that, I believe it can be learned.

The real trick isn’t just writing powerful thematic issues-led dialogue that adds power to your screenplay, it’s getting it out onto the page in an easy-to-follow form.

(Despite trite quotes to the contrary, cinema is about show and tell. Visuals can convey some thematic information, but only some. In my opinion, and as we've seen in the above example, the best way to convey theme is by having characters who believe in something passionately vocalise their values. That’s where your film derives the true core of its conflict.)

So let's say you’ve got all your themes and characters’ values worked out and you want to arrange them into a coherent argument across the two hours of your film. How do you construct a rising crescendo of scenes, each moving the story forward, each elucidating the themes, values and positions of the characters, while simultaneously interacting with the real world of people, animals and things. In short – what's the best way to go about arranging this stuff on your timeline?

Stay tuned – I’m gonna cover that in part 2.




(Until then – if you happen to be an expert on the American Civil War please let me know in the comments any character names I wasn't able to work out, and I'll update accordingly.)

Thursday

Laurie Hutzler - Character Map




I've been meaning to write a post about Laurie Hutzler for ages – her approach to planning and rewriting stories is incredibly powerful, and her Character Map is one of my favourite tools.


What Is A Character Map?

The Character Map is a proven way to develop characters that have a rich compelling emotional journey and a dynamic set of internal and external personal conflicts.  Use this tool to create characters that leap off the page in your screenplay or teleplay.  Great screenwriting begins with great characters.  Great characters with a compelling emotional journey make your script truly memorable.

Some of the terminology she uses differs slightly from Truby (specifically his Four Necessities which I wrote about here) but they're certainly compatible and complementary approaches to the same goal.

Hutzler's approach has you ask six questions of each character – What is their greatest fear? What is the greatest misconception about them? What is their strongest trait? What is their biggest foible, or shortcoming that gets them in trouble when things are otherwise going well? What do they most admire in others? What trait in others sets their teeth on edge? – and brings you to a far greater understanding of your characters and the relationships / conflicts between them than you might have thought possible.

A key part of understanding and incorporating these tools into your process is that she initially encourages you to ask these six questions of yourself. Do it now – it's really illuminating – especially when she reveals the hidden truth behind what your responses really mean.

Seeing this approach reveal things you perhaps didn't know about yourself demonstrates immediately how rich and multi-dimensional your fictional characters can be, and allows you to easily draw on these facets of your own persona and psyche in rounding-out your creations.

The process also works extremely well for seeking to understand the inner-workings of real people if, for instance, you find yourself writing a biographical script. Applying these questions to your subject allows you to draw real-feeling complexity and depth from, for example, long-departed historical figures whose bigger actions are known, but whose private thoughts can only be the subject of conjecture.

(Check out this analysis of the Lincoln trailer btw.) (Way more interesting than it sounds.)

Of course a rich understanding of your characters' inner lives is of limited use if you're not conveying that to the audience, and so Hutzler has a method to map your answers to the timeline of your story that will provide a rich character arc complete with a couple of speedbumps along the way.

Here she does get a little more esoteric than Truby. The complexity is well worth drilling into. Essentially the end result boils down to whether or not your main character(s) can transcend their fears and entrenched beliefs & behaviours, and become a better version of themselves, both for themselves and for others. For truly meaningful storytelling this choice should be a moral one – something affecting the happiness of others.

Can your hero learn so much from their struggle that they are willing to take a leap of faith at the end, cast off old ways, and become the person they never dared dream they could be? That's the central question of a lot of the world's best storytelling.

I hope you get as much out of this technique as I did. Let me know in the comments how you get on with Laurie Hutzler's approach.

Female Character Flowchart


I've just been sent this Female Character Flowchart and, while I'm not sure how much practical value it has to your writing, it is funny and should serve as a constant reminder to those who may need one that clichéd stock character types – male or female – will count against you every time.

Write your own unique real people as they struggle in difficult or outrageous circumstances. If you're stuck on this, populate your stories with people you know in real life. You don't have to tell them. In fact it may be better that you don't.

Better yet draw on your own character – your own hopes and fears, values and idiosyncrasies. Each one of us is an unlimited mine of realistic material. Whatever your preferred process – avoid (or transcend) the clichés.

That reminds me – if you have a spare month to kill, or otherwise have a lot of urgent procrastinating to get through, there are few better places for a writer to waste time than here:

TV Tropes 
This wiki is a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction. 
Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means "stereotyped and trite." In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them. 
The wiki is called "TV Tropes" because TV is where we started. Over the course of a few years, our scope has crept out to include other media. Tropes transcend television. They reflect life. Since a lot of art, especially the popular arts, does its best to reflect life, tropes are likely to show up everywhere.

If you ever escape from its clutches – happy writing.



Monday

The Lövheim cube of emotion

A three dimensional model of emotion and monoamine neurotransmitters. Original version published in the article Lövheim H. A new three-dimensional model for emotions and monoamine neurotransmitters. Med Hypotheses (2011), Epub ahead of print. doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2011.11.016 PMID: 22153577

This is something I hadn't seen before. Excerpt from Wikipedia:

Lövheim Cube of emotion [1] is a proposed theoretical model aiming at explaining the relationship between the monoamine neurotransmitters and the emotions. In the model, the three monoamine neurotransmitters serotonindopamine and noradrenaline forms the axes of a coordinate system, and the eight basic emotions, labeled according to the affect theory of Silvan Tomkins, are placed in the eight corners. The origin corresponds to a situation where no signal substance at all is released. The model hence proposes a direct relation between specific combinations of the levels of the signal substances and certain basic emotions:
Basic emotionSerotoninDopamineNoradrenaline
Shame/humiliationLowLowLow
Distress/anguishLowLowHigh
Fear/terrorLowHighLow
Anger/rageLowHighHigh
Contempt/disgustHighLowLow
SurpriseHighLowHigh
Enjoyment/JoyHighHighLow
Interest/excitementHighHighHigh

Anger is for example, according to the model, produced by the combination of low serotonin, high dopamine and high noradrenaline.
Due to the direct relation to the monoamine neurotransmitters, the model might have an advantage compared to previous models of basic emotions such as, for example, Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions. Symptoms of depression might be interpreted as an emotional palette restricted to the low-serotonergic side of the Lövheim cube, where only the basic emotions shame/humiliation, distress/anguish, fear/terror and anger/rage are within reach. The core depressive symptoms of sadness and lack of interest can be interpreted as the inability to reach the basic emotions of joy and interest located on the high-serotonergic side.

There are many attempts to categorise emotions, each with their own benefits and flaws, but I like anything that comes with a strong visual. I'm scientific like that.

This one's pretty good too:

Robert Plutchik created a wheel of emotions in 1980 which consisted of 8 basic emotions and 8 advanced emotions each composed of 2 basic ones. From Wikipedia.
Basic emotionBasic opposite
JoySadness
TrustDisgust
FearAnger
SurpriseAnticipation
SadnessJoy
DisgustTrust
AngerFear
AnticipationSurprise
Human feelings (results of emotions)FeelingsOpposite
OptimismAnticipation + JoyDisapproval
LoveJoy + TrustRemorse
SubmissionTrust + FearContempt
AweFear + SurpriseAggression
DisappointmentSurprise + SadnessOptimism
RemorseSadness + DisgustLove
ContemptDisgust + AngerSubmission
AggressionAnger + AnticipationAwe

Remember as screenwriters we're not just trying to depict emotions on screen – we're also trying to generate emotions in the heart of the viewer. Could we maybe map certain dramatic techniques to individual emotions and give audiences a more complete visceral roller coaster of experience using techniques derived from these tables and charts?

Please feel free to share your ideas and methods in the comments.

Digital Future


There are more original posts on the way I promise... in the meantime I want to share this from Chuck Wendig, one of my favourite bloggers –

25 Realizations Writers Need to Have
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/05/01/25-realizations-writers-need-to-have/

As with most discussion about the changing face of the publishing industry, most – if not all – of what he says can also apply to filmmakers confronting the new challenges of the digital future.

Which reminds me – screenwriters thinking about shooting their own material should definitely check out this excellent article by Clive Davies-Frayne –
http://raindancecanada.com/2011/02/screenwriting-and-the-digital-revolution/

(Which was originally posted here http://www.raindance.co.uk/site/index.php?id=474,6950,0,0,1,0 but I prefer the page layout of Raindance Canada).



"How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day"


Don't worry – it's not as hacky as it sounds. It's good, solid "tried this and it works" advice from published author Rachel Aaron.

http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.ca/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html

I think everyone should take a few minutes to read this.



Friday

Memento – Structure Visualisations





From the world of clever narrative timeline visualisations – check out this article on some clever visualisations of Memento:



And as they mention there are some cool diagrams on the Wikipedia page too –




I really like the ones that employ the U-turn structure, so the B&W flashbacks (which go forward chronologically) zip together with the main colour narrative, which is chronologically reversed:



Look very closely at this last one. Very clever indeed. Anyone reminded of how DNA folds?

I might see about inverting the colours and printing it out for a more detailed look.


Tuesday

Film Policy Review... thoughts




"It begins with the audience..." is a great place to start.
                                                              So is "It begins with the script..."


This is a short excerpt from page 4 of the government's recent Film Policy Review paper:
" A survey of over 16,000 Odeon customers revealed that 92 per cent of respondents would like to see more British films released each year. The things respondents expected from a British film were: entertainment (58 per cent), an expression of British attitudes (47 per cent), an accurate portrayal of typically British life (37 per cent), insights into British history (35 per cent), an ideal of British life (20 per cent) and escapism from real British life (11 per cent). "

Whoa whoa whoa whoa – hold it right there! I think this is the most important paragraph in the whole hundred pages, especially since the report's snazzy tagline is "It begins with the audience..." Nevertheless they never again address these stunning statistics. I'd like to know more.

Despite twenty minutes searching I can't find the rest of this Odeon survey, and I'm not going to waste any more time looking, but I'd really like to know what percentage of respondents expected entertainment from an American film. I'm going to proceed under the fairly reasonable assumption that it's higher than 58%. In fact I'd be a bit perplexed if it was less than a plump, round 100% since we are, supposedly, in the entertainment industry.

Transpose it onto other industries – if only 58% of shoppers expected a British product or service to actually work as advertised, you'd naturally expect people to get wise and start buying foreign.

Call me crazed and idealistic, but I'd like 100% of British cinema-goers to turn up at the cinema expecting to be entertained by home-grown fare, not 58%. No combination of tax credits and clever financial instruments, nor of "film education" (presumably in which fifteen-year old kids are schooled in why "bleak" equates with "worthy" and "important") is going to change the fact that close to half the potential audience doesn't expect a British film to entertain them. This is a major marketing problem for the soon-to-be heavily promoted British film "brand".

Americans reading this blog – or anyone overseas for that matter – may be fortunate enough to have been shielded from the British tendency to make depressing social commentary type films, because their own distributors can't see a profit in releasing them. But anyone living here knows the cliché that a sizeable segment of the British film industry seems to revel in tales of misery, drug-abuse, child-abuse and dank concrete tower blocks with broken lifts that stink of piss and general human degradation.

Luckily this isn't actually the case as much as it was, although there are still some joyless auteurs out there keeping the nightmare alive for us all, god bless them. No – lately we've had a lot fewer films during or after which you wanted to bludgeon yourself to death with the nearest available blunt object just to end the abject misery of your existence. This is a step in the right direction for our industry.

There are many things to be cautiously optimistic about in this new Film Policy Review report, and encouraging stronger links with distributors is one of them, but we should be wary of creating a situation in which films are financially viable only because they received BFI investment. The idea of investing in minimum guarantees is promising, as it lowers the break-even threshold for a distributor while still requiring some investment on their part. This is a marked improvement on how it used to work.

In order to secure Film Council investment over the past decade a project needed a distributor signed-on from the outset. Even if nobody wanted to distribute the film in question, if the Film Council wanted to finance something arrangements were made in advance to fulfil the remit that all films funded should receive a theatrical release. Somehow distributors were always found (and I'd love to see inside those account books to follow which way money travelled on some of those deals, or perhaps it was just bulk-buying and dealmaking across multiple titles). The distributors were contractually obligated to release the films so in some cases films received little more than a quiet Leicester Square premiere, followed by a straight-to-video release (not a bad thing in itself, but clearly quite telling of the distributors' intentions for the film from the start).

What resulted was a lot of films being greenlit which, however worthy or entertaining, simply hadn't been created for the marketplace or – even if they had been carefully crafted and nurtured by their producers and creatives to go out into the marketplace, be strong and thrive – their beloved films were sent away to live with distributors who didn't love them, didn't want them, couldn't care less and refused to nurture them. A lot of even the good films died of neglect.

Making films is hard. Marketing films is hard. However I believe it is possible to combine writing with market awareness to craft an end product that entertains people enough – and is remarkable enough – that people recommend it to their friends, however "worthy" the subject matter. My dictionary defines entertainment as "the action of providing or being provided with amusement or enjoyment". That should be in the contract and all too often it's overlooked by filmmakers and civil servants alike. Fix that and we'll fix our industry. The numbers will rebound. We'll all make more money. The rest will take care of itself.


Much has been made of David Cameron's embarrassing statement last week that we should be creating more successful British films, but perhaps it was just his clumsily-polite way of saying we should make fewer films that result in him wanting to kill himself.

... then again...

/

"It begins with the audience..." is a great place to start. So is "It begins with the script..."


Robin Kershaw – January 2012

(Scripts and consulting services are available)

Saturday

Joseph Campbell




I had a pretty unfair opinion of Joseph Campbell for a long time, not because I ever had a problem with his stuff – I find it very interesting – but simply because it troubled me how new writers or naive development execs would try to make EVERY story fit the hero's journey model, regardless of whether it was applicable or not.


It felt as though, once they'd read Chris Vogler's The Writer's Journey, they were pretty sure that was all anyone ever needed to know about writing. The crap that people would come up with as they tried to make tenuous connections between their story and the hero's journey structure and archetypes was, often as not, utterly embarrassing and a complete waste of everyone's time.


There is a hell of a lot more to screenwriting than just optimistically plugging in Campbell's monomyth paradigm and hoping an epic story will somehow result. Some stories just don't want to be mythic and shouldn't be forced to be against their will.


And also – as Scott Meyers' recent series of posts about Joseph Campbell attests – there is lot more to Campbell than the hero's journey too. This personal tale from Scott at Go Into The Story is the penultimate in his excellent series, all of which is well worth a look back over if you're interested in learning more about Campbell (as, naturally, is his Wikipedia entry).


Just please promise me you won't go around afterwards quoting him like everything must conform to monomyth paradigms, because you might realise after a while that you we're wrong, and then you'll just feel silly.


//

Incidentally this Campbell documentary looks like it might be worth checking out --