Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Hero Worship

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"One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being." -- May Sarton What happened to heroes in stories? In olde...
3 comments:
Tuesday, September 05, 2006

WHAT’S WRONG WITH EMOTIONS, ANYWAY?

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When was that last time you felt anything in the movie theater? I mean really felt something for the characters. Did you care who lived an...
1 comment:
Wednesday, July 12, 2006

SUPERIOR POSITION

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 From an interview with Alfred Hitchcock: "There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise,’ and yet many pict...
4 comments:
Friday, June 16, 2006

"The Humble Improve"

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“The Humble Improve” – Wynton Marsalis The sketches in this blog were done by my friend Derek Thompson who works for Pixar and has sat in...
5 comments:
Friday, May 26, 2006

The Amazing Disappearing First Act

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"Learn the fundamentals of the game and stick to them." --Jack Nicklaus I hate to come back to the whole “three act” thing, but...
6 comments:
Monday, May 15, 2006

The Other Side of the Rollercoaster

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It is at this time of the year that the studios put out their big movies – their “tent-pole” films. Their marketers will call these “non-st...
Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Inkblot Cinema

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A while ago I had a talk with a musician friend of mine. He told me that he had gone to see a modern classical concert. He said that it was ...
5 comments:
Thursday, April 20, 2006

A Look Inside My Brain part 2

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Flickering Images from Marcus Donner on Vimeo . In this post I will once again explain my process while making a short documentary for...
5 comments:
Saturday, April 08, 2006

A Look Inside My Brain

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Because I think it’s important that I show you the principles I espouse applied to my own work, in this blog entry I will breakdown a short...
1 comment:
Tuesday, March 28, 2006

On The Shoulders of Giants

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Sir Isaac Newton once said that, "if I see further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." He was of course referring to th...
10 comments:
Thursday, March 23, 2006

Paddy Chayefsky’s Dead

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Starting sometime in the 80’s film directors became art directors. The look of a film became more important than any other aspect of the fi...
5 comments:
Wednesday, March 15, 2006

MYTH OF GENRE part 2

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If you think about it, Jaws is just a monster movie. And, like a lot of monster movies, incidental characters are picked off as our hero tr...
6 comments:
Friday, March 10, 2006

THE MYTH OF GENRE

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Genre is visible. People know if they are watching a western or science fiction. But invisible ink is about the inner workings of story, n...
Monday, February 27, 2006

DIALOGUE part 4 (ADDRESS AND EXPLAIN)

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This is related to “address and dismiss” but serves a different function. The best example is in the first Star Wars, when Luke Skywalker s...
2 comments:
Tuesday, February 21, 2006

DIALOGUE part 3 (ADDRESS AND DISMISS)

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The first time I noticed this technique, I was watching John Carpenter’s The Thing. In the film, an alien creature with the ability to assu...
1 comment:
Friday, February 10, 2006

DIALOGUE part 2 (SOUNDING NATURAL)

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Over the last few years, I have noticed that every character I read, or see in the movies or on television, sounds like another movie or tel...
Wednesday, February 01, 2006

DIALOGUE part 1

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My barber wants to make a film. He wants to write a screenplay, so he wants to know the format. He figures that once he knows the format, ...
Wednesday, January 11, 2006

The Strange Case of Sherman Alexie

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I was once asked to give a talk about storytelling to a convention of high school media students with Native-American writer Sherman Alexie....
3 comments:
Wednesday, January 04, 2006

We Live in the Dark Ages part 2

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The more I talk about, and teach, structure the more I see that people have a fundamental misunderstanding about what it really is. Story s...
2 comments:
Tuesday, December 27, 2005

We Live in the Dark Ages

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These are the Dark Times. This is, in my opinion, the worst time in the history of cinema. This trend toward bad films began around 1980. ...
2 comments: