She threw a molotov at the mouth of the beast. Setting up pivotal scenes and moments.

Spoiler alert. At the end of 10 Cloverfield Lane, all hell breaks loose. She decides it's time to leave this prison of a doomsday shelter and that her captor is probably a over paranoid rapist who uses doomsday events as a cover for imprisoning his victims. She kicks over a barrel of sulfuric acid at her captor and he trips over it to take a drink, she then hops over, takes her home made radiation suit and a bottle of compressed air and heads for the air vent. It's all a really intense, anxious scene.

Is she going to get out? How is she going to get out? Will he come after? When she enters the air vent, the audience doesn't say it, nor does it need to be said in the movie, but it's something like 'do you remember this air vent, there's a way out this way?' My point is that what if they never introduced the air vent in the beginning? What if the exhaust fan didn't break down and she wasn't the only one that could fit in and repair it from the inside? Well, if they didn't set that up, the audience may have been brought out of their realm of movie rules and thought 'hey where did this come from? Well i guess anything can happen now.'

It's much better to have a concept set up in the audiences' mind before adding it in to the movie especially at a pivotal point in a movie. You don't want to lose your audience by forcing them to believe something at such a fast pace. If Harry Potter was a normal kid the whole movie and all of a sudden at the end of the movie fighting he-who-shall-not-be-named, whips out a wand and blows him up with a wizardly phrase, well the audience will think 'when was he able to do that??' And then wizardry would have been an afterthought for Harry Potter and Rowling probably wouldn't have become rich.

 It's not because you and me and other movie/netflix-goers are so dumb that it needs to be explained. It's the fact that we ARE smart. It needs to be setup accordingly and if a concept like 'oh, i can use this air vent as another way to get out because it's where i saw a hatch and just a single padlock' is thrown in out of nowhere, the audience is going to think, 'okay wtf, what else are you going to do now... make her happen to find a box full of medical supplies and guns so she can survive?' The writer or director or producer clearly didn't think it through and sort of just squeezed it in there. (Usually people don't say this but they can feel it when they watch it)

Some small things don't need to be setup, some do. It's experience from seeing what works and what doesn't in hundreds of movies that will give clues. If what you're throwing in makes big changes in the character's journey or situation, it probably needs to be setup. If it's something like, having a bottle of alcohol and matches happen to be the back seat of a pickup truck, it doesn't beg to be setup, because it still doesn't change the fact that she has to do something about being trapped in a truck as a giant alien reels it in to be chewed up as a bland auto human sandwich.

Again, it's art, not science.

The in between is becoming infinite...

Just saw the movie Her, written and directed by Spike Jonze, this past weekend and I was amazed, depressed, and enlightened after living Ted for two and a half hours.

A picture of a woman with her back turned is on Jonze's wall. As he recalls obtaining it, "the beautiful mysteriousness of it. And also, you know, the memory of it.”

Here is an article documenting the making of the movie.

The emotion evoked from the film recalls the framed anonymity: "...her dark-blonde hair brushing her shoulders, almost tangibly present but at the same time unreachable. She’s real, but only in her world, not yours."

Snagged from an article called "14 Screenwriters Writing", See the full article.

"...Stories, even ones with jumbled timelines and time periods, are linear. They start, stuff happens, they end. When working out a story, I try to stay away from traditional outlines. Trying to sit down and begin by listing the scenes in order seems overwhelming. My answer is to use notecards that I spread out on the floor. Ideas for scenes go on a card and initially aren’t required to work in concert with other scenes. This process ends up creating connections and story lines that might not have been discovered otherwise. You never know where a card might land on your floor. " -Jeff Nichols

Write write write!

Films need screenplays. Screenplays need words. Words need writing.

Just start writing with these 6 tips, with a few from Kurt Vonnegut:

1. The best ways to get over the “blank page hurdle” - give yourself permission to write badly.
2. Discard clichés: How to stop writing like “you’re meant to write”
3. Don’t make it sound like writing, instead “Write like you speak”
4. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
5. Over time, try to write less, not more
6. Keep writing, even when it already hurts

See original post below for each tip in detail:

http://blog.bufferapp.com/6-of-the-most-important-aspects-of-successful-writing

Stay motivated!

I linked an article below about the narrative and thematic force behind LOTR - Fellowship of the Ring. Both the content and comments in the article emphasize changes that occur over the course of the film. The Fellowship changes directions with attacks from the antagonist Saruman. After the fall of Gandalf, the team (and audience) heavily questions the journey. However, by the end of the film, this is resolved with hope from Frodo's memory of Gandalf and the team's realization that they must continue to push forward. Even Aragorn accepts his place as king. Frodo accepts Sam at his side.

Click here for the extended edition

Character arcs and theme are top elements to any good story / screenplay / film.

I do watch the occasional drama / comedy. It’s older article, but I only finally watched Don Jon this past week.

I share some of the same ideas about the purpose of film with JGL. Please see the article or below for excerpts. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/joseph-gordon-levitt-don-jon-sxsw_n_2864951.html

On being original but not:
"I tend to think that pretty much every great work of art is a composite of other great things that the artist has seen. I tend to be one that thinks the whole notion of originality is a little bit delusional and a little bit perpetrated by industry because it's at the heart of intellectual property rights. The companies that pay for these things and make money off of these things don't like to acknowledge the fact that your original story is actually the same as the "Odyssey." My whole thing on hitRECord is that we don't put such a premium on originality; it's more about honesty. I think either everything is original or nothing is. If you're honest as a person, every person I believe is unique and original in that way. So, if you're honest, you can tell a story from a heart. This, to me, is a heartfelt story about someone who's stuck in a rut; who's sort of under the influence of a lot of different things: his family, his friends, his church, all the media in the world, the pornography he watches every day. He manages to eventually get out from under that and open his mind a bit. Is that a story that has never been told before? No! It's one of the oldest stories ever: it's a coming of age story. But I hope there's something unique to it."

"I very much do. I think that the movies we watch, the TV shows we watch, the books we read, the songs we listen to, all have a very significant impact on our identities, our beliefs, our culture and our perspective on things. It's interesting because in our culture, nowadays, we tend to think of it as, "Oh, it's just entertainment. It doesn't matter." I don't think that's true at all. Even if a movie was just intending to just be entertainment, it's not."

Whether or not intended, a film portrays a message. What is yours? Does your film have a theme?

The Robot Assassin Nightmare

(Piranha II) was to be produced in Jamaica. On location, production slowed due to numerous problems and adverse weather…Ovidio ordered Cameron to do the close-up the next day before he started on that day’s shooting. Cameron spent the entire day sailing around the resort to reproduce the lighting but still failed to get the close-up. After he was fired, Ovidio invited Cameron to stay on location and assist in the shooting. Once in Rome, Ovidio took over the editing when Cameron was stricken with food poisoning. During his illness, he had a nightmare about an invincible robot hitman sent from the future to kill him, giving him the idea for The Terminator, which later catapulted his film career. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cameron

 

You never know when you’ll find inspiration. Once you do, stay motivated.