Advice — expert series

4 Ways Documentary Filmmaking Can Capture Real-Life Drama

Posted by Sheila Curran Bernard on

Documentary filmmakers, no less than dramatic screenwriters, strive to tell strong, often character-driven stories that have a beginning, middle and end, with something at stake, rising tension, and a narrative arc that keeps viewers actively engaged. Unlike dramatists, however, nonfiction filmmakers can't invent characters and plot points, but must instead find them in the raw material of real life. "The documentarist has a passion for what he finds in images and sounds - which always seem to him more meaningful than anything he can invent," wrote media historian Erik Barnouw. "It is in selecting and arranging his findings that he...

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The Theft of Time

Posted by Dennis Palumbo on

A particularly arrogant film producer once said to me, "I could be a writer, too, if I only had the time." Which implied, I guess, that if he didn't have to attend meetings, deal with studios, manage production budgets--in other words, if he didn't have a real job--he too could just sit around, effortlessly knocking out compelling narratives and crafting pithy dialogue. Yet for most writers, time is exactly that thing they can't seem to get enough of. Certainly not without carving it out for themselves, strenuously hewing a private space for their writing from a dense forest of financial...

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Did You Hear The One -- ?

Posted by D.B. Gilles on

-- About The Screenwriter Who Decided To Write A Comedy? There was a moment in your life when you acknowledged to yourself that you were funny. Maybe you were trying to be funny. Maybe you weren't. Maybe it just slipped out. But somebody laughed. It might have happened when you were in second grade, a freshman in high school, senior year in college or when you were out of school and into a career. Somebody laughed. You liked saying funny things. Maybe you even loved it. Getting laughs did something to you. Maybe it built up your confidence. Made you...

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Gatsby: The Great American Story

Posted by John Truby on

The Great Gatsby is a true Great American novel. What is even more amazing is that F. Scott Fitzgerald did it in little more than a short story. How did he do it? Essentially, he wrote a Great American Story. Fitzgerald was able to create what may be the fundamental story structure of 20th Century America and weave together a number of characters that each express a different take on the problem that the structure exposes. Let's begin with the novel's endpoints, because they tell us the structure. And the structure tells us more about how the story works than...

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StoryWeaving - Avoiding the Genre Trap

Posted by Melanie Ann Phillips on

A common misconception sees genre as a fixed list of dramatic requirements or a rigid structural template from which there can be no deviation. Writers laboring under these restrictions often find themselves boxed-in creatively. They become snared in the Genre Trap, cranking out stories that are indistinguishable from a whole crop of their contemporaries In fact, genre should be a fluid and organic entity that grows from each story individually. Such stories are surprising, notable, memorable, and involving. In this article, you'll learn a new flexible technique for creating stories that are unique within their genres. How We Fall Into...

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