Posts Tagged ‘Feature Writing’

When creating your characters, they should each have a specific role and serve a purpose in telling your story.  There’s more to adding characters than giving them lines.  (See the article on Creating New Characters for further explanation.)  Every lead and supporting character should fall into one or more of these archetypal categories:  Archetypes Hero: admirable, likeable, lead to story [...]

I think the worst feedback you can get aside from “I liked it” is “Sure, there are some problems, but ‘it’s just a movie’”.  You should never excuse illogical or unrealistic scenarios simply because ‘it’s only a movie’. I recently watched several action movies and found I most enjoyed the films that were realistic or [...]

Perhaps you have heard about or read Armond White’s scathing review on the beloved Toy Story 3.  http://www.nypress.com/article-21357-bored-game.html?anonymousId=-3062657814293038038 The trouble with critics is that their primary motivation is not necessarily to judge a movie fairly but to entertain their readers.   The more colourful or opinionated the review, the more entertaining it is, but simply saying “I hated it” doesn’t make for much of [...]

Visual style is something that is often neglected or overlooked.  Many new writers just put the story on paper and forget about the camera altogether.  The resulting script is often just a series of locations with basic action and dialogue, which isn’t wrong, it just leaves a lot open to interpretation. Visual style isn’t the [...]

Some writers will say that any instructions for directors is bad, while others will say some is okay.  Again, don’t look to professional screenplays for the answers because they aren’t spec scripts; they’re more than likely shooting scripts.  When you write a spec script, you want to keep the camera out of it.  The purpose [...]