Category: Beyond Words

Beyond Words

Shhh: the use of silence in

Even in the Bay Area, the quiet weeks of January remind us of the gifts of winter: a stillness, pause, and time of secret, subterranean growth. Similarly, silence and stillness can amplify the hidden dramatic qualities of your story on film. You can use them to capture your audience and draw them closer, anticipating something yet unseen. They can solicit a deeper focus on a character’s internal state. Silence can also establish a quality of place or an emotional tone.

topics: actors, authors, bay area, screenwriting

Beyond Words

Shhh: the use of silence in film

Even in the Bay Area, the quiet weeks of January remind us of the gifts of winter: a stillness, pause, and time of secret, subterranean growth. Similarly, silence and stillness can amplify the hidden dramatic qualities of your story on film. You can use them to capture your audience and draw them closer, anticipating something yet unseen. They can solicit a deeper focus on a character’s internal state. Silence can also establish a quality of place or an emotional tone.

topics: actors, authors, bay area, screenwriting

Beyond Words

Carmen Madden on watching people, writing characters

Writer-director Carmen Madden, whose highly accomplished first feature, Everyday Black Man, won the Best Feature Film award at the Peachtree Village International Film Festival in Atlanta in September, and is now on the festival circuit, calls screenwriters “the first builders of the set” —of that unique world of their story. Her screenplays reflect just how intimately she comes to see and know that world and the characters that inhabit it.

topics: authors, bay area, screenwriting

Beyond Words

Carmen Madden on watching people, writing characters

Writer-director Carmen Madden, whose highly accomplished first feature, Everyday Black Man, won the Best Feature Film award at the Peachtree Village International Film Festival in Atlanta in September, and is now on the festival circuit, calls screenwriters “the first builders of the set” —of that unique world of their story. Her screenplays reflect just how intimately she comes to see and know that world and the characters that inhabit it.

topics: authors, bay area, screenwriting

Beyond Words

The importance of supporting characters

Supporting characters, who back up the main character’s turns in the spotlight, are not simply lesser lights with second billing. They are often key sources of revelation in the story, unmasking aspects of personality, motivation and backstory that might otherwise have remained hidden. They can help expand the mystery of the story by showing us unseen forces that pull the main character in many directions, which will make that character’s choices and the story’s directions less predictable.

topics: authors, bay area, directors, diy, features, filmmakers, how-to, independent film, screenwriting

Beyond Words

Understanding backstory

Behind any narrative for the screen is the story that came before it —the life that shaped the central character, who arrives fully formed as your story opens. Your screenplay may reveal only well-placed hints of the back story, or whole formative episodes in flashback. But you, the writer, have to know what that backstory was, before you can show your audience what drives your characters and what they are capable of.

topics: authors, bay area, comedy, directors, diy, filmmakers, genre films, hollywood, independent film, noir, screenwriting

Beyond Words

Comedy that sticks

Another summer, another cavalcade of summer comedies to grab us up, spin us around, rush the world backward and leave us tottering at the end of the ride. The best of these will graze the source of great comedy, leaving a lasting glow. But most will, by August, have slid from consciousness like so many candy wrappers trampled underfoot. So: What’s the key to comedy that sticks with us, despite perhaps an overblown story line or how lost and low-down the characters seem at the time?

topics: actors, authors, bay area, comedy, screenwriting, sex

Beyond Words

Comedy that sticks

Another summer, another cavalcade of summer comedies to grab us up, spin us around, rush the world backward and leave us tottering at the end of the ride. The best of these will graze the source of great comedy, leaving a lasting glow. But most will, by August, have slid from consciousness like so many candy wrappers trampled underfoot. So: What’s the key to comedy that sticks with us, despite perhaps an overblown story line or how lost and low-down the characters seem at the time?

topics: actors, authors, bay area, comedy, screenwriting, sex

Beyond Words

The Hero, deconstructed

The history of film is replete with conventional heroes—preternaturally strong, quick-witted, and courageous—as well as unlikely heroes, vain and hapless before their transformation into something nobler. Traditionally, in the vast majority of films, the hero has saved the day, if not the girl, the town, or the planet.

But increasingly, contemporary film heroes are less confident, less attuned to their moral compass, and possessed of less lofty goals. The journeys of their characters offer less ambitious, subtler gifts to the audience. These heroes may lift a beacon at the darkness, pointing the way—but they may not undertake the trip. They may begin to define a problem, but not see it through to resolution. They may offer new insights on a complex issue or circumstance, which might be the most courageous step they can take in their unforgiving universe.

topics: authors, bay area, diy, screenwriting

Beyond Words

Character, stripped to the bone

For the writer, traditional, instantly recognizable heroes, such as the everyman in Wall-E or the underdog in Slumdog Millionaire, are both easier to create and predictably satisfying for both creator and audience. We see the mountain dead ahead for these characters. The obstacles—and summoned courage and wit to overcome them—line up like so many hurdles on a track.

topics: authors, bay area, diy, screenwriting

Beyond Words

Character, stripped to the bone

For the writer, traditional, instantly recognizable heroes, such as the everyman in Wall-E or the underdog in Slumdog Millionaire, are both easier to create and predictably satisfying for both creator and audience. We see the mountain dead ahead for these characters. The obstacles—and summoned courage and wit to overcome them—line up like so many hurdles on a track.

But another kind of hero, the kind that carries such small, sober films as Chop Shop (2007) and Frozen River (2008), presents deeper challenges in the building of character: attention to the subtlest details of behavior and to the smallest shifts in the world of the character, which signal a hero’s journey both profound and deeply internal.

topics: authors, bay area, diy

Beyond Words

Indie Toolkit: The alchemy of adaptation

Common wisdom tells us that the book is always better than the film. A movie based on a true story can never give us all of the layered complexity of real life.

But the object of adaptation is never just a faithful retelling. It’s instead a selective re-imagining of the tale, which brings into sharp focus essential truths about the characters and their world. It chooses not every chapter or speech, but just those elements that can distill the story’s special power and importance.

To pull off a skillful adaptation, you must be equal parts alchemist and seer, able to translate the often unwieldy bulk of the original story – hundreds of fiction pages, decades of a life – into a breathing and transformative tale on the screen.

In tackling Slumdog Millionaire, the adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s novel, originally titled, Q&A, screenwriter Simon Beaufoy confronted both inherent gifts and liabilities.

topics: authors, awards, bay area, drama, dramatic films, how-to

Beyond Words

The alchemy of adaptation

Common wisdom tells us that the book is always better than the film. A movie based on a true story can never give us all of the layered complexity of real life.

But the object of adaptation is never just a faithful retelling. It’s instead a selective re-imagining of the tale, which brings into sharp focus essential truths about the characters and their world. It chooses not every chapter or speech, but just those elements that can distill the story’s special power and importance.

topics: authors, awards, bay area, drama, dramatic films, how-to

Beyond Words

Case studies in screenwriting: Pam Gray

Sebastopol-based screenwriter Pamela Gray’s approach to screenwriting is the literary equivalent of the slow food movement: she takes the time she needs to find her story, nurture it along, coax her characters into life, and find deep truths that don’t emerge through a formulaic approach.

Best known for A Walk on the Moon, a ’60s era drama, and Music of the Heart, the inspiring tale of a violin instructor in East Harlem, Gray writes real stories about ordinary people who experience transformative moments in their lives. Her upcoming film, Betty Anne Waters, based on the true story of a high school dropout and single mother who put herself through law school to defend her imprisoned brother who she believed was innocent, will begin shooting in January.
Over time, Gray has developed a potent mix of creative habits that guide her raw ideas to rise and take shape as finished screenplays. Her writing process has much to tell us about how to grow a story, how to access character subtleties, the importance of staying tuned to the power of the visual, and when to step in to impose necessary structural elements.

topics: bay area, features, hollywood, independent film, screenwriting

Beyond Words

Case studies in screenwriting: Pam Gray

Sebastopol-based screenwriter Pamela Gray’s approach to screenwriting is the literary equivalent of the slow food movement: she takes the time she needs to find her story, nurture it along, coax her characters into life, and find deep truths that don’t emerge through a formulaic approach.

topics: bay area, features, hollywood, independent film, screenwriting

Beyond Words

The dimensions of dialogue

To the novice screenwriter, dialogue is a maddening conundrum. It has to be spare but expressive, sound natural, fit the characters and allow for insights and revelations. The most skillful dialogue on film also achieves a structural dimension. It can shape the narrative just as surely as the plot does.

Dialogue can take any number of forms. It can become a map of the lead character’s emotional journey, a smokescreen for the plot to proceed behind or a storm cloud of oncoming disaster.

topics: bay area, filmmakers, how-to, screenwriting

Beyond Words

The dimensions of dialogue

To the novice screenwriter, dialogue is a maddening conundrum. It has to be spare but expressive, sound natural, fit the characters and allow for insights and revelations. The most skillful dialogue on film also achieves a structural dimension. It can shape the narrative just as surely as the plot does.

Dialogue can take any number of forms. It can become a map of the lead character’s emotional journey, a smokescreen for the plot to proceed behind or a storm cloud of oncoming disaster.

[Editor’s note: This is first in a series for SF360.org’s Indie Toolkit devoted to the screenwriting craft, and it looks at how different uses of dialogue can alter the narrative blueprint of a film. Future articles will profile notable screenwriters, focus on new directions in narrative and reflect further on aspects of craft.]

topics: bay area, filmmakers, how-to, screenwriting