Screenwriting From Iowa

“When you do a scene (as a cinematographer) you ask yourself, ‘What do you want the audience to think or feel at the end of the scene that they didn’t at the beginning of the scene? What path do we take that will evoke their emotional response by the end of the scene.’” ACS & [...]

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Film editor Walter Murch has won three Academy Awards, and in a career that has spanned six decades he’s edited a list of well known films including The Godfather Part III, Jarhead, The English Patient, and Apocalypse Now. And along the way he’s worked with some of the greatest modern film directors (Coppola, Lucas, Sam Mendes) [...]

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“A dramatic story is any series of events having vivid, emotional, conflicting, striking interest or results.” William Froug Screenwriting Tricks of the Trade “Witness is a great little film that works on all levels. The ending of one thing is always the beginning of something else.” Syd Field If basic emotions are Happy, Sad, Disgust, [...]

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“The story is the journey for truth. The plot is the road is takes to get there.” Peter Dunne  I have yet to find a nice neat, concise definition of emotional structure—but I think I can unpack it a little and give you a few solid examples. Yesterday, I read my first Kindle book—and it [...]

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“A.J. Appleyard, in a study of the various stages of reading through which we go as readers, insists that the major source  of literary experience is emotional. Without an affective dimension, without investing feelings, reading fictional texts would hold no interest. Reading is always ‘emotional.’ To deny this fact of life is to supress a [...]

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“Without understanding Emotional Structure, the beginning, the middle, and the end of your script have a 100 percent chance of becoming the beginning, the muddle, and the end. Because emotions rule the central, most misunderstood and most feared element of a screenplay: that of the story’s underlying meaning. And only by understanding Emotional Structure can [...]

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Happy Thanksgiving from Iowa. I have two stories from Iowa that tie into not only Thanksgiving, but into the theme of emotions that I’ve been writing about a chunk of this month. Jim and John Harbaugh are not just the only two brothers to ever be head coaches in the NFL, but tonight they will [...]

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“Aesthetics is for the artist as Ornithology is for the birds.” Barnett Newman “Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.” Oscar Wilde I’m not sure [...]

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“There was certain quality of melanchloy that Connie (Conrad Hall) carried with him that he was very in touch and you feel it in the films.” Director  Glenn Gordon Caron Melancholy can be defined as a pensive mood or depressing spirit. If you read many bios of artists across the board (painters, writers, musicians, etc.) [...]

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For just over two weeks I’ve been writing about the role of emotions in filmmaking and screenwriting and somehow I missed that Richard Walter has a whole chapter in his book Essentials of Screenwriting simply titled Emotion. Here is part of what the Professor of Screenwriting at UCLA’s MFA program wrote: Film is for feeling. [...]

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