Screenwriting From Iowa

Here’s are three chunks of info regarding emotion from the book The Art of Plotting by Linda Cowgill: “Great writers rake their heroes over the coals because this is how stories develop emotion, and emotion is how stories connect with their audience.” Linda Cowgill “Since Syd Field’s Screenplay hit the racks twenty-five years ago, the [...]

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Today is the 70th anniversary of one of the most tragic days in American History, the bombing of Pearl Harbour in Hawaii killing roughly 2,400 people—mostly those in the United States military. Less than a month later five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa enlisted in the U.S. Navy requesting to be on the same ship. They [...]

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Morph Archetypes: “The audience watches an onscreen character—generally but not always the main character—go through an Outer Game adventure in order to deal with some psychological/emotional issues within themselves. They change—Morph—as we watch.” Sandy Frank In Sandy Frank’s book The Inner Game of Screenwriting, he writes that the three most common Morph Archetypes are Evolution, [...]

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“A relentless focus on the Inner Game is the key to writing a successful screenplay.” Sandy Frank The Inner Game of Screenwriting Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty  Dumpty had a great fall… Traditional Nursey Rhyme Tiger Woods won a golf tournament yesterday. Once upon a time, that wasn’t a big deal. But considering [...]

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“You’ll find in times of great emotions in films, the characters almost always speak less works, not more. I count silence as a form of dialogue.”David Freeman   

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In this long journey of exploring emotions in screenwriting and filmmaking I’ve quoted writers, directors, cinematographers, and editors on the important role that emotions has on characters, on the audience, and on the script readers who first first your script.  But I don’t think I’ve touched on the role of emotions on the writer personally.  [...]

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“A character’s emotional life helps the audience to identify with the character and understand his motivations. It makes a character seem authentic and heightens the stakes by showing what’s important to him, as well as communicating through these reactions what the story is really about. When the emotional component of a story is left out, [...]

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“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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