Screenwriting From Iowa

“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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“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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