HOW TO CREATE INTERESTING CHARACTERS
The key to finding your story is determining what your main character wants and what he or she does to get it. In a wedding video, a bride and groom want to get married; therefore, all of your choices, from the look of the film to what shots you choose to shoot must revolve around this dramatic need.
Jamin Winans’ great internet short Uncle Jack is one of the strongest short films shot on a DSLR—due to the fact that it tells a powerful story. Jack wants to escape his pursuers while at the same time he wants to keep his niece happy by telling her a fairytale.
In summary, Uncle Jack takes the fairytale motif and updates it into a contemporary setting in which a man is fleeing a crime scene chased by thugs who want him dead. An unconscious clown sits in the passenger seat of the car, while a giggling woman screams with glee in the back seat of the convertible. Bullets fly and Jack’s cell phone rings. Without listening to who’s on the other end, Jack assumes it’s one of his cohorts, and he warns him that the plan has been compromised and to, “Get out of there.” The film cuts to a young girl on her bed, who quizzically says, “Uncle Jack?” He tries to ditch her, but she insists that he tell her a story because her parents are fighting and he once told her that she could call him any time when that happens. Not wanting to break his word, he tells her a fairytale, using his present predicament as the metaphor for the story. By the end of the film, Uncle Jack and his buddy in the clown suit are cornered in a costume shop, and the niece realizes what’s going on and tells her uncle what to do to beat the enemy. After their defeat, Uncle Jack’s niece tells him to stop gambling.
The story works well because the main character isn’t just a shady character trying to avoid a gambling debt; he’s a shady character who loves his niece and doesn’t want to disappoint her. Good stories evolve from avoiding the stereotype that tends to drive the profit-motivated bottom line. The famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler, ASC, puts it this way:
For me, artistic goes beyond the visual image or photograph; it’s the totality of the philosophy, the ideas, the personality and the soul of people. Too often, the search for what seems to be commercial—the things that grab people’s attention—opens the door for celebrating antipersonal behavior, celebrating warfare, celebrating ways which do not elevate and serve mankind.1
Uncle Jack could have devolved into blockbuster violence, but Winan’s takes the story to a deeper level by making Jack a conflicted character who represents something more than a stereotype. Wexler’s advice extends to documentaries and news: what kinds of stories are you going to tell? The answer stems from the roots of why human beings tell stories in the first place.
HOW TO TAP INTO MAINSTREAM AUDIENCE’S EMOTIONAL CORE
There are probably as many reasons to be entertained by a story as there are people. The films of George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg tend to resonate with a wide audience because these filmmakers understand how to shape the images and stories that carry emotional and intellectual meaning for the viewer. Storytellers with broad appeal seem to naturally craft compelling stories that meet the needs or demands of a wide audience.
When storytellers strive to create and capture images that are unique to their own personal perspective, when they’re tapping into the subconscious intuition, they can inspire viewers and perhaps teach them something about how to live their lives more fully.
In Uncle Jack, Winans taps into larger themes and not only provides us with an entertaining but tragically flawed character, but also uses the niece as the impetus to help change this character into something better than he is. “I liked the idea that the niece was just someone listening to the fairy tale,” Winans explains in an interview, “but by the end you realize she’s truly part of it and ultimately the knower of all. She’s part of his world initially, but by the end, he’s part of her world.”2 Being conscious when such change of character occurs is essential when crafting compelling stories—it’s the hinge where your directing and cinematography revolves, since when you know when a character changes, you can craft images that highlight that change.
Whether we want to write our own scripts or shoot another’s script, we should choose projects that resonate in some way with our need to tell this particular story. The art of shooting it well—shaping the look and feel of it—will be more honest and clear when we do a project that means something to us. This doesn’t mean that when you choose to shoot a wedding or a commercial, for example, every moment of the work is imbued with deep psychological meaning. But a job can be more than a job when we endow it with our passionate view of how we perceive the world. Do we linger on a glance from the bride in a tight close-up when she looks at the groom because we see in this moment a universal moment of truth … and we weld this image to the cultural belief that love can last forever? Maybe.
One of the reason’s Vincent Laforet’s Reverie is powerful isn’t that it was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II. It’s that he opened with that romantic kiss between a couple and the guy blows it—he tries to pursue his love but loses it. The story contains power. It resonates with a universal theme of lost love, and most of us have experienced that loss in our own way. And in the hands of a good director-cinematographer (the DSLR shooter), the story can be translated into powerful images that resonate with an audience.
For Winans, the premise for Uncle Jack told through a fairytale lens was about shaping a point of view: “I strongly believe the world we see is a choice of perspective. Some of us see the laws of physics and some of us see magic. The fairy tale theme in a modern context was just choosing to see the typical action (cars and guns) sequence as magical instead.” The perspective was shaped by the dramatic need for Jack to tell a story to his niece—not only to keep his promise, but eventually this act provides him self-realization about his own foibles and need for humility and change.
Uncle Jack and his niece—their conflicting dramatic needs that coalesce around a mutual desire to help each other out—express the core of Winan’s short. How the characters react to the situation they’re in defines who these characters are, and by having Jack become this father figure to his niece in her time of need provides her an opportunity to help save his life over the phone. And the dramatic needs of the characters are what an audience identifies with.
The story sets the tone and becomes the soul of the shoot. The camera is secondary. Philip Bloom, at a DSLR Hdi RAWworks Masterclass held in Los Angeles on March 6, 2010, discussed that it didn’t really matter what lenses or camera you use if the content is “engaging”; it’s the story that matters.
Always start with characters—from them stems the conflict, thus the drama, and the audience will more easily get caught up in the story.
Always start with characters—from them stems conflict, thus the drama, and the audience will more easily get caught up in the story.
Documentary filmmakers Brent and Craig Renaud have made such films as Warrior Champions, Little Rock Central High: 50 Years Later, Taking the Hill, Off to War, and Dope Sick Love. When asked about shooting short doc projects for the The New York Times after the earthquake in Haiti, they discussed the importance of finding stories that others avoid:
We love to tell stories that won’t get told otherwise or at least not in the same way. In one story we produced for the The New York Times recently we focused on the young Haitian American Navy Corpsmen aboard the USNS Comfort hospital ship who have been called upon to be translators for victims of the earthquake in Haiti. With no training at all, these young men and women stepped up and became a lifeline for vulnerable Haitian patients coming aboard the ship, a foreign country really, unfamiliar and scary. The Corpsmen comfort the patients and attend to their needs, letting them know that the United States is here to help. Sometimes they tell the patients that their legs will be amputated, or even that they will soon die. Through the experience of these translators the viewer is given a totally different and interesting look at this crisis. These Corpsmen are national heroes, and had we not profiled them, very few people would have known it. Showing things like this to the world is something that makes us proud.
(Lancaster, 2010, Documentary Tech. http://documentarytech.com/?p=3489)
One of their major themes revolves around the underdog doing something that deepens the human experience. The Renaud brothers capture these moments in their projects because something within compels them to bring back stories that mean something. And at the heart of it is the story—not what camera they shoot on; not the technology—but what story they are going to tell and what characters would compellingly help convey that story.
In our long form documentary work everything is about character. We are more likely to start a project with a character we like rather than an issue or a story. The short form news stories that we produce for the Times are a little different, but not a lot. With these stories often we are starting from a larger concept, like the Drug War in Juarez, or the earthquake in Haiti, but whereas most news stories are dominated by a correspondent either on camera or in voice-over, we are still looking for characters to drive the story. We do use some voiceover in these news pieces because it helps focus and keep the stories short. However we use as little as possible. We believe the look on a child’s face, or a gesture from a politician, uncommented on can sometimes speak worlds more than an all knowing voice-over.
(Lancaster 2010, Documentary Tech. http://documentarytech.com/?p=3489)
The character is key because around that person is a dramatic need that tends to be universal by which the audience can identify and become engaged with the content—and they will more quickly fall in love with your images!
WHERE DO GOOD IDEAS COME FROM?
I tell my writing and production students that there is only one of them in the universe, and their job is to discover their unique voice and share that with others. Good stories come from storytellers who are honest with themselves and tell a story that’s unique to their voice and passions. If you are going to shoot a scene in which a couple kiss, then you had better film it in such a way that comes from how you see the world—whether that’s drawn from a fantasy dream vision, a nightmare, or from real life. In either case, it’s rooted in how you feel and see the world. That’s essentially what good filmmakers do and helps guide them in shaping images that haven’t been seen before. We haven’t seen shots quite like those in Laforet’s Reverie. Although we’ve seen plenty of chase scenes in film, we haven’t quite seen the one Winans gives us in Uncle Jack (see Figure 7.1). These scenes stem from the vision of how these filmmakers perceive the world. It’s their unique voices that help provide power to those images. Then their choice of cameras and how they shape the look and feel of their scenes are coming from the right place—the story.
FIGURE 7.1 The clever and powerful story of Uncle Jack revolves around fairytale themes in a few short minutes. In this shot, a Pentax K-7 DSLR is taped to the steering wheel with a wide angle lens to shoot everyone in the car. The car is set in a studio against a greenscreen.
(© 2010 Jamin Winans. Used with permission.)
It’s their unique voices that help provide power to those images. Then their choice of cameras and how they shape the look and feel of their scenes are coming from the right place—the story.
However, if the shots are too unique—not tapping into the dramatic action of a character with wants and needs—you may end up putting together a pretty film, but you may lose your audience. Without a solid story, you won’t likely capture a large audience.
In a personal example, when I directed a short written by a former student of mine—The Kitchen, set in a 1950s farmhouse—the stifling heat of August would bring in evening thundershowers. In probably every movie I’ve seen, the sound of thunder always occurs simultaneously with the flash of lightning. But that’s not how I observed the world growing up during summer thunderstorms in Maine. There might be distant flashes of “heat” lightning with no thunder, and as it got closer, the lightning flash would always occur first, until it was right overhead. After seeing a flash, we would count the silence until the thunder to determine the approximate distance of the storm (five seconds would be about a mile). So when I crafted the sound design for this short around my experiences as a child in Maine, there would be flashes followed by moments of silence, the moments shortening as the storm intensified—and I paralleled this with the increasing emotional tensions of the film.
Winan’s Uncle Jack “started with the idea of a character forced to stay on his phone through ridiculous circumstances and yet try to make it seem like everything was fine,” the writer-director explains. “From there I asked the question, ‘Who’s the last person he should want to be on the phone with?’ I liked the contrast of a clearly shady guy talking very genuinely and sweetly to a little kid. That quickly led to him translating his current situation into a bedtime story.”
Developing Story Ideas by Michael Rabiger (Focal Press, 2006) is an essential read if you really want to tap into your original voice for finding and analyzing stories; it’s useful for writers and nonwriters. In it, he presents dozens of writing exercises that will help you discover a unique voice in telling stories. “Discovering the source of your stories,” he writes, “those you are best qualified to tell, means looking for causes and effects in your own life and grasping the nature of what you feel most deeply. … it regularly produces insights that make people more accessible and interesting—both the real people around you and the fictional ones you nurture into existence” (15). The book includes exercises on discovering your voice and influences in life, conducting dramatic analysis, and assessing the feasibility and quality of stories. It also includes a series of writing projects covering tales from your childhood and family stories, retelling a myth in a modern-day setting, telling a story based on dream images, adapting a short story, adapting a news story and a documentary topic, writing a 30-minute fiction piece, and writing a feature film.
Having taught beginning scriptwriting for seven years, I determined the number of good scripts in my class hovered around 20–25 percent. After my students began using Rabiger’s book, I saw the number of good scripts increase to 75–80 percent. The exercises work, so, as a professional educator, I wholeheartedly recommend the book.
Essentially, Rabiger guides you through a series of short writing exercises that tap into the your memories—whether it’s a childhood memory, a story told in the family (such as about the time when my crazy uncle…). He has you write in the present tense in outline script treatment form. In addition, he provides tools on how to analyze a script for its story structure, as well as how to assess a story for its strengths and weaknesses.
I end this section with a couple of writing exercises that should help you find your voice and begin writing stories (or choosing stories that resonate with you). The first is drawn from Rabiger’s Developing Story Ideas, and the second presents a way that I developed to write dialog. I include examples to help jump-start the exercises.
Exercise
Discovering Stories You Should Tell and Finding Story Ideas
Modified from Rabiger’s Developing Story Ideas (Focal Press, 2006: 25–26).3
“Survey of Yourself and Your Authorial Goals”
1. Describe the “marks left on you by one or two really formative experiences”—ones that were life-changing or forced you to appreciate life in a different way. It can be happy and/or sad experiences—but it should be something that moved you to experience deep emotions. Keep these notes private. They do not need to be shared.
2. “Develop two or three themes connected with the marks that this main character carries. Examples: isolation; betrayal; the high cost of pretense.”
3. “Think of three or four types of characters toward whom you feel particular empathy.”
4. “Develop four provisional story topics. Make all four exploit a single theme from your answer to #1,” and make each topic contain a main character, explore concerns you care about, and be as different from each other as possible.
5. If you want to work on a fiction piece, write a short three- to five-paragraph story in the present tense and showing only what an audience can see and hear (you can’t see thoughts, so keep the story within the main character’s point of view and what the audience can see on the imaginary movie screen of your mind). Craft the story around one of these story topics. Be sure to give your main character an agenda: she has a need, desire, or want that she must attempt to fulfill. Make her do it and put an obstacle or two in her way.
Example from one of my former students:
1. Psychological marks (private notes, not published).
2. Develop two or three themes
a. Shame
b. Self-destruction
c. Misdirected anger
3. Three or four types of characters:
a. Professional career people who obtained “everything” on their own and subsequently destroyed it all on their own.
b. Someone who lost his/her identity due to self-indulgence (Gollum/Sméagol from Lord of the Rings).
c. Children who are emotionally abandoned and therefore never feel validated in their own emotions.
4. Four provisional story topics based on the theme of self-destruction:
a. A motivated career woman who is secretly plagued by self-loathing and doubt but strives to be recognized and respected.
b. A daughter pretending that she’s successful, happy & healthy in order to protect her mother from the truth about her addiction to drugs.
c. A young thrill-seeker who hangs out with the Moab crowd to ride off cliffs with his bicycle and participates in various daredevil stunts—who is beginning to realize that he really doesn’t care if he gets hurt or even dies.
d. An animal rights activist & stray/abused animal rescuer who ends up getting overwhelmed and is finally arrested for animal abuse & neglect.
From this, we can see how this student evolved this theme into this story outline.
Scene 1: A 9-year-old girl named Millie wakes up and pads into the tiny kitchen of a dilapidated, wooden shack, clutching a ragged teddy bear. It is 1927 in rural Oklahoma. Millie sees her mother in the kitchen, staring wildly at the dirty pots and pans strewn all over the sink and table. Millie asks her mother what is wrong. Her mother tells her that ghosts came in during the night and messed up the pots and pans after she’d cleaned them, making breakfast for themselves and leaving before anyone in the house woke up. Millie tries to reason with her mother, but her mother emphatically tells her that she heard the ghosts clanking the pans and making a [ruckus] all night long. Millie presses the teddy bear close to her chest with both arms, turns around and goes back to her room.
Scene 2: Millie comes home from school during a cold winter day and sees that her little 4-year-old brother, Jake, is curled up in the corner, writhing in pain. She runs into the kitchen to tell her mother that something is wrong with Jake. Her mother continues to hum to herself and plod around the kitchen, making some kind of imaginary dinner for imaginary guests. Millie tugs on her mother’s skirt, insisting that she come now and look at Jake. Millie’s mother shoos her away and tells her it’s not polite to interrupt adults when they’re having a conversation—even though Millie’s mother is the only adult at home right now. Millie runs back into the living room to check on Jake. He is pale and holding his belly. He emits a loud moan and her mother’s voice can be heard from the kitchen, telling the children to pipe down and be quiet. Millie runs back into the kitchen once more, begging her mother to please come look at Jake, telling her that he’s really, really sick. Her mother stares out the window while she holds an imaginary bowl of imaginary food in one arm and stirs with an imaginary spoon in the opposite hand. Millie runs back into the living room and props open the front door. She clumsily gathers Jake up in her tiny arms. He is almost as big as she is, so she has to pull him up several different ways before she finally gets a good hold of the boy. Millie carefully steps out of the house and down the rickety wooden steps, and sets off across the fields.
Scene 3: Millie toddles across the field with her brother in her arms. She knows the general direction of town and heads for it. She continues walking with Jake, having to set him down every now and then to catch her breath, then gather him up again to keep walking. The hospital is miles away. Millie carries Jake this way all by herself for the entire journey.
Scene 4: Millie finally arrives at the hospital. Nurses notice her as she stumbles up the walkway, exhausted. The nurses run out to grab Jake and help her up. They ask her what is wrong, and she can barely breathe, much less talk. One of the nurses, after one look at Jake, picks the boy up and hurries into the building. Millie is helped inside by the nurses and given a drink of water. Millie sits on the cold, hard wooden bench and waits, her water cup emptied, her dress and face filthy with dirt and dead weeds from the fields she had to cross. She lies down and curls up on the bench.
Scene 5: Millie wakes up. A doctor is touching her shoulder, trying to ask her questions about where her parents are and how she got there. Millie rubs her eyes and gazes up at the doctor, asking for Jake. The doctor informs her that Jake had a serious case of appendicitis, and that if she had not taken him to the hospital when she had, his appendix would have burst and he very likely would have died. The doctor tells Millie that Jake must spend some time in the hospital bed and that she should go home. Millie obediently walks out of the hospital and heads across the miles of fields that lead to home.
We can see the development of an original voice in this story, one that comes from this student’s unique perspective on life. We can also see the development of the three act structure—the emotional arc mapping the change in character: the setup (the daughter notices that there is something wrong with her mother), complications (the daughter tries to get her mother to help the sick brother), climax/crisis (she takes her brother by herself to the hospital), and resolution (the brother survives).
Exercise
Writing Good Dialog
Give two characters conflicting agendas and place them into a scene that occurs in one location in one moment of time. As they speak, do not allow either of them to reveal their agenda through dialog—until the end of the scene (if at all), unless you want your story to sound like a soap opera! This will heighten the subtext—the underlying emotions and motivations of the characters—and will usually lead to good dialog. If you reveal the agenda too soon, the energy will likely dissipate quickly.
Example of dialog with hidden agendas (1) by Margo McClellen:
Daytime, outside a posh restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. PAULY is standing in front of the doorway and lights a cigarette. He dons a tacky blue jumpsuit and gold jewelry. A strange looking man, an ALIEN, wearing a tailored suit that could be Armani (if it weren’t for the fish-scale-like print) stoically walks up to Pauly.
ALIEN
Good afternoon. Please take me to your--
PAULY
Hey, is that a vintage Jag?
ALIEN
… good afternoon. I would like for you to--
PAULY
Hey man, what kind of mileage you get in that baby?
ALIEN
Mile--
PAULY
Yeah I bet she guzzles, eh? But who gives a crap, right? That car is HOT.
ALIEN
Good … afternoon … I would like--
PAULY
You don’t speak English too good, do ya?
Pauly glances up and down the street.
PAULY
Hey, my girlfriend’s comin’ out in a sec. She’s gotta SEE this thing!
(toward restaurant entrance)
Hey, SHEILA! Get yer ass out here, RIGHT NOW…you gotta SEE this!
(to ALIEN)
Hey uh, do you have the time?
ALIEN
Time? I--
PAULY
HEEEY SHEEEILA!!!
SHEILA sprints out of the restaurant, glancing over her shoulder. She notices Alien and smiles sweetly, then looks at Pauly urgently.
PAULY
Here, baby, c’mon—you gotta SEE this CAR!
Pauly grabs her arm and starts to pull her toward Alien’s “car”.
PAULY
(walking around the car)
Check this OUT, man!
(to ALIEN)
Hey, you wouldn’t mind if we took it for a little spin would you? I’ll give you FIVE HUNDRED BUCKS right now if you just let me take it around the block. All you gotta do is just WAIT HERE ‘til we get back …
ALIEN
Wait … here? You must take me to your--
PAULY
Yeah yeah yeah I’ll take you wherever you wanna go, foreign boy. After we get back.
He and Sheila exchange a knowing glance as they get into the “car.” The vehicle begins to sputter, then starts violently flashing bright yellow and orange.
PAULY
(from inside the car)
WHAT the--
The “car” winks out of existence. Alien just stands there, staring at the empty parking space.
ALIEN
Well … crap.
We can clearly see the two different agendas: The alien wants directions to the “leader,” while Pauly wants to “borrow” the alien’s ride and impress his girlfriend. Although it’s clear what both characters want, by having Pauly be the lead—taking charge, doing what he wants, he is able to overcome the obstacle of the alien character. The alien, on the other hand, is clear on what it wants, but its agenda is so at odds with Pauly’s that it never gets a chance—which adds to the comedic flavor of the scene. Good dialog is driven by hidden agendas.
Example of dialog with hidden agenda by Ed Crosby.
Will and Joe, two high school students, hang out in the back of their school. They’re smoking cigarettes. Jennifer skips up to them.
JEN
Hey Will.
WILL
‘Sup.
Joe
Hey Jen.
Jen doesn’t take her eyes off Will.
JEN
Oh hey … umm Will, how are you?
WILL
Fine.
JEN
Oh cool.
JOE
What’s goin on with you, Jen?
JEN
Nothin much.
WILL
Man, I can’t wait to get my leather jacket.
JEN
Oh yeah that’s a beautiful jacket. It’s gonna look really good on you.
WILL
Yeah, I know, I’ve been saving for like a month but it’s gonna be worth it. Man I’m going to look so cool.
JEN
Yeah.
Joe
Hey Jen did you get that note I left in your locker?
JEN
Huh? Uhh no … I don’t know.
JOE
Yeah well basically I’m going to The Rat this weekend to see The Unseen so I can pick you up a t-shirt or a pin or whatever ‘cause I remember you said how you liked them when we were talking about bands at the pep rally.
JEN
What? Oh yeah that would be cool.
WILL
That punk rock shit, fuckin sucks. They can’t even play. Sounds like shit.
JOE
It’s not about musicianship, Will, It’s about raw aggression.
WILL
Yeah cause that’s what gets girls in the mood, “raw aggression.”
JEN
Ummm, I kind of like it.
WILL
Whatever.
JOE
Yeah so if you want a t-shirt They’re only like 5 bucks but I can totally spot you the cash. You can pay me after or maybe you could buy me a beer sometime.
JEN
Hmmm hmmm. Hey Will, uhhhh … Can you give me a ride?
WILL
You wanna ride in The Machine?
JEN
Yeah, I love The Machine.
WILL
Sure, babe. What you gonna do for me?
JEN
Heh heh.
Jen looks at Joe who is looking at the ground.
WILL
God I love that car. It’s like an extension of my personality. It’s like you can look at my car and go, “Yeah, that guy is pretty cool.”
JEN
(turned off)
Uhhh yeah.
JOE
That’s how I feel about my 10 speed. One look at that thing and the ladies go wild.
Jen laughs.
WILL
What, are you serious? No chick is into a guy who rides a bike.
JEN
Yeah, I mean how old are you?
JOE
16.
JEN
And you ride a bike?
JOE
Yeah, that’s right I ride a bike!
JEN
Okay, Jesus!
They all stand around shifting uncomfortably. The schoolbell rings.
WILL
Well, schools out. Gimme another smoke, Joe. Come on, The Machine awaits.
JOE
(Looking at the ground) I’m gonna walk.
WILL
What dude, you live like four miles from here.
JOE
Yeah I know.
WILL
You’re going to walk four miles in those ratty tennis shoes. They’re going to fall off by the time you get home.
JOE
I don’t care.
WILL
Okay, come on, Jen.
JEN
Hey, you know, I just remembered I have detention today.
WILL
Okay.
JEN
Okay see you guys later.
Jen runs off without looking at either of them.
WILL
She is so weird. Alright, man, have a good walk.
JOE
Thanks.
Will walks off. Joe, suddenly hauls off and kicks a garbage can, then he just stands there. He turns to walk away.
JEN
Joe!
JOE
Jen?
Jen walks out from behind the school.
JOE
Will left already.
JEN
Oh.
She looks around and fidgets. JOE What happened to detention?
JEN
Uhhh… cancelled … yeah they cancelled it.
They both stand there looking uncomfortable.
JOE
Well I was gonna go …
JEN
YES!
JOE
Yes?
JEN
I mean what were you going to say?
JOE
I was gonna go home and listen to records.
JEN
Oh that sounds cool.
JOE
I mean you could come too if you wanted.
JEN
Uhhh sure.
They walk off together smiling.
The subtext is clear, and we never have to worry about feeling as though the author is spoon-feeding how we should feel about the characters or let them tell us what their agendas are. Rather, the writer lets the emotional dynamics of the characters take over as they try not to say what’s exactly on their minds, and we’re led into a story that is entertaining because it forces the audience to guess what’s going on, and this guessing is what keeps them interested.
STORY STRUCTURE
After you have a sense of character down and what the story may be about—and have a sense of how to write decent dialog—you need to think about story structure. This story structure is mainly shaped, or caused, by the main character, whether the character is initiating the action or reacting to it. In Uncle Jack, Jack wants to flee his pursuers, while trying to keep his niece happy over the phone. The structure of the story comes out of his need to escape while simultaneously using the changing scenes of his escapade to embellish the fairytale he’s telling his niece.
Every action has a reaction. What occurs in one scene causes what will follow. A character does this by performing actions. He engages in actions because he wants something. Uncle Jack’s niece wants him to tell her a story so she doesn’t have to think about her parents’ fighting. Uncle Jack reacts to this by telling her a story, while he simultaneously wants to escape his attackers. Neither character is static. For one thing, if a character is static, then there’s nothing to propel the story forward; there is no dramatic need for an audience to gain emotional attachment and they’ll look for other stories that hook them. And second, these actions, the dramatic needs of the characters, must be arranged in a such a way as to build emotions in the characters and, by extension, the audience.
Dramatic need drives the plot—the arrangement of actions. A bride wanting to get married would be the dramatic need in a wedding video, for example. So, when we’re the DSLR shooters, what actions do we need to capture that reveal this dramatic need? In fiction, the dramatic needs of the character start with the writer but continue through production and into the postproduction phase of editing. But the principle applies to nonwriters, as well. The filmmaker, whether shooting a documentary on the fly or setting up a commercial, rock video, or wedding shoot, must understand the dramatic needs of the characters and subjects to be able to deliver useful shots for the editor (even if the filmmaker is the editor!); these shots need to move the story forward.
Typical story structures follow this pattern: hook, introduction or setup of the dramatic need of the character (some may refer to this as the exposition, the minimal necessary information needed by an audience to get the story), conflict or complications to the dramatic need that rises to a climax, and finally a resolution (the dramatic need is resolved).
A hook is an incident that grabs the audience’s attention right away. We’re given some kind of background or context or introduction to the character or situation. There’s some obstacle the character must overcome to get what she wants; this conflict builds to a crisis point or climax where the character either gets what she wants or doesn’t. Finally, the resolution reveals what the character learned from her experience.
This should not be a formulaic process, but rather one that’s organic, rising out of the character’s needs and wants as expressed by the writer (or filmmaker analyzing the story structure of whatever piece she’s planning to shoot). The emotional changes a character goes through pivot around the setup, complications, and climax. These emotional changes in character (the character arc) typically revolve around three acts.
• Act 1 presents the setup, the introduction of the characters, their background, and setting. It may introduce the conflict—the central need or want of the character coming into conflict with something, someone, or even herself.
• Act 2 presents a turn of events for the central character in her quest to get what she wants; obstacles or complications get in her way, eventually escalating to Act 3.
• Act 3 comes at the apex of the story, the climatic point representing the strongest emotional moment for the character where she must face the final confrontation, the final crisis (the wedding vows and kiss at the wedding). She either gets what she wants or she doesn’t, thus resolving the story.
In the Alien-Pauly story described in the dialog writing exercise, we can even see the emotional arc of the characters in a mini three-act structure; indeed, individual scenes will contain elements of the three-act structure (but usually not the resolution because the story continues into another scene):
• Setup of Act 1: The alien wants directions, while Pauly checks out the Alien’s ride, thinking that it’s a souped-up car.
• Act 2: This act adds the complication of Pauly deciding not to just look at the “car,” but to call his girlfriend out and take the car for a spin, perhaps even to steal it—rising to the climax/crisis in the next act.
• Act 3: Pauly taking the “car,” leaving the Alien standing on the sidewalk as the resolution.
In Uncle Jack, the emotional arc of the characters look like this:
• Setup of Act 1: Uncle Jack tries to escape thugs shooting at him. His niece calls him. He tries to get rid of her, but can’t, taking us to…
• Act 2: This act adds the complication of Uncle Jack trying to tell a fairytale to his niece while he flees the car, enters a train, saves his buddy clown from falling from a building, and heads down a tunnel.
• Act 3: And they hide in a costume shop, where they are cornered by two gunman, while the niece explains to Uncle Jack how to escape the situation, thus resolving the story.
Why is this important for us as DSLR shooters? As the person responsible for setting the look of the shots and capturing them on camera, you, as the director (whether shooting it yourself or working with a cinematographer), must understand the story and know what images go where so the editor has everything needed to deliver a strong story. Gordon Willis, ASC, describes how the cinematographer “is responsible for the image. He is responsible for putting that magic up on the wall. He’s the visual psychiatrist, moving the audience from here to there”4
If the cinematographer doesn’t understand the story—the underlying dramatic needs of the character expressed over time—then how will she know what to shoot and how to shoot? This is rooted in the story. When a clearly written script maps the change of a character as he attempts to get what he wants (or even just a brief outline of the emotional change of the bride and groom in a wedding video), then it’s much easier to revolve the story around a central character trying to get what he wants. If the story is vague, with a weak central character, the story doesn’t move forward and the cinematography doesn’t have a basis on which to shoot. Plus, you end up with random shots that might look pretty but don’t move a story forward, moment by moment, shot by shot, and will likely bore an audience.
Get a script, write a script, adapt a story, or analyze and structure a rock video or wedding shoot around a story. If you can’t think of a story, then modernize a fairytale and shoot it with friends. What would a short film look like if you rewrite and set the “Little Red Riding Hood” folktale in New York City or Los Angeles or a small town in middle America? Tell a story with your images.
Winans, the writer and director of the Internet short Uncle Jack (as well as the writer-director of 2009’s fantastic independent film, Ink) believes that “story is everything” when it comes to narrative filmmaking. As a beginning filmmaker, he used to gravitate toward “cool shots, cool editing” without thinking too much about the story. “But after enough miserably failed films with really cool shots,” Winans explains, “it became apparent that if I didn’t have the script, and more specifically the story, then I was sunk no matter what I did with the camera.” So as he honed his filmmaking skills, he focused on the story: “As the years have gone by, my focus has been less and less on the technical process and more and more about the script.” He faced a hard lesson and realized that “filmmaking is way too difficult, expensive, and time consuming to waste on a bad script,” he adds.
Until you’re telling a story, you’re not doing cinema but simply playing around with a camera.
Let’s look at an example to see how this structure can be seen in Vincent Laforet’s Internet hit Reverie (see http://vimeo.com/7151244), shot on a Canon 5D Mark II. This short piece (97 seconds, excluding credits), tells the simple story of a man forgetting to meet his girl at a specific place. He wakes up and realizes he’s late, then flies out the door, grabs flowers, and races his way to her location in his car, but misses her. Finally, the search escalates as he rides a helicopter in order to find her, but he fails. The movie ends as it began, a man sleeping on a couch dreaming about his girl. He wakes up and rushes out to try and meet her in time, but his love is gone—or perhaps it was just a dream.
Let’s map Laforet’s short as a mini three-act piece on the graph, as shown in Figure 7.2.
FIGURE 7.2 The three-act structure of Vincent Laforet’s Reverie.
Act 1: Hook, setup of dramatic need: The man wants the woman. We see a man and woman kissing. Man on sofa, sleeping, as TV flickers light onto him. He gets flashes of images of a woman dressed in red, waiting for him. The conflict is set up: he should be there, but he fell asleep watching TV. Act 2: Rising action, further complications to his dramatic need. Man washes his face, rushes up stairs, grabs flowers, and races through the city, looking around as he drives. The woman stands and waits. There is a series of shots of the man driving, overcoming further obstacles; he’s using the GPS—perhaps he’s lost. He arrives, whipping off his sunglasses, but she’s not there. Act 3: Climax/crisis/final confrontation and resolution. The girl’s gone. The man’s arrived too late, and the flowers drop out of his hand. He sweats bullets. He drives around the city, looking for her. The sequence ends with a climatic shot of him in a helicopter as he continues to look for her. Panoramic shots of the city. The story is resolved as he realizes he’s not going to find her. The short ends with him on his couch, waking up and rushing out the door—presumably the beginning of the film, or perhaps he’s just dreaming about the encounter and failure to meet the girl. In either case, the story is resolved. He doesn’t get the girl.
STORYTELLING SHOOTING EXERCISE
By Dave Anselmi
A good way to practice scriptwriting and see how what you write gets translated on film is to take a small scene from one of your favorite films and re-create it, shot by shot. Shoot a scene from one of your favorite films (make sure it’s a good film that you can actually shoot—an action film with a lot of special effects may be too hard, but a good scene of drama can do the trick). By repeating the scene, by re-creating it shot-by-shot, you’ll get a good sense of how good storytelling works on film. With this knowledge, you’ll start to understand how to write better scripts.
Once the story is in place, a script written, then the cinematographer—in consultation with the director—determines the look and feel of the film, before shooting begins. In smaller projects, you may be the cinematographer and the director. In either case, the story should be your guide in determining how the film should look—whether you’re shooting people to provide a snapshot of a city, wedding, commercial, music video, short, documentary, piece of video journalism, or feature.
NOTES
1 Fauer, J. (2008). Cinematographer Style: The Complete Interview, Vol. 1, (p.297). American Society of Cinematographers.
2 All quotations by Winans in this chapter were conducted by the author in June 2010.
3 This exercise was published in Developing Story Ideas, Second Edition, by Michal Rabiger, Chapter 3, “Artistic Identity,” Copyright © 2006 Elsevier, Inc. Printed with permission.
4 Fauer, J. (2008). Cinematographer Style: The Complete Interviews, Vol. 1, (p.315). American Society of Cinematographers.