As promised yesterday here are some practical guidelines in making a good comedy: Just because everyone on the set thinks it’s funny, doesn’t mean an audience will like it.
Remember that feature films are made and watched under completely different circumstances. A film crew might be near the edge of hysteria after a long, [...]
Making someone laugh is a bit like scratching their back. The specific location of an itch may be difficult for the scratcher to hit first time, and the scratchee usually can’t describe the exact place where it itches either. With a bit of direction along the lines of ‘up a bit, down a bit, [...]
As mentioned on the blog entry ‘Three Act Structure: First Act’ we would look a little further into inciting incidents and plot points. An inciting incident usually comes half way through the first act and sets your whole film in motion. So for example in ‘Night of the living dead’ this is the [...]
In the previous blog entry I was talking about the three act structure. Let’s take a little look at what should happen in the first act.
Act 1: SET UP
If our film is 90 minutes long then our first act is going to be about 20 -25 minutes long. In those [...]
Knowing how to structure your film will really help when you come to write the screenplay. If you apply the three act structure it will divide your film into three parts (see diagram below).
Once applied you should begin to get an idea of what should be happening [...]
Knowing how to set out your script is an important lesson to learn. As I mentioned in the entry ‘Ideas’, the script’s the cornerstone of your production. So unless you plan to ditch the script completely and improvise your way through your film lets discuss script layout. I’ve knocked up a page based [...]
I love the idea of making a zombie film and after thinking about locations and budget I need to think about what’s going to make my film stand out from the crowd. Let’s face it everybody and their wife are making zombie films so I’m going to have to give it a fresh [...]
I’m going to put into practice what I discussed in the earlier entry on ‘ideas’. I talked about three key elements (focusing on a film that you, yourself, are going to produce) that I thought were necessary when having an idea for a film: Budget, Originality and Hook. So if I were to [...]
We’re going to start out looking at the script as the fundemental building block for your movie. I always thought that writing a feature film would be easy. You could just get a handful of set pieces and string them together. I thought it was as simple as sitting down over a weekend [...]
