Film crit hulk screenwriting 101 pdf download

Like Plato describing the cave, we use our considerate and thoughtful minds to pass the torch of universal truths and do our best to distinguish them from the shadows. And if we can fundamentally agree that stories are both important and have a purpose The real question becomes: what makes a good narrative? Is it something that involves you?

Is it something that is well-realized? That feels honest and real? That is crafted without extraneous excess? That gets you to learn something you never knew before? Or is it something that speaks to some basic truth that you now recognize in yourself? The correct answer is "yes. There is, of course, some amount of wiggle room when it comes to how successful each of these elements needs to be in relation to each other.

For instance, if your story is really concerned with the thematic meaning of a given scene it can indulge in some aspects that are not wholly crucial for story economy. Theres a negotiation to all of this. You can't lose sight of all the things a good story needs, but when you do go out of bounds it has to be for a really good reason.

Sure that good reason mostly depends on what matters to you, the proverbial author, or you, the proverbial audience member, but Hulk thinks it's safe to say that every great film does capture all of these elements in some way.

So let's just go for it! Here Hulk presents a working definition of ideal storytelling: a good narrative is compelling to the audience, economically told, feels real either in terms of emotion, detail, or texture, and speaks to some thematic truth that you recognize in yourself or the world at large.

And all Hulk had to do was cheat with a long, silly sentence that was just a list of the stuff Hulk said earlier. Yes, this definition sets a high standard for execution, but please remember it is not meant to be exclusive or limiting or inflexible. Its instead an ideal model for how to tell the best possible stories. Meaning the definition is meant to be both practical and an inspiration, not restrictive. Hulk wont inherently exclude anything for lacking a component. Its just that Hulk tends to recognize that all the best stories are multifaceted, complex, interesting, and resonant.

No matter how technically "untrue" a story may be, a well-told, compelling one will still feel real. And the best stories speak to your mind thematically , body viscerally , and soul with resonance. So why wouldnt you want your own stories to do the same? Hulk is all about embracing the high standard, regardless of our ability to actually live up to it.

Just sit down and look at that definition again, then look at your own stories. Ask yourself, are you trying to be cool instead of compelling? Are you trying to be disaffected and edgy instead of authentic? Are you being disingenuous to the world you've created in the name of a quick fix? Heck, are you even thinking about what your story says on a larger thematic level at all? In total, are you at least trying to do all the things you need to fit our working definition of a good narrative?

And the answers to these questions will tell you everything you need to know. Well, proverbial reader who lives in Hulks book, Hulk would like to suggest that you implicitly know stories. You know them in your bones. You, no matter who you are, instinctively know what makes stories good and how they work. The key is simply to become aware of what you already know. The problem with Hulk trying to help you find inspiration is that inspiration sort of has to be um natural.

It certainly cannot be forced. Inspiration is largely a mysterious process that is, by its nature, organic and rather personal. And to understand how you, as an individual, find that inspiration takes practice, patience, and a lot of hard work.

Sure, Hulk could give you the thoroughly bad and rather popular answer of saying "Stories are all around you! You just have to look for them! Even if the statement is weirdly true.

Stories and inspiration actually are everywhere. But the real key is training your brain how to recognize this inspiration and apply it readily. And in doing so it will become constant, pervasive, and even downright suffocating to the point where you wont be able to keep up. For far too long, Hulk thought the key to inspiration was having the ability to decipher a story that was worth telling versus one that isn't worth telling but that was wrong.

Anything in this universe can be a story worth telling, as long as you know how to best tell it. So that means the real key is understanding how to take that inspiration and make it manifest as story. So the first thing we have to do is decipher why the moment of inspiration itself really matters. It's not just the starting point, but something that can work as a backbone for the entire process of writing. Consider the fact that Hulk has tons of ideas at the moment and they exist in various forms: brain storms, outlines, half-written screenplays, fully-written screenplays, short stories, teleplays, novels.

Even a litany of small ideas written on napkins and scraps of paper. What this personal information is meant to imply is that the relative "done-ness" or form of the property has absolutely nothing to do with the idea and concept itself. A finished film is as close to the inspiration that spawned it as that original scribbled note on a napkin.

To the creator, they are conceptually the same thing, no matter how much they might have changed. Never forget that. Because the germ of your idea can be the thing that must constantly light the fire underneath you as you go forth. When you are in the slog of working out the logistics, you must find that same inspiration. Even if the project radically changes, the idea itself should be a through-line that saves your script throughout the process.

The moment of inspiration is both your motive and motivation. But even then, where to get that idea written on a napkin? The germ of the idea? The very first thing that you write down? The answers to those questions are so ethereal and vague that it is almost foolish to really try and answer it.

But, foolish as it may be, Hulk wants to help you. So Hulks going to do Hulk's best here and try to give you some productive ways of finding stories you want to tell. To do that, Hulk will start with a question: why does it seem like so many movies arent trying to say anything these days?

Probably because a lot of movies arent trying to say anything these days. Its a bit of a forgotten element in all this. Often we view a film trying to say something as an obstacle to entertainment, a challenging notion that prevents us from placating audiences with the dumb, mindless entertainment we think they crave. But as Hulk alluded to in Part One, Hulk disagrees with this idea.

Humanity creates narratives. We give things meaning and value and import. You can bemoan the rise of reality. TV and say that its not saying anything because its clearly full of false and manufactured storylines, all of which is likely true, but as a culture who watches it, we still assign socialization and narrative to reality TV all the same. People talk of the motives of the Kardashians the same way we do the motives of the highest fiction.

The Kardashian show may not be intentionally trying to say anything, and there may be an intellectual chasm between the subtleties of that kind of show and the pinnacle of art, but it is rather easy to forget that were effectively doing the same thing with both properties. Both are narratives that serve the same purpose of informing life. Meaning both low-fiction and high-fiction say something. Of course, Hulk imagines there are those of you out there who think that a film trying to say something is annoying, who feel it is didactic.

Hulk also rejects this notion, for saying something, anything is the very purpose of art. And narrative is the best vehicle in the world for conveying meaning.

Its so good it can do it incidentally. So what do you want to say? What is it that you want to tell the world? Thats what inspiration is. It is something that is inspirational to you. So Hulk will now ask you a better question: what compels you? There are a lot of different avenues you can go down while trying to answer that question, but lets try the most literal and concrete first. First let us try to answer it on a macro, issue-based level: are you concerned with problems facing our nations youth?

The conditions of farm animals? Crooked politicians? The unsung plight of nurses and other people trying to do good in a bureaucracy?

Corrupt practices of corporate business? Mundane heroisms? Gender inequality? Sexual politics? Really, you are just asking yourself, what do I have a strong opinion about? The funny thing is that people use these topics in making documentaries all the time, but Hulk wants to convey to you that this is also a great way to find inspiration for fiction. Of course, the prime worry of doing so is that youll just end up making a political essay in the form of a movie.

Or that you will retroactively create a narrative that only fits what you want to say, and thus it will feel like a mouthpiece and not an organic story. But the point of embracing these kinds of broad issues from the get-go is that they always seem to have some sort of personal relevance, one that will help drive the creative voice of your work. Plus it speaks to the old adage "write what you know. It breeds the idea that we can only tell the uber-personal.

Thus, Hulk thinks write what compels you is a much more functional way to discover your own ideas. The main reason this issue-centric approach works is that it tends to naturally imbue your film with the thematic backbone a strong narrative requires. And because, come on, you should freaking care about the story you are telling. Otherwise, why even do it? The audience really can tell. And if you don't care? That comes across plain as day, too look at the career arc of Brett Ratner, for instance.

Aesthetically everything is pleasing enough - or at least a carbon copy of what he intends to mimic, but the films are soulless. And the one film of his he was excited about was Rush Hour, which actually connected with people in a valid popcorn way. Most writers and filmmakers care for something within the films identity, whether it is the genre, audience effect, or craft implementation.

Are you telling a scary story? You should delight in scaring your audience. Going back to our definition of what is a story? You should engage the audience. And in order to do that:. You have to have something to say, even if that something is ambivalent or esoteric. But remember, this large-scale, issue-first approach is just one half of the deal. So you essentially need a second inspiration to go along with your issue.

You need to craft a story that is achingly human as a partner to your themes. And that means you have to craft organic characters, characters that are not mere props to larger ideas, making the story reek of being hollow and manufactured. You can't just reverse engineer some characters that fit your ideal situation and have them act out what you want to say and do. Everything is grounded in character. They make it all feel human. Hulk will explain in the upcoming sections on empathy, but its just how the best stories resonate with us.

So for the same question of making a human film What compels you? This time let us answer it on a micro level and think of specific life details that reveal larger ideas. For instance: "My friend so-and-so is amazing. She volunteers at a hospital and", or, "I read this great article about so-and-so. Heck, it doesn't even have to be people-centric. You can be like "I thought of this great scenario where or "Heres this really neat sci-fi world where so-and-so is possible.

Or heck, you can just have a single line or image that you find compelling. These microlevel details are a much more common form of inspiration. They are wonderful, tiny little nuggets of inspiration that invite you and excite you to larger possibilities of storytelling.

But they alone are not narratives. That is so important to understand. In fact, it is the reason Hulk put the two halves of inspiration in that order. So often people think to start with the tiny nuggets and then figure out what you want to say later, but it is Hulks experience that people dont really know how to do that.

Again, so many films are voiceless. So many films simply say "I want to write about this textured, interesting person, and think that it will somehow magically produce a textured, interesting story. A good narrative has to be created. Slaved over. Worked through time and time again before it is something so much more. What this dynamic actually speaks to is the great lesson that singular details are not stand-ins for characterization.

For example, there have been a lot of recent movies that have gotten into trouble for assuming texture and character detail somehow is the same thing as character motive. We dont need details to tell us who characters are and what they like, we need details to show us what characters want and need and what they will likely do.

This is the heart of drama well Hulk will use this phrase a lot, so its one of them. And thus allow Hulk to argue that the whole popular hatred for quirky indie movies has nothing to do with their being quirky, or maudlin, or saccharine.

It's because they're often empty. People latch onto hating the quirk, insisting that it does not "feel real," but in Hulks opinion that is a misdiagnosis. It's that so often these oblique characteristics try to hide a lack of narrative or thematic purpose. Extravagant character details are welcome if theres purpose, in fact those quirky movies with real meat to them tend to work like gangbusters, but so often we get character detail apropos of nothing.

We get heavy grit apropos of nothing. You have to go further than that. Everything needs a purpose. And so with real life stories you have to also realize that sometimes the "facts" get in the way of good storytelling. Hulk will get balls-deep into why that is so true later, but Hulk just wants you to understand that when were dealing with the moment of inspiration we have to also understand how that moment will translate into a good story from the get-go. And the more understanding of that process we have, the more capable you will become in finding inspiration.

Because ultimately, a truly good narrative is born from the combining of the macro and micro into one singular, coherent approach. Your characters and the story they inhabit should be in complete alignment with the intention of your themes.

It is the sublime combination of text and subtext, which means your narrative too because thats what you are saying. And when you think all the way back to that germ of an idea that compels you, whether it's a detail, a person, a concept, or a theme, you must then zero in and figure out how that germ then becomes a story.

It would be easy for Hulk to sit here and talk about this on and on in the abstract, so lets get specific with an example. When Alan Ball created Six Feet Under, he had a passing thought about a family who worked as undertakers and how that must be a weird life wherein they are confronting mortality every day of their lives.

That was the germ of the idea. It wasn't just that it was "weird" or "different," but that the characters engaged an interesting idea so plainly and tangibly. They battle a concept that is so damn pertinent to our culture, particularly one that largely avoids the topic of death altogether.

And with this idea he figured out a way to immediately blend text and subtext. But that was just the conceit. He had so much further to go before it became a story filled with purpose.

He filled it out with rich, textured characters that also compelled him. Prim matriarchs, 35 year old granola transients, closeted gay adults, and disaffected teens. But again. That doesn't make a story, either. So he then came up with two devices that helped propel everything. First, their father dies in the opening moments of the show so that this show about confronting mortality didnt just do so on the abstract or tangential level, but on a deeply personal level too.

And the second device was that every single episode would open with a different funeral client's death, which allowed him to color the show with different meanings and themes time and time again. But more importantly both story decisions helped reinforce the central theme of the show. Every detail helped confront mortality in every possible way, dramatically and philosophically, helping to marry the text and subtext.

But more importantly to our subject at hand, do you see the role that the germ of the idea plays in the story construction? We think about what compels us, and in this case it was the image of a family and the idea of "confronting mortality," and he used that as the through-line for the entire series, right up until the series final episode, "The End.

Notice how Hulk brought up a TV show as the prime example? Hulk did that on purpose. The first reason is to understand that a germ of an idea can carry you across five years and countless hours of story if youll let it. And the second reason is that it is important to understand from the get-go that not every idea is a great fit for the medium of screenwriting. Some ides make the most sense for TV.

Some make sense for a novel. Some make sense for video games. Some make sense for a comedy sketch. This is important to realize because Hulk reads things every day that would really best be suited as other media. Its symptomatic of the fact that people like to box themselves in as a screenwriter, TV writer, etc.

And it only has the ending effect of limiting the best possible articulation of your idea. And worse than that, the shape of each medium is rapidly changing into one. So get ready to embrace all of it. For we are writers, no matter what the form. We have distilled the best screenwriting books for you. However, they all represent a different perspective. Just sign up for a free trial with Audible. They are both essential texts for screenwriters and getting them for free via Audible is a great deal.

This is one of the most comprehensive screenwriting books out there, written by two experts on the craft. It takes an in-depth look into the screenplay as a physical craft, deconstructing its many moving parts and arranging them in a cohesive and valuable learning experience. It then places the lessons it teaches on top of the structures of about fifteen classic screenplays to illustrate how the mechanics taught here have functioned in real filmmaking and writing. This is a must-have for any writer, and while the prose itself is nothing to write home about, it deserves valuable real estate near or around your writing desk.

Podcasts Team Deakins — This has quickly become my favorite podcast on filmmaking. Not only do they cover cinematography in a delightful level of detail, but they have on guests with various jobs in movies. Want to know what a script supervisor does? They got an episode where one tells it in great detail. Highly recommended. Film Crit Hulk is an film critic who writes in the persona of the Incredible Hulk. In this book, available only as an e-book, he has put together a bunch of stuff from his blog, all about constructing stories and films.

I really like his approach, which does not rely on formula. More about playwriting, but applicable to screenwriting as well. Story by Robert McKee. This one is a little heavier on formula than I like. But I got a lot out of this that I found useful, and this is a lot less heavy on formula than most similar books.

Dialogue by Robert McKee. This is a terrific book all about improving your dialogue. It helped me understand how to write subtext. Strongly recommended. The Comic Toolbox and various other works by John Voorhees. Voorhees writes mostly about writing for TV, but his stuff is applicable to screenwriting as well.

I like the various tools and ways of looking at things that he presents. Screenwriting by Film Crit Hulk! Your tags:. Send-to-Kindle or Email Please login to your account first Need help? Please read our short guide how to send a book to Kindle. The file will be sent to your email address. Screenwriting 77 Related searches Screenwriting Filmcrithulk. Documents Similar To Filmcrithulk Screenwriting Gaurav Meena. Flavia Neves.

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