Briefly, the most important aspect to a movie is to evoke an emotional experience out of the audience and it must occur throughout the whole movie or you’ve lost the audience. They walk out which is what you don’t want. You must keep the audience interested and entertained by stimulating their curiosity as to what is going to happen next, what the characters are thinking, or by inspiring them via a character’s actions. Telling the story from your own heart, experiences, and point of view in an honest manner will help bring your film and characters to life making the connection to the audience more real.

There are basics to a good story. One doesn’t usually just sit down and write a story. They shape it according to structures that have existed for centuries.

A protagonist (the good guy) has a goal and needs to take action to achieve it. But as it is in most people's life, there are obstacles to overcome—the conflict. The conflict can be internal (it helps to have this no matter what the subject), physical, or the threat of another character, the antagonist or the bad guy. At the point the obstacles are no longer a threat and any conflict disappears, we have the climax and resolution. The whole story is the transition from obstacle to resolution.

Hey, it’s a great story. Whether biographies like Ray, or Starwars, or even the Ken Burns documentary, History of Jazz, it’s much the same structure.

Characters drive the story with their actions. Characters, whether real or not, have their own realities driven by their own internal conflicts and happiness. Characters who are always happy have internal affinity. Characters who have ups and downs have contrast usually making them more interesting. It is a known fact that parents favor the craziest child usually with the most internal conflict. These children bring out the emotions in the parent.

The main character, protagonist, has to go through a transition during the movie—the character arch. Shortly or at the start of the movie, the character has some sort of personal conflict. Working through the conflict leads the character to a transformation and for the rest of the movie they are now able to deal with the antagonist and the plot thickens as they say.

The plot is the series of events that happen in the story. John meets Mary in a film class (setup or establishment). Of course, they fall in love. Unfortunately, Mary’s brother gets arrested for drugs, which curtails the relationship (the inciting incident). John must now take steps to get the relationship back without hindering Mary’s familial love for her brother (the conflict). Through a series of planned and patient events, John eventually leads her to the realization that love for the family can coincide with love for a lover (the climax). They get married with Mary’s brother—out of jail--acting as best man (the resolution). Notice in the example that there are to connected stories: Johns struggle to recapture Mary’s love and Mary’s love/hate feelings for her brother who just screwed up his life and damaged hers. A and B stories in the same film and especially on TV are common.

The theme is the overall message, concept, or essence of the story. Patience and strategy wins the battle of love is the basic theme of the plot above. Some other examples are: if help someone, then you will be helped in the future, love is beyond physical beauty, truth hurts, desire leads to suffering, and ….

The conflict as mentioned is everything that prevents or gets in the way of the protagonist in achieving their goal. Ken Burns’ jazz musicians strived against societies predacious to make jazz an accepted art form.

Interaction is what occurs between characters or even ideas presented. Interaction can occur as connections and disconnections. Affinity happens when characters are always connected or connected in a manner that there is no conflict. Contrast on the other hand is when characters connect, then disconnect much like lovers do. This creates conflict or tension and plays a very import part towards making the movie emotional.

So that’s the basic format. Now you have to think up your own plot based on a theme, with a cast of characters, who want to reach a goal, but have conflicts, and determine how they can resolve the conflict in the process of interacting with one another.

If you haven't thought of an idea yet, you better get going. First, either alone or with a team, explore topics that interest you. The gamut is wide open--social security problems, your brother's ex-wife, fictional stories, biography, mountain biking, the weird cafe at the end of the block, cell phone dating, hip hop music, that last sci-fi book you just read, etc.

You might end up with something in political genre like Arnold meets the Democrats (documentary), the Matrix of Gavilan (sci-fi), Betty Sue and Ralph at Gavilan (romance), Iraq Military Untrained (war drama), My Brother's Ex-wife's Boyfriend (family drama), or Thursday meets Friday (Horror). Use the imagination, brainstorm, or hey! a documentary on the Ecology of Gavilan sounds great.

Help getting your idea:
Everyone knows what daydreaming is about. If you don't daydream enough in your classes, then try sleeping in on a Saturday. Have a pad and pencil by your bed. Don't get up just yet, lie there and let thoughts enter your mind. If a good one appears, grab the pad and write the idea down. If you get in a flow with idea, keep writing and don't worry about punctuation, paragraphs, or spelling--just write! After you finish, have your coffee and look over what you wrote. Straighten it up a bit and either start the story or take it to a team meeting.

Brainstorming doesn't mean raining on your brain; it means brain ideas will pour out in a storm. To do this, get a few people together in a room and toss out ideas. Don't dwell on them. The rules are: listen carefully to each idea presented, but make no judgment about it. And put aside your egos! Write down each idea, and then at a later time, go over them discussing the pros and cons of each. Make comments about how each idea can be developed into a story. Ok, something has got to stand out by now. Hopefully, the team can arrive at the best idea without a big fight. There, it's time to write your story!

Got idea? Need story and script! Yes, even a documentary needs a story. Film is telling a story visually/aurally to a group of folks at the campfire, oops, movie theater. And any film has to keep an audience entertained or they put out your fire and walk out of the theater.

Characters:
M ake them unique, composites of movie characters with one of your friends can work, and avoid clichés if possible. Make as few as possible for your short film, but develop them with depth. No, you can't do the story of war invasion with 1800 troops on the beach. Have as few characters as the movie needs to make the plot progress.

The structure:
Movies generally start with lots of excitement, the fall back and start to climb from there. In other words grab the audiences attention, then begin the real story, building suspense or contrast until the climax at the end. You can build slowly (e.g., family drama) or tease the audience with a number of rises then a little fall back (e.g., action picture), or mix it up.

Everyone has their own way of writing a story, but here are a few hints. First, write a logline. What, a log line? It's one sentence that tells your whole story. Trying to do that is like mountain biking up the side of Everest, but it really helps now to keep your focus and later you can use it in a quick conversation to get Spielberg or Martin interested in your project while you ride the elevator together to the top of the skyscraper.

This is a modern tale of love vs. career where Johnny and Luisa, fall in love, have twenty three kids, get divorced, allowing Luisa to follow her true life's motivation to become CEO of HP and Johnny to finally succeed in business by opening 23 day care centers throughout the west coast.

This must be in a special primitive form or layout that has lots of room for notes. This makes it easily read by agents, producers, and yes, your actors. If you try to make it fancy, Hollywood knows you are a novice. Make it look just like theirs. See this example from, The Designer, which was made using style sheets in MS Word. You can use software like Final Draft that makes it even easier. These programs guide your writing so that it follows a structure.

Generally, 1 page in a script is about 1 minute of film/video. A 2-hour show is around 128 pages. A short movie might have a few more pages plus the one per minute.

Remember, only write scenes or content that is necessary to make the plot progress. No extra fancy scenes. Just because you wrote a good one, if it does not have anything to do with establishing the characters or place, or advancing the plot, out! I know it hurts.

This is a basic rule: have your characters do it, not say it! Don’t tell what is going to happen. Show it. This is a visual medium. Remember too, there is a camera that you control with the script.

POV or point of view is the direction that the camera is coming from. A conversation can be filmed from each characters POV switching back and forth as the conversation changes. The car chase can be viewed from the audience POV (affinity), inside the car from the passengers POV (more contrast), or a person on the street who is about to get run over (contrast).

Don’t linger in a scene unless it fits the pacing of the movie. As soon as the main point occurs, move on to the next scene.

As mentioned above, a character can have contrast that creates tension and affinity that creates calm, but contrast and affinity work with space, colors, tone of voice, actions, POVs also. A love scene in a crowded place can have a little contrast making it somewhat more interesting as opposed to the run of the mill bedroom scene. The car chase through an industrial center (affinity) does not have as much impact as one through a peaceful neighborhood with kids on the street (contrast).

There are many more suggestions and rules for a story and a script. You might want to check out the book, Developing Digital Short Films, by Sherri Sheridan.

When the script is done, read it and rewrite. After a few of these sessions, get a few friends together and read the parts aloud to each other--not perfectly acted out, but with a little emotion. Does it sound good? Remember, it must make sense to the intended audience.

Exercise #1-1: Get an idea for a story and write a log line. This does not have to be the story you will make into a movie, but it’s better if it is. Email this to digitalmedia@gavilan.edu

Exercise # 1-2: Write a two or more page script using the format in the example, The Designer. You may download a few pages of the Word file and import the style sheets into Word if you desire. Hopefully, you will submit part of the actual script of your movie.