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Oblique Strategies

25/3/2016

2 Comments

 
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"I'll tell you a secret. The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you've got a hit. Find an ending, but don't cheat, and don't you dare bring in a deus ex machina. Your characters must change, and the change must come from them. Do that, and you'll be fine." - Robert McKee's character in Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman
This week we had a break from pitching and each picked a scene from our film to describe to a partner. We then wrote up out our partner's scene but in a completely different genre. I took a scene from Lauren's romcom treatment and wrote it up as a horror. She took a violent and disturbing scene from my thriller and played it out as a comedy. 

It was surprising how easily we could see opposing genre elements fitting into our films. Coming from a comedy background, I've been trying to resist the urge to let gags creep into my thriller, but I now feel more confident that there's a way to make it work. This is an (admittedly fucked up) love story, and I can't imagine falling in love with someone that didn't make me laugh. 

Another interesting thing that Lauren did was to show the scene from the antagonist's perspective. We follow his silent growing anxiety as his listens at a closed door rather than the protagonist's relatively banal conversation, which is a great idea to increase the tension and round out the character. Yes, I will be stealing this. 

On Wednesday we did another speedwriting exercise where we were given a scenario - Jo has to get a train home to see his/her dying mother in 5 minutes but he/she has no money - and were asked to throw as many obstacles in the character's way as possible. We thought up personal, physical, environmental and metaphysical challenges for the character and had a lot of fun putting Jo in the shit.

This is a great exercise to lift a scene out of a blockage - if you're stuck, chances are that the character doesn't have enough to contend with...
2 Comments
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23/2/2018 07:08:05 pm

This is a common thing in film industry. People who are part of the creative team will spend most of their time just to come up with the best concept possible for their next project. Some have came up with a lot of concepts, but ended up being dumped because his boss or the producers didn't like it, and that's normal. Once you're into pitching scene, you should never be a sensitive person for everything that will happen is just work-related only. don't take things seriously.

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3/9/2023 04:05:51 pm

Thank you for shharing

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