BBC - Mark Kermode's film blog

Monday, 7 March 2011

 

Note: set design at 2:00. A great insight into gameshow formatting. 

Ultimate screenwriting links page

Pub Games

G day Bruce

player 1: gday bruce
player 2: gday bruce
1: say gday to bruce bruce
2 gday bruce
3 gdyy bruce
2 say gday to bruce bruce
3 gday bruce
4 gday bruce
3 say gday to bruce bruce

the game goes on like this but if sumone fucks up then 3 fingers need to be drunk and ur name changes which confuses things even more

Names:
0 mistakes - bruce
1 mistake - sheila
2 mistakes - whack another shrimp on the barby
3 whack another shrimp on the barby and giv it to bruce
4 whack another shrimp on the barby and giv it to bruce whos married to sheila
5 tie me kangaroodown
6 ur out the game - down a pint to buy ur way back in

remember only the person who made a mistake changes there name




Thursday, 3 March 2011

40 Likes - Final Treatment

1 x 30’ Pilot
BBC 2

Broadcasting yourself has never been easier. I believe audiences require an innovative way to introduce user content and 40 Likes delivers. As web based communities begin to collide with the multi-channel world, 40 Likes endeavours to provide a unique place to present viral visionaries.

Showcasing the best of YouTube from one off shorts by aspiring film makers, to off the wall clips by every day small screen icons, we will be delivering the best-of-net to a lively, 40 strong studio audience, who like YouTube, will be for one night only, our very own subscribers.

40 likes features the latest online morsels in full, prefaced by up and coming Stand-up performer Charlie Meyrick* in his own inimitable presentation. 

Our host will introduce contributors from the web and invite the 40 audience members to pick the cream of the crop during the shows finale.

The episode will be formatted into a series of links, which will be separately broadcasted onto YouTube in the form of playlists:

The pilot show will include:

Comments
A sideways look at a compilation of the funniest/strangest/badly spelt comments the tube has to offer.

New Talent
A place for new music to be found and shared liked and disliked. An exciting new band will perform live.

Animation
A smorgasbord of quirky clips to enlighten and enrage, brighten or darken your day.

Crowd sourcing
User-based films and shorts from big brands to Indy bands 

Audience Interaction
Opening the floor for the audience, they will rate they’re best clips, like or dislike.

Wednesday, 2 March 2011

"I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not."
Jean-Luc Godard


"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."

Anton Chekhov

Editing is as important as the writing. "I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."

Truman Capote

Ways to Create a twist

Chekhov’s Gun – The term Chekhov’s Gun refers to author Anton Chekhov’s assertion that “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” With that quote Checkhov combined several writing tips into a very simple statement. Don’t dwell on frivolous detail, foreshadow your outcomes, and hide your revelations in plain site. A good example of this is the rock hammer from The Shawshank Redemption. Andy receives it for seemingly innocent purposes but it ends up being key to the plot. The twist relied on that bit of foreshadowing to provide a third option to the question of whether Andy was dead or alive in his cell.

Unreliable Narrator – When the point of view character influences the narrative by filtering information or manipulating the understanding of events from the preceding story, that character becomes an unreliable narrator. A perfect example of this is The Usual Suspects in which the story is told to investigators by Verbal who leads them to the wrong conclusions. Another is Fight Club, whose narrator is so unreliable, even he doesn’t know it until late in the story. The twist, of course, comes when we in the audience get to see things as they actually are, rather than the manifestations of the narrator.

Anagnorisis - This most common twist involves revealing the hidden nature of a character or object. Think Luke Skywalker’s parentage, Charles Kane’s sled, or when Neo wakes up in The Matrix. All of these twists rely on a reveal of information that completely changes the story up to and from that point. Neo can’t understand the world as he used to before he learned what the matrix was, nor could Luke hide from the conflict created between the evil in his family and his mission to destroy the empire. This twist is perhaps also the easiest to deploy as all it requires is for the author to withhold the vital information until the climax.

The Least Likely Villian – Another commonly used twist is to conceal the villain throughout the story and in the end reveal that it was someone known the the protagonist all along, someone above suspicion. Watchmen uses this twist, revealing Adrian to be the mastermind behind the killings and, ultimately, a plan to fake an alien invasion. Typically this twist is combined with a red-herring, a person of interest pursued by the good guys but is really just a misdirection.

Non-Linear Timeline – Similar to in medias res but a more extreme example, non-linear timelines can lend surprise to otherwise straightforward plot elements, sometimes even reversing the entire timeline so that resolutions precede their conflicts. Pulp Fiction makes use of a jumbled timeline, telling multiple stories while beginning and ending at the same point in time.

Ambiguous Ending – When curtain falls or the last page is turned, does the audience really know what’s happened? What will happen? Leaving the story open ended lets the reader infer a meaning to the events in the story that can constitute a twist or a straight forward interpretation. See the series finale of The Sopranos. Does Tony live? Does the family carry on with its business as before? Or does he die violently either there in front of his children or at some later time? The twist is that we don’t know and we have to imply. This can work well, as in the close of Inception, or create controversy, like the aforementioned Sopranos.

Not Over Yet – When the action winds down and our characters are taking a breather in the dénouement, the forces of evil spin up again to let the audience know that while this story is over, the war is far from won. Most recently seen in The Crazies when our heroes escape only to walk right back into the same trap.

Hero to Villain - When after the ultimate battle the hero emerges victorious but changed into the very thing he was fighting. This is a twist most often associated with horror stories. The filmed version of 30 Days of Night has the hero turning into a vampire in order to defeat the invading hoard. In Chronicles of Riddick, Riddick himself becomes leader of the necromongers after killing the Grand Marshall.

Deus Ex Machina – From the Latin “god from the machine”. This twist comes when an unsolvable problem is miraculously resolved by an un-foreshadowed intervention. Unless used for comedic affect, this strategy is frowned upon. A useful implementation of the technique can be found in Monty Python and The Holy Grail when, while being chased by an animated monster, the animator has a heart attack and they are miraculously saved.