Film lessons = Writing lessons · 7:34pm May 3rd, 2020
I was going to do a blog post sometime on the lessons I've learned while writing. (Mostly by smashing my face into them repeatedly until I recognized my mistake, then making a new mistake, then another...) Then by absolute sheer chance, I heard David Sandberg, who was the director on Shazam! and had the unfortunate YouTube tag of @ponysmasher, posted various film-making hints and tricks. Lo and behold, that led me to this:
Everything he says is just as true for writing as it is for film. The complexity of your scene is the cube of the number of characters, at least, so keep the population down. Good sound (or dialogue) is critical. You will hit several depressive events during the writing and publication process that have nothing to do with the actual quality of your story. Urgency is important. Every character must want something, and be trying to reach it or they're just standing around. Emotional scale needs to be relatively smooth (don't scramble in high-tension scenes with low-tension scenes or you'll confuse the reader). Crank your Nigel Tunfel to 11, so things don't just pop, they explode. And leave your reader with a satisfying ending, like this.
This clip is not the only YouTube post he's made. Watch a bunch of them. He's not only a good director, he's a good on-screen tutor.
Yeah, more characters make more complication, that's for sure. If you ask me, that's doubly true in the written word. In a film, you write more dialogue, plan a lot more, and take more camera angles, and complicated as the logistics of that may be, it's still very much possible, and if you've done your due diligence, the audience will follow. In writing, we don't have the luxury of cameras or even sound to direct the audience to follow where we want that to be. Using ,he said. and ,she said. has very low levels of diminishing returns. If you're good, you can muster a few dialogue scenes with the mane 6, having no dialogue tags at all, but good luck doing that with six OC's. And a large block of dialogue can quickly become bloated with dialogue tags. Then you need to not rewrite, but restructure the entire dialogue scene to make it work... just within the confines of dialogue tags, nevermind what the story is doing, that's another thing to worry about entirely.
I like how in the video he also recognizes that a bad ending will ruin a good movie, or story.
Yes, writing for films is writing. I thought that was obvious.
5255767 Nope, other way around. Rules for storytelling are quite similar between different storytelling media, from multimillion-dollar movies all the way down to ponyfic. It's just that his storytelling has a far greater chance of getting him a house with a pool.
5255477 Monster in the Twilight was such a nightmare that if I had known how difficult it was going in, I never would have gone in. Six main characters plus Spike plus six kids plus Zecora plus Nightmare Moon plus Celestia plus my insane batponies...
5255783
We're both saying the exact same thing with different words, so let's stop quibbling about semantics.
Holy crap this is good! Thanks for sharing.