Tag: scriptwriting
Nacho Vigalondo, the acclaimed director of The Time-Crimes (Cronocrímenes), is already promoting his forthcoming flick Extraterrestre. Luckily, instead of just telling us how nice everbybody in the team was and how much fun they had over the hard, hard shooting, he shares his expertise through these 5 pills of writer-director’s wisdom:
In a nutshell:
- Know what you’re telling. Each story tells one thing.
- Know what you’re not telling. Focus.
- Know the size of your project. Take into account the budget and possibilities that you will actually have when carrying out what’s written.
- Don’t try to show off your influences, or you risk making your movie an impersonal collection of unconnected moments.
- Don’t try to impress your family, friends, competitors or even the audience. Rather aim to satisfy yourself.
I said it yesterday: everybody thinks they can write. Those who can move a camera. Those who can hold a pencil. Those woh can direct their actors. Those who can program a computer. If they can do all those complex technical things, what else do they need to write a movie, a comic, a play, a game? As Brenda Ueland used to say, everybody hsa something to tell!
I’ll admit that there are many creators who are capable of doing all that and writing their own stories. We can all think up names of movie directors and comic authors so I won’t make a list. The problem is that everybody wants to be one of those auteurs… which is another reason why there are so many mediocre pieces out there. If you intend to write for an audio-visual format, that’s one of the challenges you’ll have to face: the disdain of some “professionals” in the sector who’ll think that writing may as well get done by monkeys.
This topic, among many others, came up in conversation with our first guest ever, a renowned Spanish comic author whose words will cover these pages in the next few days.
But with this we’re already going away from the topic of videogames, back into the general themes of this multi-faceted blog. I hope this light introduction to the issue captured your interest, as we’ll find more chances to delve deeper into its complexities. In the next few days we’ll catch up with news that have been popping up on the interwebs in the last few days and then we’ll pass the mike to our first interviewee. Stay tuned!
Ideas are worth nothing. Half the people you ask will say they’d never ever be able to come up with a movie, a book or a game. The other half are brimming with ideas… and half the humanity is a lot of people. If gold or diamonds are so valuable because of their scarcity, by the same rule ideas are worthless – there are too many.
And you’ll say, if there are so many presumably good ideas, why are there so many bad movies, so much mediocre literature, such clichéd videogames? Because the tricky part is to turn a good idea into a good finished product. How many promising trailers hide boring movies? How many interesting back covers sell out bad literature? A good synopsis does not guarantee a good story. Walking the walk is more difficult than talking the talk.
When one wants to prove themselves good writers they must prove their worth through a good novel or story collection – sometimes only one is not even enough. That’s also why so many aspiring scriptwriters film their own shorts. The same rule applies if you want to write videogames. by making games you’ll prove that not only have you good ideas but also know what to do with them, how to integrate them in a playable environment, how to engage the player, how to use interactivity, how to define a whole coherent world.
In theory, many of these tasks are for programmers, graphic designers and the lot, and indeed in practice, in a professional environment, tasks will be apropriately distributed. But in order to enter that market, you’ll have to show insiders that you know how to integrate your work with the rest of the team, in a word – that you know the format.
The only way to make it is to learn other abilities that allow you, if not to make the whole game yourself, at least to develop a part of the technical requirements of the process. As we’ve been saying all week, all elements in a videogame are intimately related, and the more of them you explore, the better you’ll know how they relate to each other and the more coherent the result will be. And above all, the more work you can take in your hands, the more interesting it will be for others to work with you. If you want to surround yourself with a team of graphic artists, musicians and programmers that help you realize your project, you’ll need to offer them something beyond “an idea”. The more knowledge and abilities you bring in, the more chances you’ll have that serious people take you seriously and jump in a colaboration with you.
Take into account you don’t need to start from scratch. There are numerous engines desgined to help you create games. Here’s someone more knowledgeable on the topic, my friend David García “Xander“, to suggest a few:
Renpy, RPG Maker and GameMaker are the most famous (together with one for fighting games, but I don’t think we can tell stories with that ;-). Many people make games in Flash. Then there’s the possibility of building MODs for PC games. Some companies make theit games’ development kits available for users to modify or make completely new games. For example there’s Valve with their Source engine from “Half-Life” or Bioware with the tools from “Neverwinter Nights 2”. The latter is quite famous, easy to use and, coming for a Western RPG, applis well to storytelling. There’s also the recent “Dragon Age”, also by Bioware, with some capabilities for cinematics. For shooters there are the tools from games like “Gears of War”, “Crisis” or “FarCry 3”. Even “StarCraft 2” have released their kit and I hear it’s quite powerful, allowing you even to change the genre and build an action game, instead of strategy, for example. In a word, there’s a lot to choose from.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: one has to work hard. Many amateurs think it’s easy: I’ll write, he’ll draw, she’ll write the code… In practice, this never works, because illustrators and programmers will rather work on their own ideas and direct their own projects. And here goes one of those big truths that make the work of a professional scriptwriter on any audiovisual medium, so difficult:
Everybody thinks they can write.
And if you don’t believe me, I’ll tell you more next time.
Today we get a suggestion from our friend Llabrac.
I was listening to an interview with the Spanish author Jerónimo Tristante on La Rosa de los Vientos (the program from August 2nd). He believes we have been educated audiovisually, so when they tell him that his novels are very cinematic, he takes that as a compliment.
He explained that he often starts his novels, like so many American movies do, with a “seed story” that serves as an introduction to the main character. It’s a similar concept to starting in the middle of the action, but with events that are not necessarily related to the plot of the novel itself. I found it interesting and probably easier than beginnings in media res. You put a hook on the reader, introduce the characters and, after the resolution of the episode, are free to start with the novel itself.
While this is nothing new, I think it is a very good suggestion to keep in mind. Have you written anything with that structure?
I’ve mentioned Scriptshadow in the past, so I won’t introduce Carson Reeves again. Last Monday he reviewed the script for Vanishing On 7th Street, a horror film whose trailer is already available:
As you can see, everybody disappears form the face of the earth, with the rare exception of our protagonists. There’s also something strange going on with darkness, as they can only trust the lights they carry themselves. Pure claustrophoby, and a powerful premise.
Carson starts off his review by wondering, too powerful?
The Vanishing on 7th Street is a script that starts off strong but, like a lot of these scripts, gets swallowed up in its own ambition. The ultra high-concept premise lures us in like fresh garbage to a family of raccoons. The question is, is the premise *too* high concept? Wha? Huh? Buh? ‘How can that even be possible’ you ask?? A premise is too high concept when no matter what you do with the story, it will never be as interesting as the concept itself. In other words, you bite off more than you can chew. And unfortunately, I think that’s the case with Vanishing.
The idea deserves some thought. Only last night was I talking precisely about this, as I’ve recently finished 1984 and my partner is reading Brave New World. Such classics both suffer from the same unarguable flaw: once the initial premise is exhausted, the plot grows thinner by the page.
We’ve seeen the same problem on TV, a few years ago on The 4400 (forty four hundred missing people reappear simultaneously together without aging a day or memories of the missing time) and more recently on the big flop of the season, Flashforward (every person on the planet faints simultaneously and dreams a scene of their own future exactly six months later).
Of course the concepts are powerful enough to engage the reader’s imagination (or the viewer’s, who’ll pay their cinema ticket or sit in front of the TV every week, willing to witness the grand show) – but is it not a pity that, by starting with the climax, we all end up disappointed?
If the concept that sends your story into motion is the best thing about your script, then you only have one-fourth of a script. What if aliens invaded our planet tomorrow? Okay, great concept. But then what? How do you keep that interesting for the 100 minutes after they invade? If you want to see how bad someone can screw this up, go rent Independence Day. Just make sure to also rent a gun, as you’ll want to shoot yourself by the midpoint. I think the key to these high concept ideas is making sure you have a story ready on the personal level after you hit your audience with the hook.
Indeed the big question is, how do I avoid that problem? With interesting characters? Through solid plotting? But of course! Shouldn’t those elements be present in every story? Yes, but we raised the bar too high for ourselves, how can I come up with an ending that’s worthy of my beginning? Well, you need to find elements that are just as powerful. Lost may have disappointed many of us towards the end, but during six seasons it managed to reinvent itself with complex characters, unexpected twists and narrative schemes of all colours and shapes. Blindness turned itself inside out by undoing a world tragedy and revealing a personal one. Masterful!
So here’s an exercise just as powerful: how would you save Vanishing on 7th Street from falling into this trap? How would you improve a book the size and importance of 1984? How would you get, out of these premises above, more than the authors who created them? Or, to present another forthcoming blockbuster, what would you do with the premise of Skyline?