From Hairdressing to the Fall of the Roman Empire

‘Process’ in Storytelling If you’re a screenwriter, one questions you’ll always find yourself asking is “what gives my story structure?” What is it that keeps the audience engaged as they watch and then provides a pleasing sense of closure? Traditional Hollywood script gurus will point you to The Hero’s Journey. According to this model, the […]

Directorial Style

Why directors make their mark ☛ One thing that distinguishes many successful directors is their tendency to leave their own personal stamp on a film. From Woody Allen to Ken Loach, Spike Lee to Tarantino, directors whose names we know often give their films such a distinctive feel that, were we to be dropped into […]

The Heart of the Matter

The Primacy of Emotion in Screenwriting ☛ Emotion is at the heart of every story. This statement won’t sound controversial if you write relationship dramas or rom-coms, but those of you who pen complex political thrillers or action movies will probably disagree. If you do, you’re wrong and I’ll tell you why. In a bit. […]

PRODUCT REVIEW G-Drive mobile SSD Rugged

As camera resolutions improve and file sizes increase, filmmakers need more and bigger hard drives. But we have a variety of requirements of a device to store our media, for example: It needs to have the capacity to hold a lot of very large files. It needs to have a fast read speed, so […]

The Return of the Reel

In Which the Writer has a Kodak Moment ☛ Film is dead. It was coming for a time: when I left film school I got a lot of work as a 1st assistant editor because I was good at hand-holding editors who were being forced to stop cutting on 35mm. That was the late 90s. […]

How Long You’ll Need to Edit…

…and When You Should Stop ☛ One question that I’m often asked when interviewing for a low-budget feature is: “how long do you think you’ll need?” The answer is… it’s complicated. There used to be a rule of thumb for feature films: 1.5 times the length of the shoot. This was based on the assumption […]

Brando recognition

When is a good actor not a good actor? ☛ A weird thing sometimes happens when two or more people sit down in a cutting room and look through takes. They will agree on which take has the smoothest camera move or focus pull, there’ll be little disagreement about whether the shoot looks better with […]

The Hateful One

How Did Harvey Happen? ☛ It should go without saying that I deplore those incidents of abuse against women that Harvey Weinstein’s admitted to, and those of which he’s been accused, but it’s gone without saying by too many people for too long, so I feel the need to add my voice. What does it […]

The Invisible Art of Editing?

Invisible vs. high-profile editing I started in the cutting room at an exciting time for editing. The high-octane style popularised by music videos shown on MTV and made possible by editing on computer rather than on celluloid, was starting to filter through to feature films. In some cases it led to the sort of […]

The Root of Rootability

How to Make your Protagonist Engaging I don’t think I’m the only screenwriter to be frustrated when I’m given the note “Couldn’t the main character be… just a bit more likeable?” My frustration comes partly from the fact that a lot of my protagonists are intentionally not conventionally likeable, and partly from the note having […]