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Character Introductions
Every episode covering Character Introductions.
DZ-97: Ensembles 2 - Servicing Characters
How do you give your audience access to a lot of characters?
AI✦The episode identifies quintessential group introductions as a tool--a specific craft move for servicing ensemble casts and establishing characters efficiently.✦
Listen if you're writing ensemble stories and want to discover tools for giving all your characters adimension
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In Part 2 of our exploration into ensemble stories, Stu, Chas and Mel examine films whose plot and genre require a lot of characters. Thus we tackle a team sports film (PITCH PERFECT), a murder mystery (GLASS ONION), a slasher (SCREAM 2022) and a family holiday flick (THE FAMILY STONE)… →
Films:
Pitch Perfect (2012)
, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
, Scream (2022)
, The Family Stone (2005)
DZ-44: Marvel - First Acts and Establishing Characters
How can your first act effectively establish your character journey?
AI✦The episode examines how IRON MAN, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, and DOCTOR STRANGE each introduce their protagonists in ways that immediately signal their defining flaws and wounds.✦
Listen if your first act exposition feels clunky--the MCU has a schema for burying backstory inside character introductions.
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First Acts are hard. They have to set so much in motion, especially setting up characters. To help them understand how to write effective first acts better, Stu and Chas turn their analytical gaze to a franchise that has been refining and reiterating its first act “schema” for over a decade... THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE… →
DZ-117: Pulling Off Tonal Shifts
How can we teach our audience new storytelling rules in the middle of our story?
AI✦The introduction of Sarah on page 80 of Swiss Army Man becomes the fulcrum for the film’s tonal shift because we finally meet her as a character with her own reality, not filtered through Hank’s delusion.✦
Listen if you want to write tonal pivots that land on the page without a director's toolkit.
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Following on from our episodes on establishing tone through action lines and through character, this is what we have been building up to: how to pull off a tonal switch… that does NOT throw the audience out of the film. And, in particular, how to pull that off on the page when writers don’t have framing, lighting, music, editing, etc. at our disposal… →
DZ-89: Opening Sequences
How does your opening sequence set up your audience?
AI✦Each opening examined--from OCEAN’S ELEVEN to A SERIOUS MAN--demonstrates how to introduce character through sequences that reveal who people are rather than simply dropping into action.✦
Listen if you want to understand how great opening sequences establish character, genre, and theme while defying genre conventions
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Inspired by her tweet on how subversive an opening OCEAN’S ELEVEN has, Chas and Stu invited amazing writer/director Jessica Ellis onto the show to deep dive into opening sequences. How does a good opening setup character, genre, and theme… →
DZ-79: Interweaving Timelines 2 - The Social Network
How can interweaving two timelines change how we feel about a character?
AI✦Mel, Chas, and Stu analyze Sorkin’s on-the-page skill with managing intercutting and introducing characters across multiple timelines in The Social Network.✦
Listen to understand how manage stakes when you're using flashforwards.
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In this Part 2 of Interweaving Timelines (aka The Stu Monologue Episode), Mel, Chas and Stu tackle Sorkin/Fincher’s The Social Network. As you’ll hear, it is clearly Stu’s favourite of the examples we cover and, ah, not Mel’s favourite. While all three bring their own biases and opinions on the reality of Facebook as it has become, we do manage to put the destruction of democracy to one side to actually analyse the meticulous craft that this film displays… →
Films:
The Social Network (2010)
DZ-15: World Building Rules, Okay?
How does setting up rules help you build a world?
AI✦Much like their character introductions episode, Chas and Stu cover a vast range of scripts to show how introducing characters and introducing worlds often happen simultaneously through the same opening moves.✦
Listen when your opening pages feel like exposition dumps (which is bad, okay?)
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In our most epic/longest episode yet, Chas and Stu tackle world building in films. Specifically, how the rules make something a world and not just a setting. Starting with world-centric genres like sci-fi and fantasy, we also cover horror, crime drama and - er - “other”. We discuss a variety of techniques for setting up the rules of the world, including cold opens, voiceover, title cards and outsider characters! We’ve limited ourselves to the opening 3-5 pages... mostly... because (so the theory goes) they’re the pages that teach the audience how to read/watch your story/film… →
Films:
The Matrix (1999)
, Inception (2010)
, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
, Jurassic Park (1993)
, Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
DZ-83: A Very Thematic Stand-up Special!
What can screenwriters learn from the storytelling techniques used by stand-up comedians?
AI✦Chas points out that ‘how do we want the audience to react to their character?’ mirrors the stand-up problem of establishing who you are on stage, and both require clarity about whether the audience is aware of how they come across.✦
Listen if you want to understand how stand-up comedians grip audiences and build emotional arcs (and what narrative tools screenwriters can borrow from comedy)!
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Standup comedians can keep audiences gripped to their every word for over an hour, and often bring them to emotional climaxes by the end. So how do they do it and what tools can apply to scripted narratives… →
DZ-58: Game of Thrones - Character Exposition
How can you let your characters tell us how they feel?
AI✦Stu and the team examine first-meeting scenes as opportunities for character revelation, where what a character says (and doesn’t say) about themselves matters more than backstory.✦
Listen to understand why what a character *doesn't* say reveals more than exposition ever could.
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In watching Season 7 (and the first three episodes of Season 8) of Game of Thrones, Stu noticed that there were lots of scenes where characters either met for the first time or were reunited after a long time apart. In these scenes, the audience knows (or thinks they know) more than either character. And so the fascination, power and subversion comes from what the characters choose to reveal... or not… →
Films:
Game of Thrones (2011)
Shows:
Game of Thrones
DZ-9: Characterising Introductions
Can the introduction of a character be so good that the character doesn't need describing?
Stu and Chas argue about different techniques for introducing characters and whether character descriptions are even necessary. This is important for writers, as we only have words to compensate for the whole range of cinematic expression. And so Chas and Stu explore techniques like introducing characters through action, having other people discuss the character first, ensuring the introduction represents the character’s goal/flaw/theme, and many more… →
⏱ 1h 22m
23 JUN 2014
Listen if you want your character introductions to pop!
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Stu and Chas argue about different techniques for introducing characters and whether character descriptions are even necessary. This is important for writers, as we only have words to compensate for the whole range of cinematic expression. And so Chas and Stu explore techniques like introducing characters through action, having other people discuss the character first, ensuring the introduction represents the character’s goal/flaw/theme, and many more… →