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Choices and Decisions

Every episode covering Choices and Decisions.

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DZ-34: Game of Choices - Decision Making and Character Implications

How does the experience of a character's decision impact our feelings towards that character?
AI✦The central investigation tracks how the experience of witnessing (or not witnessing) a character make a decision controls the audience’s emotional relationship to that character.✦
⏱ 1h 26m
14 AUG 2016
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After a spectacular end to Season 6 of GAME OF THRONES, Chas and Stu were struck by the very different portrayals of Sansa in Episode 9 - Battle of the Bastards and Cersei in Episode 10 - The Winds of Winter. Despite both characters having an enormous impact on the narrative, the audience’s experience of those characters is very different -- largely because Sansa is absent from 98% of Battle of the Bastards… →

DZ-84: Choices & Decisions 1 - Booksmart

What is the difference between choice and decision when it comes to characters?
AI✦The episode’s central framework distinguishes choice (options presented), decision (knowing consideration and action), and consequence (resulting outcome) as three separable dramatic tools that create different emotional effects.✦
⏱ 1h 12m
30 OCT 2021
Listen how the separation of choice, decision, and consequence (for a character) creates emotional impact.
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In order to better understand dramatising of character, Chas and Stu take a very draft zero look at very specific tool: choices and decisions. We analyse three films through the decisions made by their characters. In particular, how the audience understanding of: the choice available, the considered decision itself, and the consequence changes how we feel about these characters. And how separating those three things can create different emotional effects on your audience… →
Shows: Fleabag

DZ-85: Choices & Decisions 2 - The Farewell & Wrath of Man

What is difference between choice and decision when it comes to audience experience?
AI✦The episode’s core framework distinguishes choice (options presented), decision (knowing consideration and action), and consequence, showing how this distinction shapes what audiences feel about characters across three films.✦
⏱ 1h 49m
17 NOV 2021
Listen when you want to show a character refusing to change despite every opportunity to do so.
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In our second part of our “series” on Choices & Decisions, we take a deep dive into THE FAREWELL and WRATH OF MAN, with a sidebar on NOMADLAND… →

Even More

DZ-119: Final Character Choices & Great Endings

How do you dramatise a protagonist's internal journey through their final decision?
AI✦Stu and Chas distinguish a choice as where the character is presented with options and makes a knowing decision, versus a decision that happens to them--and this distinction determines whether your character reads as active or powerless at the climax.✦
⏱ 1h 52m
18 JUN 2025
Listen if you want to understand how to better dramatise a character's internal journey
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In this episode, Stu and Chas focus solely on the final choices made by protagonists and how that reflects their character journey and successfully, or not, dramatises the internal… →

DZ-55: Character Motivations 1

What to do when a reader says "I don't buy that he/she would do that"?
AI✦Chas and Stu analyze how structural decisions (often the ones audiences reject) can be made credible through careful construction of motivation, using examples like Luke’s decision in A New Hope and Tony Stark’s arc in Iron Man.✦
⏱ 2h 18m
15 JAN 2019
Listen if you're writing a scene where your character does something 'out of character' and your readers to buy it.
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Chas & Stu look at examples of good character motivation. We’ve all watched movies where we don’t believe the motivation of a character or characters. We may have even written scripts where readers don’t buy the character’s choices. And that’s often a real problem because most of these choices coincide with key structural moments — e.g. the moments where the characters decide to do something “out of character” in order to progress to the next part of the story. To help us solve the problem of how to improve our character motivations, in this episode we explore great examples of character motivation and how they have helped the audience believe a character’s decision… →

DZ-114: Climaxes in CHALLENGERS

How does ending your story on the climax affect audience experience?
AI✦Building on their earlier episode on this concept, Chas and Mel show how the specific choices characters make in the final moment become the carrier of thematic weight when the story refuses to move past them.✦
⏱ 1h 17m
29 NOV 2024
Listen to understand how withholding resolution can make your story great!
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While Stu is on show, Mel and Chas sit down to analyse the meaning behind the ending of 2024’s CHALLENGERS, especially when - upon reading the script - the most impactful moment of the ending on screen (for Chas in particular) is not written on the page… →

DZ-48: One-Shot - Blade Runner 2049 - Agency vs Choice

Can your characters be given choices and yet still be deprived of agency?
AI✦Chas and Stu examine how characters can be dramatised through binary choices, using Blade Runner 2049 as a case study in how choice itself becomes a dramatic tool.✦
⏱ 1h 53m
28 FEB 2018
Listen to discover how characters can be dramatised through binary choices (and understand the difference between choice and agency).
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To kick off 2018, Chas and Stu take a deep dive into one of their favourite movies of 2017: Blade Runner 2049. However, they abstained from “Fox News-ing this shit” by being joined by the most accomplished screenwriter they know, C.S. McMullen (Blood List 2017, Black List 2017, also a lover of Blade Runner 2049)… →