Recent content by Helen

Absolutely no problem with it. I guarantee that very soon a new movie will be released where the main character will be clearly identified as a Chosen One and it'll make a billion dollars. As with all these things, it's not that it's been done before, but that it's executed well.

For me, the world building comes pretty late - I'll start with plot, then character change, then theme (might sound like an odd order, but it's actually helpful) and they'll inform the world building.

haha I wouldn't worry about it: You're doing the right thing by engineering it to get the main character out of the Ordinary World and onto the journey... Whether you call the mother's request or Emma's choice the Inciting Incident, is almost irrelevant (you can drive yourself mad: you...

It's not necessarily about adding quirkiness or flaws. Give the character a belief. Off the top of my head, the most recent example I can think of is Ryan Gosling in La La Land; he says "when you have an opportunity like this, you have to grab it with both hands." That's the sort of thing...

You can use change to pace it. You know who the characters are in the beginning, you know who they are at the end and you stage gate it.

Oscars 2017 Winner and Nominees Basic Deconstructions KalBashir.com - YouTube

In an origin story, you set the character up in an Ordinary World (which may or may not be a farm - Luke Skywalker, Clark Kent etc). If already extraordinary (e.g. Superman 2, Thor 2, Iron Man 2 etc), you still start by setting the character up in an Ordinary World. It's pretty much the same...

Jesus spent years with his father Joseph learning to be a carpenter. That was his Ordinary World.

There's an almost classic pattern you can follow, the latest is seen in LA LA LAND, which will probably win best film in a few weeks: they don't know each other, they hate each other, they think it'll go nowhere, it starts going somewhere, they date, they become a couple, they break up, they get...

It's a cycle. It repeats. Thor / Zeus rise to the top, they become Gods. That's one cycle. Then the Gods develop imperfections and the cycle repeats. Or they become mentors helping others learn the lessons. It comes back down to theme and the message you want to communicate. The...

I love when that question is asked. Often I think I know the story, then I answer the question and discover I don't know it as well as I thought. Answered enough times, it helps develop the pitch too.

I think images can be excellent triggers. The image I remember when I first came across this concept was a film noir type still of a lady in a cocktail dress pulling a gun out of a bedside drawer - and having to write what motivated that and what she did with the gun and what happened after...

Pretty much. Look at it from the point of view of arc. You're still going to arc the character; an episode is easier because you've got a snippet of an arc but then throughout the whole series the arc is longer, so it balances out. And it really gets complex when you go into multiple series...

Yes. It's a nightmare. My solution is to just finish one before starting another. Not always possible.

Sorry, I didn't mean it to come across that way. I'm sure the absolute feelings are there though. For example, the recent Clinton/Trump debates - there is real conflict there based on values and principles. Pretty much every news story is based on conflicting values. Now, politics and the...