6Killing Your Darlings
We all want our movies to be compelling. We want to engage audiences and make them want to keep watching. One of the enemies of good storytelling is boredom, and heaven forbid we should inflict that on our audiences. So let’s consider how we might be doing that in spite of ourselves.
One of the most common mistakes writers make is to include useless transition scenes, which may seem fabulous and necessary when they “see” the movie in their heads but are actually entirely useless, expensive, time killing, and boring!
I took on a project in the Arctic years ago where I taught Inuit and Dene artists to make films about their own culture. That’s because network television had moved in north of the 60th parallel and was destroying ...
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