Last weekend I stopped by one of those "second run" theaters and saw Kingsman: The Secret Service again. Reviews were mixed, but if you don’t mind a little over-the-top, gratuitous violence, it was a pretty enjoyable movie. Think Quentin Tarantino meets James Bond. But regardless of what you thought of the movie, there were three aspects of the movie that stood out to me as a writer.
1. Story Structure is important. Hollywood is known for rigorously adhering to standard story structure and this movie was no exception. The First Plot Point, when the hero (Eggsy) makes the decision to join the Kingsman organization, occurred right at the 20% mark. (The FPP should happen somewhere between 20-25% in books and movies) The midpoint reversal appeared at the halfway point of the movie. And the All-Is-Lost moment, which marks the transition into the third and final act, occurred within four minutes of the expected 75% mark. Classic story structure. Do writers have to hit these marks that closely in our books? Probably not, but we should strive to come as close as we can.
2. Foreshadowing. This movie was chock full of it. There was scarcely a line of dialogue, sight gag, or event that occurred in the first three quarters of the movie that wasn't a setup for something else that happened later. I’m not going to give away any spoilers, but almost everything in this movie was doing double (or triple) duty. You thought a particular line of dialogue was added because it was funny? Think again. That bit of dialogue will come in handy later. Did you think having one of the secondary characters being afraid of heights was done only to make one scene in the middle of the movie more intense? Sorry. Expect that fear to play an even bigger role later when the stakes are higher.
3. Make it personal. When the protagonist is busy saving the world during the story's climax, the goals can often feel a bit distant. Almost impersonal at times. Sure, we know the world’s going to blow up if the hero/heroine doesn’t get to the switch in time, and of course we're rooting for him/her to succeed, but how much do we really care? We don't know any of the hundreds of millions of people who are going to die if he/she fails. So writers often look for ways to make the final battle extra personal for both the protagonist and the audience.
During the final climatic scene in Kingsman, when Eggsy is racing against the clock to stop the bad guy’s plan to destroy the world as we know it, the movie keeps cutting away to scenes of the outside world, showing how it’s collapsing into chaos. The point is clear—millions of people will die if Eggsy fails. But that’s just not personal enough. As we near the final seconds in the countdown, the movie starts showing us glimpses of his baby sister back in London and the imminent danger she'll be in if Eggsy fails. She’s just one more life out of the millions expected to die, but suddenly we’re much more invested in the movie’s outcome because she’s important to Eggsy. Mission accomplished.
I never thought about these kinds of things before I started writing. Now I can't help but notice them whenever I go to a movie. And when I come home from a movie that's done good job with these techniques, it always fires me up to make my story the best it can be.
How about you?
ChemistKen
Website of Ken Rahmoeller -- fantasy author, chemist, and lover of all things Hogwarts (Photo Courtesy of Scarluuk)
Showing posts with label foreshadowing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foreshadowing. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
What Doctor Who Taught Me About Writing
A few weeks ago, I saw the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary show. Twice, actually. Once on television and then again with my daughter at the movies. I enjoyed both viewings, but after the second, I began thinking about how the movie worked. Especially in its use of foreshadowing.
Foreshadowing is when the writer gives the reader (or viewer) some sort of clue or hint about something that will occur later in the story. There are many reasons to foreshadow, one of which is to deepen the story, but foreshadowing can also be an important tool for the writer. It allows the writer to deliver necessary information to the reader without revealing the importance of that information too soon in the story.
For example, about halfway through the Doctor Who movie, when the Doctors needed to escape the Tower of London—yes, I said Doctors. The eleventh and tenth Doctors were both in the show, along with the “war” Doctor from 400 years in the past. (Hey come on, they’re Timelords. They're allowed to do that kind of stuff.) Anyway, when they needed to escape from the Tower, they came up with a plan to program a horrendously complicated subroutine into the war doctor’s sonic screwdriver so that 400 years later, the current doctor’s sonic screwdriver would have the completed calculations for their escape. Turns out they never got around to using those calculations, since Clara showed up to rescue them at that point, but no matter—the scene had already served its real purpose. The idea of using sonic screwdrivers in this way had been planted into our minds, so when the same technique was used to solve the big problem later during the final climatic scene, no time was wasted having to explain the concept, so the scene moved along quickly.
The use of foreshadowing to prepare the reader for solutions the MC will use later on is common. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, for example, Rowling needed a time traveling device to solve a story problem she’d created, so she invented a pendant capable of carrying Harry back in time. Of course, having this item suddenly appear right when Harry needed it would have seemed contrived, so Rowling introduced the pendant to us early and gave it its own subplot. Then when Harry needed the pendant to solve the big problem at the end, its presence seemed perfectly natural.
In the Doctor Who movie, a similar technique was used when the Doctor was shown (at the beginning of the movie) a special 3D painting described as Timelord art. Turns out that painting (and the concept behind its technology) was necessary to solve two big problems later on in the story, but for the audience to accept its use as a legitimate solution, we needed to be introduced to the concept of Timelord art early on. And simply sticking the painting into the same room as the Doctor wasn’t enough. There had to be a reason for its existence or the viewers would have been suspicious. So the writers came up with a subplot for the painting (which I won’t go into here), giving a valid reason for its existence and preparing us for its use in the final scene. And everything was done so smoothly, it never occurred to me that the painting had been a plant from the start—a fact I was able to appreciate during my second viewing.
If writing has done anything for me, it’s made me better at spotting foreshadowing during movies. Much to the annoyance of my wife.
What about you? Do you spot foreshadowing in movies more easily these days?
Foreshadowing is when the writer gives the reader (or viewer) some sort of clue or hint about something that will occur later in the story. There are many reasons to foreshadow, one of which is to deepen the story, but foreshadowing can also be an important tool for the writer. It allows the writer to deliver necessary information to the reader without revealing the importance of that information too soon in the story.
*********WARNING—DOCTOR WHO SPOILER ALERT**********
For example, about halfway through the Doctor Who movie, when the Doctors needed to escape the Tower of London—yes, I said Doctors. The eleventh and tenth Doctors were both in the show, along with the “war” Doctor from 400 years in the past. (Hey come on, they’re Timelords. They're allowed to do that kind of stuff.) Anyway, when they needed to escape from the Tower, they came up with a plan to program a horrendously complicated subroutine into the war doctor’s sonic screwdriver so that 400 years later, the current doctor’s sonic screwdriver would have the completed calculations for their escape. Turns out they never got around to using those calculations, since Clara showed up to rescue them at that point, but no matter—the scene had already served its real purpose. The idea of using sonic screwdrivers in this way had been planted into our minds, so when the same technique was used to solve the big problem later during the final climatic scene, no time was wasted having to explain the concept, so the scene moved along quickly.
The use of foreshadowing to prepare the reader for solutions the MC will use later on is common. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, for example, Rowling needed a time traveling device to solve a story problem she’d created, so she invented a pendant capable of carrying Harry back in time. Of course, having this item suddenly appear right when Harry needed it would have seemed contrived, so Rowling introduced the pendant to us early and gave it its own subplot. Then when Harry needed the pendant to solve the big problem at the end, its presence seemed perfectly natural.
*******WARNING—ANOTHER DOCTOR WHO SPOILER ALERT*******
In the Doctor Who movie, a similar technique was used when the Doctor was shown (at the beginning of the movie) a special 3D painting described as Timelord art. Turns out that painting (and the concept behind its technology) was necessary to solve two big problems later on in the story, but for the audience to accept its use as a legitimate solution, we needed to be introduced to the concept of Timelord art early on. And simply sticking the painting into the same room as the Doctor wasn’t enough. There had to be a reason for its existence or the viewers would have been suspicious. So the writers came up with a subplot for the painting (which I won’t go into here), giving a valid reason for its existence and preparing us for its use in the final scene. And everything was done so smoothly, it never occurred to me that the painting had been a plant from the start—a fact I was able to appreciate during my second viewing.
If writing has done anything for me, it’s made me better at spotting foreshadowing during movies. Much to the annoyance of my wife.
What about you? Do you spot foreshadowing in movies more easily these days?
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