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GAME OF THRONES, HARRY POTTER, Isaac Asimov, LOTR, MAD MAX, mythology, STAR WARS, THE EXPANSE, THE MATRIX, world-building - July 13, 2022

ON WORLD-BUILDING

“World-building” is the term used for crafting the details of a fantasy world, whatever that might be. It’s the expression of the project’s internal mythology as reflected by the “reality” of the characters inhabiting this world. The most obvious example of world-building is something based on, for example, thoroughly detailed fantasy IP: LORD OF THE RINGS, HARRY POTTER, GAME OF THRONES, and so on. That is: What our mythical countries are, where they reside in the larger fantasy world, who are the main players in this space, if magic exists and how it works, the backstory of how this world...

The Saga

My wife and I recently went back and watched the Lord of The Rings movies, and on my own I went back and watched The Hobbit(s) once we had finished the original trilogy (remember Hobbit was made after LOTR). It made me hyper aware of the epic scope that all Saga’s embody, and how powerful the world-building in those stories are. Other examples include: The Matrix, The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, The Godfather, Harry Potter, Narnia, Indiana Jones, and Pirates of the Caribbean… In this article, I want to breakdown what those movies have in common, what...

Write Something They Won’t Make: Ironic Lessons from GAME OF THRONES

Writing in the hopes of your script getting produced can be, counterintuitively, limiting. Setting limits on your imagination before the script has gone into production may seem pragmatic and business-minded, but it can also weaken the final product. This is the ironic lesson to draw from GAME OF THRONES. In an interview with the New York Times before the show came out, George RR Martin explained the genesis of his epic fantasy series – he was a frustrated TV writer. “To some extent, the project was also a reaction to my own Hollywood career. I was out there for 10...

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