Groundhog's Day RSS

ALIEN, AVATAR, coincidence, GROUNDHOG'S DAY, set-up, STAR WARS, structure - December 01, 2022

GIMME GIMME GIMME

In story development there is a term: gimme. A gimme is a story beat that’s built on a coincidence. There are big gimmes and small gimmes. Typically, a well-constructed story has room for one big gimme. Even then, the big gimme is usually found in the set-up, i.e. the coincidence that either creates the set-up, or gets our protagonist into the set-up. For example, in AVATAR our gimme is that Sully’s brother was fitted for a Na’vi avatar, so he’s the only person who can also inhabit it. In ALIEN our gimme is that Ripley’s ship the Nostromo just-so-happens to...

Theme

Recently, I was working on a script rewrite. Most of the notes I had gotten were fairly straightforward, and I thought turning it around would take perhaps a week at most. But then I realized… wait, we’ve never figured out our themes; the script doesn’t yet have a clear thematic statement. This is really basic, foundational stuff, and it didn’t occur to me until late in the development process. That’s because it’s very easy to get caught up in the spinning gears of plot and character. But the themes are just as important, because this is the true “what this...

Hook

We’ve touched on macro elements like Genre and Sub-genre, and gotten somewhat more specific with Paradigm. Now let’s talk about Hook, which might be described as “the big idea of the movie” or “what the movie is about.” But Hook can also be seen as the “what makes this script/movie unique,” i.e. what sets it apart from all of the other scripts and movies in the same space. Because: simply going through the motions of plugging in the standard beats of a paradigm, checking off all the boxes, isn’t a hook; it’s just an exercise. The older industry term for...

Read more