There is a joke from your Great Grandparents’ generation that was told over and over again. “While lost in NYC, a man holding a map, (this is a piece of paper with streets and highways on it) walked up to a stranger and said, “Excuse me, how do I get to Carnegie...
How does STAR WARS: The Force Awakens unlock the key to Great Storytelling? The key to great storytelling is based on your main character’s DILEMMA. The Dilemma is when your main character must choose between two things with equal significance – but they can’t have...
While co-teaching “The Heroine’s Journey: Writing and Selling the Female-driven Screenplay” with Pamela Gray — who wrote the scripts for “A Walk on the Moon” with Diane Lane, “Music of the Heart” with Meryl Streep and “Conviction” with Hilary Swank — we realized that...
En route to Sundance, I was thinking about last year’s favorite, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and how storytellers tell the most heartwarming stories like Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, Billy Elliot, Six Feet Under, and Sense and Sensibility. What do all of these...
Here are 24 things to know about crafting thrillers: 1) Thriller is a combination of crime and horror stories where a detective or an average person acting like detective is victimized and in great danger. (Note: see John Truby on thriller). 2) The stakes for the main...
These are the essential elements of human comedies, or “dramedies”: These family dramas with comic overtones tend to be “feel good” movies that also have depth and meaning. The comedy tends to be less overt as the humor comes from a deep empathy for characters...
These are the essential elements of documentary storytelling: Engage the audience with a present time story before revealing the back-story. The present time story engages the audience through the beginning, middle and end of the film. Define the Palette of...
Learning how to be great storytellers begins with a paradigm shift, changing your relationship to the stories you’re telling. You tell the best stories when you understand that you, the characters in your story, and your audience are all part of an “echo-system” that...
At an Esalen Institute conference in Big Sur, mythologists like Joseph Campbell and Robert Johnson were trying to come up with a clear, simple definition of “myth”. After several days, they still hadn’t come up with an answer, so they asked Robert Johnson’s young son...
Dramedy Workshop
$29.95
