Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 7 days 21 hours 43 minutes
What effect does adding a ton of characters have on your story? In Part 3 (the final part? Ha!) of our exploration into ensemble stories, Stu, Chas & Mel examine films whose genres do not conventionally require a ton of character or that use those...
How do you give your audience access to a lot of characters? In Part 2 of our exploration into ensemble stories, Stu, Chas and Mel examine films whose plot and genre require a lot of characters. Thus we tackle a team sports film (PITCH PERFECT), a...
DZ-96: Ensembles 1 - What do we mean by an ensemble? How can the same story feel different when you have more characters? In the first part of our series on ensembles, Chas, Stu and Mel start by laying the groundwork for our future episodes. And we...
How do you maintain hope in the face of, er, screenwriting? Time for our annual backmatter episode, where we drop any ruse of any objectivity, and fully embrace our subjective opinions! In this episode we discuss: potential topics for 2023; the...
How can you use physical objects to track character change… wordlessly? In part two of our two-part series on TALISMANS, we break down the beats used to turn objects (in a broad sense) into talismans; how talismans can track character journeys and...
How can you use physical objects to reveal inner character? In this series, Chas and Stu discuss TALISMANS. Physical objects that are imbued with meaning by a character or characters. They’re a powerful tool to access inner character. In this first...
How can endings prompt an audience to reflect on your story? Stu & Chas set out to explore what makes certain endings powerful, in particular those of LA LA LAND, INCEPTION, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and TURNING RED. The lens they bring to those endings...
How can you keep your audience hooked when they know the end of the story? Chas, Stu and Mel take a deep dive into stakes, using then lens of biopics to help us think about them. If an audience already knows the “plot” outcome of a story, then how...
How can you use setups and payoffs to stitch your film together? In this one-shot, Chas and Stu dive into the awesomeness of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. In particular, we focus on its use of setups, payoffs and reversals; breakdown the...
How does your opening sequence set up your audience? Inspired by her tweet on how subversive an opening OCEAN’S ELEVEN has, Chas and Stu invited amazing writer/director Jessica Ellis onto the show to deep dive into opening sequences. How does a good...