Terrific talk by Elizabeth Gilbert from the TED series. Nineteen minutes well spent.
Thanks to Rawson for the link.
Terrific talk by Elizabeth Gilbert from the TED series. Nineteen minutes well spent.
Thanks to Rawson for the link.
It seems a lot of my scripts revolve around a character’s inner struggle and their inner demons creating destructive physical reactions (acting out). My question is: What if the main character’s motivation is finding their way because they are lost? Isn’t this a purely mental obstacle?
I know you say to make these obstacles physical and simple but this is the complete opposite. Any help would be appreciated.
— Dallas
Staten Island, NY
Write a book. Or a song. Or a poem.
Sure, many great movies feature characters struggling against their demons, or attempting to find themselves. But it’s invariably played as subtext against a more external conflict — the one that actually drives the plot. You need to be able to point the camera at something.
There’s nothing wrong with internal struggle. Just pick a medium that can handle it.
Two good write-ups today on the weekend phenomenon in which many smart people became swept up in moral outrage based on flimsy logic.
If you missed it, Clay Shirky summarizes it thusly:
After an enormous number of books relating to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered (LGBT) themes lost their Amazon sales rank, and therefore their visibility in certain Amazon list and search functions, we participated in a public campaign, largely coordinated via the Twitter keyword #amazonfail (a form of labeling called a hashtag) because of a perceived injustice at the hands of that company, an injustice that didn’t actually occur.
Mary Hodder would probably agree with most of that history. But in her take on the event, she finds there is still reason for outrage, even if Amazon wasn’t deliberately trying to sweep gay titles under the rug:
The issue with #AmazonFail isn’t that a French Employee pressed the wrong button or could affect the system by changing “false” to “true” in filtering certain “adult” classified items, it’s that Amazon’s system has assumptions such as: sexual orientation is part of “adult”. And “gay” is part of “adult.” In other words, #AmazonFail is about the subconscious assumptions of people built into algorithms and classification that contain discriminatory ideas. When other employees use the system, whether they themselves agree with the underlying assumptions of the algorithms and classification system, or even realize the system has these point’s of view built in, they can put those assumptions into force, as the Amazon France Employee apparently did according to Amazon.
Shirky found himself part of the #amazonfail mob, and is now embarrassed by his assumptions:
Though the #amazonfail event is important for several reasons, I can’t write about it dispassionately, because I was an enthusiastic participant in its use on Sunday. I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true. As bad as that was, though, far worse is the retrofitting of alternate rationales to continue to view Amazon with suspicion, rationales that would not have provoked the outrage we felt had they been all we were asked to react to in the first place.
Shirky calls this “conservation of outrage.” Once you realize the original thing you were upset about doesn’t exist, there is a great temptation to find an alternate target. We’ve all done that.
Beyond the conspiracy theories, what I found most interesting about #amazonfail were tweets demanding to know why Amazon hadn’t corrected the problem just hours after the term had surged on Twitter. It speaks to the speed of popular culture — and the sugar-high of Twitter — that we expect every problem to be identified and remedied immediately. Five minutes feels like an eternity.
If a screenplay has a good amount of foreign words sprinkled throughout, is it OK to attach a glossary of a few pages? Or is that an amateurish way to handle it? These foreign words would appear both in action/description and in dialogue (NOT to be subtitled.)
I just think that it would make for a smoother read to NOT have explanations of each word as it comes up in the screenplay.
— Alejandro
Caracas/Los Angeles
My hunch is that you won’t need it. When you need to use the foreign term in action, put the translation in parentheses right after the word. When you’re using a bit of the language without subtitles, it’s still a good idea to provide a parenthetical to help the reader:
Merry stirs a pot of kholowa (sweet potato leaves), while the children play tag. She fakes a smile as her neighbor NYANDO walks up. He’s fifty and blind in one eye.
MERRY
(how are you?)
Muli bwanji, Nyando?
Have some English-speakers read your script, and if they’re truly perplexed, a glossary might be in order. If there are five really crucial terms, you could put it at the start of the script, right after the title page. If there are more, a glossary at the end might be better. In any case, keep it to less than a page.