Can AI write formulaic screenplays as well as humans? There are many formulaic structures around: Save the Cat, the Three Act structure, and the heroic journey, to name just a few. These predefined templates have a recommended structure to follow based on previous experience of what has worked well. As a result, the structures are … More Can AI ‘Save the Cat’? Exploring Predictability in Scriptwriting
I have found the Writing Excuses podcast (and archives) very useful to learn about the art of story writing. One I found particularly useful was episode 10.13 (“Where is my story going?“) on structure. (The episodes before and after it are all pretty good. Series 10 they started making the episodes more like teaching content.) … More Practical Tips for Structuring Stories
In a movie (or in my case, an animated cartoon), dialogue can make or break a scene. For animation, the visual aspects may take a lot more time to create, but poor dialogue or poor voice acting can have just as much impact even though they take less effort. So I always find posts or … More Writing Great Dialogue
6:15 PM I am exploring assembling scenes for computer animation from text based on AI. This is partly because I would like to speed up my workflow, and partly as a learning exercise to understand the challenges of applying AI to real life problems. This time I am looking at GPT to see how it … More Entity Extraction for Screenplays with ChatGPT
Are sympathetic characters the same or different to engaging characters? This was a topic on an old Writing Excuses podcast (episode 9.10). The answer is they are different. Here is what resonated with me from the episode in terms of how can I think about my characters to make them more engaging. To help characters … More Sympathetic vs Engaging Characters
To make stories more interesting, do you need conflict or do you need tension? Can you create tension without conflict? I was just listening to the Writing Excuses podcast (episode 18.5, An Interview with Mary Robinette Kowal) and she raised a current thought she was working through on whether it was conflict that made stories … More Conflict vs Tension in Storytelling
I have been working on creating my own animated cartoon using 3D computer animation. This is a personal hobby project, so I have been taking short cuts like no voice actors. I have the first few episodes completed, which means it’s a good time to sit back and review before I launch back into the … More How to Write an Anime Script (2022 Q4 update)
Another masterclass series from the Writing Excuses podcast that I found interesting on script writing as M.I.C.E. This stands for The basic premise is that stories are easier to understand when you nest the starting and ending of parts of the story. For example, you can start a storyline for A, end A, start B, … More MICE Outlining
This is my summary of a podcast I found on YouTube (its available on multiple platforms) from “Bulletproof Screenwriting“, an interview with Karl Iglesias (author, teacher, and consultant in scriptwriting). The whole Bulletproof series looks great if you want to learn more about screenwriting (I just subscribed to the podcast myself), but here are my … More Emotional Impact in Scriptwriting
There are probably some great books on how to write good drama scripts, but I came across a reference to ‘The Poetics’ written by Aristotle in 330 BCE. I was curious how much story telling has changed over the years. I found it a surprisingly interesting read with concrete actionable advice. I might not have … More Great advice for writing a good story, by some old guy
Extra Ordinary, the Series 