Top 10 Uses of Foreshadowing

The YouTube channel WatchMojo has been entertaining me for years now, but it can also be hugely educational. This video of the Top 10 Uses of Foreshadowing in film provides some excellent examples of set ups and pay offs. Foreshadowing is a powerful story-telling technique but not always easy to get right, too subtle and it may go unnoticed, too obvious and it ruins any mystique.

The Usual Suspects, Shaun of the Dead and Jurassic Park are some of my personal favourites. Whereas The Dark Knight's "you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" always felt too heavy-handed to me, considering we all knew Harvey Dent was going to became Two Face.

Murder My Sweet & Using IMdB for Dialogue

Murder My Sweet, is the film adaptation of Raymand Chandler's hardboiled detective novel Farewell My Lovely. It's one of the most effective adaptations of the writer's work with it's slick first person narrative, Dick Powell nailing the dry wit of Philip Marlowe, and director Edward Dymytryk presenting a dark, cynical vision of 1940s society.

Chandler's dialogue is second-to-none, and Dymytryk kept it all intact for the film - Marlowe's sarcasm and deadpan delivery are one of the great hallmarks of the noir genre - and something I and many crime fiction writer's aspire to emulate. So when researching Murder My Sweet on IMdB the quotes section proved a fantastic little resource. Nothing like reading the novel or watching the film to really get a feel for the rhythm and beats of the dialogue, but if you haven't got time for that commitment, but need some inspiration dialogue-wise, check out IMdB's quotes section of your favourite movies. If the dialogue's anywhere near as quotable as some of the classic film noir's, there's gonna be a shit-ton of great lines to inspire you.

Joss Whedon - Bafta Guru

The Bafta Guru site is a bountiful resource on filmmaking, they've got screenwriting lectures, interviews, and opportunities. This interview with Joss Whedon for their 'Life in Pictures' strand isn't just a great overview of the writer/director, it's also amazing what you can learn from just listening to him. Plus it's really fucking funny. Like really really funny. I've probably posted it before but after revisiting it last week, it bears repeat listening. This is the guy who created Buffy, Angel, Firefly and Serenity. He brought the Avengers together in a bickering harmony. I could listen to him all day.

Screenplays

Below I've collated a few links to great screenplays, both film and TV. The links are mainly pilfered from other, far better, filmmaking resources like the fantastic Cinephilia and Beyond, as well as the unstoppable Go Into the Story, and the UK's own BBC Writers Room. The more screenplays you read, the easier it becomes to write them... or so I'm told.

Glen Garry Glen Ross - David Mamet

Calvary - John Michael McDonagh

People Just Do Nothing - Steve Stamp

Fargo (film) - Joel & Ethan Coen

Fargo (TV series) - Noah Hawley

I've just finished watching Fargo the TV series, a new benchmark against which we'll measure all other spinoffs! Noah Hawley's black comedy had enough little nods to the Coen Brothers' original film - that subplot on the fate of Steve Buscemi's buried million was inspired - but did its own thing, with it's own deeply flawed yet lovable characters and quirky ideas. There's an online PDF of the first episode that's a perfect example of how a pilot can deftly introduce all your main characters, while keeping the plot moving - things just keep happening! - and using the setting to its full potential. The dialogue is sublime and the tone, that straight-faced gallows humour, is to die for.

The 5 Plot Points

Most stories, be it on the screen, stage or page, have plots that can be broken down to five major turning points. These turning points alter the protagonists' direction, either by changing his goal or introducing new obstacles that set him further away from achieving it.

The Inciting Incident - This is the event that kicks everything off. It will typically turn the main protagonist's ordinary world upside down and open a door to a new realm of the unknown. It occurs about half way through the first act and sets up the conflict to come.

In Back to the Future, it's the moment when Marty witnesses Doc invent time travel.

In The Godfather it's when, while at his sister's wedding, Michael Corleone tells his girlfriend that Luca does the dirty work for his father saying, "That's my family Katie, it's not me." Of course, the story is Michael's descent into that world.

The Lock In - Occurring at the end of Act 1 and propelling the story into Act 2 the lock-in outlines the main goal for the protagonist. The door of the inciting incident that opened and invited the protagonist into a new realm - that closes, locking the main character in the new realm, and if it he wants to return home, he'll have to achieve his aim.

In Back to the Future it's when Marty travels back in time to prevent Doc's murder at the hands of the Libyan terrorists from whom Doc stole plutonium for the DeLorean. This leads him to stealing the affection of his teenage mother Lorraine, when it was supposed to fall on his teenage father George.

In The Godfather it's when Michael's father - Don Vito Corleone - is gunned down in the street. When Michael hears of this he rushes to his father's bedside and into the family life he'd tried to distance himself from.

Midpoint - Also known as the first culmination, the midpoint occurs in the middle of Act 2 and marks either the first major success, or the first major failure of the protagonist so they're either closer to or further away from their goal. 

In Back to the Future it's when Marty realises his brother is gradually fading from a photograph he has, because Marty's disrupted the space/time continuum by meeting his mother and father in the past.

In The Godfather it's when Michael murders The Turk and dirty cop McCluskey and flees to Italy where the family will protect him.

All Is Lost - This is the point that propels us into the third and final act, when the obstacles against our protagonist seem insurmountable, they're staring defeat in the face, victory couldn't be further away and you're wondering "How the hell are they gonna get out of this?"

In Back to the Future it's when Biff has his goons lock Marty in the trunk of his car allowing Biff to make unwanted advances on Lorraine, and with Marty's dad free to play the hero, however it's already been well established George doesn't haven't have the balls to stand up to Biff.

In The Godfather it's when Michael travels to Las Vegas to buy out Moe Greene's stake in the Corleone's casinos and Greene derides the family as a fading power. To add injury to insult, Michael sees his brother Fredo falling under Greene's influence.

Climax and Resolution - In the most exciting way possible the climax resolves the ultimate problem posed by the inciting incident, as well as wrapping up any loose story threads set up along the way. Our protagonist either leaves the new realm to return home a changed character, or stays and becomes King. So the inciting incident provokes the question - what will happen? and the climax declares - this!

In Back to the Future a storm brews and a fallen branch disconnects the cable Doc has run from the clock tower to the street in order to harness a lightening strike which Marty needs to pass under in the DeLorean in order to get back to the future. But Marty can't start the car and Doc struggles on the clock tower's ledge trying to reconnect the cable. Marty manages to get the DeLorean up to 88mph as the lightning strikes the clock tower and electricity flows through the cable. Doc's murder is prevented thanks to Marty's letter telling him to wear a bullet proof vest. Marty wakes up the next morning and finds his family changed - George is a successful author full of self-confidence, Lorraine is happily in love, and Biff, rather than being a bullying superior, is now subordinate to George and Marty.

In The Godfather Michael orders the assassination of the New York dons, Moe Greene and Tessio. Michael questions Carlo on his involvement in Sonny's murder and after admitting he was contacted, Peter Clemenza kills him with a wire garrote. Kay then confronts Michael, who denies killing Carlo, an answer she accepts. As Kay watches Michael warily as he receives his capos, who address him as the new Don Corleone. All this occurs at the Christening of Connie's son, for whom Michael is the godfather.

Christopher Nolan on 'Following'

Here Christopher Nolan talks through the making of his first feature - Following. It's a neo noir tale with a twisty turny plot that keeps you guessing right up to the end. In this interview he elucidates on how having no budget can be used to your advantage, from choosing to shoot black and white, to the use of sound, and elements to include or not to avoid betraying your lack of finance, as well as how it helped him develop directorial techniques he's been using ever since.

Despite his budgets increasing to astronomical figures, Nolan hasn't changed his methods, he still prefers to shoot single camera, still draws a lot from the crime and film noir genre, and still uses inserts for both storytelling and editing reasons. It's an in-depth interview where you can learn a lot about first time film-making, as well as the story behind the production of a very strong début feature.

Immortal Technique - Dance with the Devil

This here's some gut-wrenching storytelling. A ghetto Greek tragedy, Immortal Technique tells a brutal story of crime, greed and materialism, as New York projects kid Billy, desperate for money and respect, does whatever he has to in order to rise to the top. The consequences of Billy's desires and actions are as harrowing as Immortal Technique's ruthless delivery.

The Lost Room & MacGuffins

In a lecture he gave at Columbia university way back when in 1939, Alfred Hitchcock defined MacGuffins as, "the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is almost always the papers." It's the thing that the main characters want, Marcellus Wallace's briefcase in Pulp Fiction, unobtanium in Avatar, and the meaning of rosebud in Citizen Kane. In the first act at least, it's what drives the characters and story forward.

The Lost Room is a 2006 sci-fi series about the eponymous motel room and a bunch of everyday objects that possess unusual powers. The protagonist, detective Joe Miller, has to hunt down these objects to rescue his nitwit daughter who got lost in the lost room. It opens with some shady deal to get the Key - the Key can open any hinged door and turn it into a portal to the Lost Room - the deal goes south and the Key ends up in the hands of Joe Miller. Each episode revolves around a different object, a different MacGuffin, and the more MacGuffins we meet the more we learn about the mythology of the Lost Room, it's objects and the numerous cabals searching for the powerful objects.

It's a great hidden gem of a show, and demonstrates not only how to use MacGuffins in storytelling, but also how ultimately meaningless most MacGuffins are - they'll propel the characters and story along for the first act or two but after that, the climax and resolution really revolves around the protagonist coming to terms with their personal flaw or solving some internal conflict, which will probably have been externalized with the MacGuffin or via the characters' relationship to it. In the case of the Lost Room it was Joe's stupid daughter and his anxiety about being an inadequate father - an anxiety which was fully substantiated when he lost her in a portal to another universe. Simply, find his daughter and he's a good father.

An interesting example of MacGuffins in modern cinema are the Infinity Stones in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the Avengers, and Captain America: The First Avenger, it was the Tesseract, in Guardians of the Galaxy it looks to be the mysterious orb Chris Pratt's Star Lord is trying to steal in the trailer, and in Thor: The Dark World it was the Aether. These are the Infinity Stones and it's these MacGuffins (and the heroes) that tie the plots together of each individual movie, as well as the different phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, because, as will transpire in Avengers 3, the uber-villain Thanos is trying to get his big purple mitts on all six of the Infinity Stones - whoever holds all six stones in the Infinity Gauntlet gains omnipotence, omniscience and God-like power - so this Infinity Gauntlet will be the ultimate MacGuffin of not only Avengers 3 but the whole MCU and stopping Thanos will be our heroes' ultimate goal. Their first aim will be to keep the Infinity MacGuffins away from Thanos, except they'll fail, all will be seemingly lost, and there'll be an epic showdown, from which our heroes will no doubt emerge victorious. But not all of them, I bet.

Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy

This video compilation by Tony Zhou perfectly demonstrates not only the cinematic flair and comedic talents of Edgar Wright but also analyses how the English auteur uses every frame as an opportunity to tell the story visually. And it reminds me how pissed I am that he's now not directing Ant-Man. Stupid Marvel.

Tony's beef and disappointment with American comedies is well articulated, calling them out for their lazy filmmaking - "the use of picture and sound to deliver jokes is... boring." He rightly argues that when you're predominantly using close up shots of your actors delivering dialogue, you're not using the full potential of cinema. And this is what Edgar Wright does so well - visual storytelling. In Tony's words, "the frame is a playground, so play."

Brian Koppelman's Sixty Second Screenwriting

Brian Koppelman, the screenwriter behind Rounders, Runner, Runner and Ocean's Thirteen, has been recording six second Vine videos giving writing advice. They range from the practical, "Remember the last argument you had? Write it down." To the no-nonsense. "Today I'd prefer to be reading, playing in the snow, but I'm a writer - are you?"

His straight up delivery is sometimes unforgiving and sometimes comforting. In the latest #sixsecondscreenwriting Vine, number 176 states, "I promise you this, if you write every single day, a year from now you'll be a much better writer than you are today." The catalyst for these injections of knowledge were Brian's dislike of screenwriting gurus and their professed rules to writing, "All screenwriting books are bullshit, all. Watch movies, read screenplays, let them be your guide." You can find an archive of all Brian's Vines here, and with over two decades of experience these video nuggets can't be ignored.