Want to Write Great Scenes? Discussing Master Texts and Film Making Tips: Bennett Pellington Part 3

Bennett Pellington is an award winning filmmaker who is hard at work at Part 2 of his award winning short film. He and I talk about storytelling, the struggles with filmmaking, and how to over come them!

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Link to Full Transcript

3 Big Takeaways

Use "Master Texts" to practice your craftBest books for aspiring filmmakers: Blake Snyder's Save the Cat & Hollywood StandardThe Silent Film Check: Watch a movie silently and see if you can follow what's happening. If you can't there's probably too much exposition. Do this check with your own work.

Favorite Quote
"No one should plagiarize. That is not anywhere near when I'm even trying to get across here. But one thing that helped me kind of learn screenwriting and find my voice and writing is looking at other scripts. And they don't even have to be in the genre that you're working on. But to read from those writers who have done it in the past and sold their script and just hear how they wrote, like even your action lines or describing lines. It's really informative, 

You know, as long as you're not stealing like dialogue and other big things are set pieces whatever like, don't, don't take it but make it your own. Take what they did, which works, and go make it your own. Now you have a bit of a roadmap. 

I have a buddy who used to take a scene from a movie that he'd say it's kind of like the general same sense of a scene from another movie. And he'll take that scene, and he would open up a new draft and not copy that scene, but he would put his characters in, and paste all the action lines, and then he'd go through one by one, and write it out as if he was writing, you know Die Hard or whatever, right. 

But then by manipulating it and changing and making his own, you have a totally different scene, but it's in the same arc as a scene from, you know, Die Hard or something, and it just helped inform him how to go about that next hurdle right because you cross that hurdle and then you got 100 more in front."

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