This is a thread to talk about a storytelling
The Storytelling Thread
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I thought the trailer didn’t have a clear 3 act structure. There was no hero’s journey, no setup of the character or final resolution, terrible.
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I gave the trailer a thumbs down before I watched it, just to be safe.
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I guess Aquaman’s finest moment was in Morrison’s JLA when he used his telepathy to give that white Martian a stroke.
Yes, giving your opponent a crippling life-long disability is the mark of a true hero.
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I’m mounting a campaign to give us the director’s cut.
I want them to release the Snyder cut of the Director’s Cut.
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Yes, giving your opponent a crippling life-long disability is the mark of a true hero.
That’s not what I said!
I was saying it more towards use of his ability not heroism.
All Aquaman does is swim and talk to fish. Morrison was resourceful in that instance.
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Comments on the trailer and its storytelling?
I do wonder what it’s like to watch that trailer and not know the story already. For a first trailer, this one lays out a lot of the story; using the Bene Gesserit voice-over narration allows them to explain the whole setup in which the story takes place. Other than that, it’s very Paul-centric, giving us only very brief shots of other characters and the setting. I think it’s probably all very relatable if you don’t know the story; you get a very clear sense of what the movie will be about.
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Speaking as someone who’s never read Dune, but has seen the David Lynch movie, obviously I don’t have much of an idea what the story is about.
And I still didn’t get much of an idea from the trailer. I’m guessing there’s more to those honking great books than just a weird coming-of-age/messiah story.
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I’m guessing there’s more to those honking great books than just a weird coming-of-age/messiah story.
Umm, nope
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Marvel bit off more than what they could chew, so they blew up Genosha or should I say Morrison
They blew up Morrison? No wonder he went back to DC.
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They blew up Morrison? No wonder he went back to DC.
For a necromancer of Grant Morrisons stature, death is just a minor inconvenience.
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Kind of like why the Tasha Yar character was killed off in Star Trek TNG
Tasha was killed because Denise Crosby quit the show in frustration about how little she had to do, not because the producers found her surplus to requirements.
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To someone else who started reading X-Men comics in the mid-80s, the Claremont/Silvestri era might be the best; or the Claremont/Jim Lee era of the early 90s; or, in this century, the Morrison/Quitely era. Some may even feel that the recent Hickman era is the absolute best that the X-books have ever been.
Personally, as someone who started out during the Roy Thomas/Neal Adams days (just before the book was turned into reprints-only until the debut of the All-New All-Different Giant Size X-Men #1), my personal favorite X-Men era was in the late 80s-early 90s when they expanded from three books (Uncanny, New Mutants, and X-Factor) to a roster that included Excalibur, solo Wolverine, adjectiveless X-Men, and Cable, because there was so much variety and at least two books to look forward to each week. Of course, being Marvel, they quickly overexpanded and began doing things for shock value when the writers and artists who made the line great either left or were pushed aside, so my favorite X-era was immediately followed by the worst X-era.
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That’s one of the things streaming services are catching on to – that TV shows no longer need to be 12 or 24 episodes in order to fill a time-slot for the next few months. They can be any length, and even have different running times per episode because they don’t need to fill an hour-long slot in the schedule.
The early Netflix series, such as the Marvel ones, definitely suffered from that kind of padding brought about by outdated thinking about what a TV show should be.
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The early Netflix series, such as the Marvel ones, definitely suffered from that kind of padding brought about by outdated thinking about what a TV show should be.
Those solo series (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, etc) are the most egregious examples of padding that I’ve experienced. The Defenders team show, on the other hand, was only 10 (?) episodes and had much better pacing as a result.
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I’m sure Zack Snyder would have loved them.
Talking of the DC movies, I feel as though the new Batman movie has really lifted the look of Netflix DD, especially that stairwell fight scene.
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“incredibly poorly written”… yeah ok…
Well, anyhow, at least the production was mostly great… I mean, these days it’s easier to take a shit on them I guess, since there are so many good shows… but even a couple of years ago the qualitly was mostly not there yet.
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It was all just so slow and padded and felt like a chore to watch
This was by far the biggest issue and funnily enough I heard discussed today on the Pilot TV podcast. That Netflix, despite the freedom really to choose any length or format they want, tend to pad stuff out way beyond what the level of story justifies.
I should have loved these shows, I am target audience and they were generally well cast and well filmed, but I gave up halfway through as they were sooo ploddingly slow. The last straw was the 2nd Jessica Jones that was like a Jon Pertwee Doctor Who from the 70s where they escaped, got caught again, escaped again in every episode.
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The last straw was the 2nd Jessica Jones that was like a Jon Pertwee Doctor Who from the 70s where they escaped, got caught again, escaped again in every episode.
I only watched the first season of Jessica Jones and I hate-watched most of that. It was the stabbiest TV show ever! Stabbings with knives, stabbings with scissors, stabbings with wine glasses, then finally, stabbings with garden shears!
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The last straw was the 2nd Jessica Jones that was like a Jon Pertwee Doctor Who from the 70s where they escaped, got caught again, escaped again in every episode.
You’re actually rekindling my interest in watching these shows
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This was by far the biggest issue and funnily enough I heard discussed today on the Pilot TV podcast. That Netflix, despite the freedom really to choose any length or format they want, tend to pad stuff out way beyond what the level of story justifies.
I thought I had seen somewhere that in the case of the Marvel series, it was Marvel who insisted that each season be 13 episodes long.
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Maybe, either way it’s a noted trend in some Netflix shows and 13 was way too long for all of them with the amount of story they had to tell.,
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Think about how much story GAME OF THRONES fit into each 10-episode season. Then think about how much story Netflix fit into any 13-episode Marvel season. Seriously, one half-hour episode of SIMPSONS Season 4 had more plot development than an entire season of LUKE CAGE.
You know I’m right.
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It’s amazing to watch those early Simpsons episodes and see how much story they packed in them. They were tight and lean. When I rewatched “You Only Move Twice”, I noticed quickly they moved into the story. No meandering or long setup. It just got straight to the point and kept going. And it was funny as hell.
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So it’s not just a major plot hole in a story but if the story is really going nowhere, the audience loses interest.
Is a short attention span to blame? A smarter audience with limited time to waste and other alternatives?
Some comic readers drop titles from their pull list because of this. Just saying.
If the story and characters are not compelling, people will lose interest regardless of the medium.
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If the audience loses interest, it’s not because the story is going nowhere, it’s because the journey is not interesting.
And it’s nothing to do with attention span, it’s to do with good writing. I read Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, which is about 1800 pages, and it held my attention because every page was interesting. I read a Bendis Legion issue, which is 20 pages long, and my attention wanders in the middle because it’s just not interesting.
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And it’s nothing to do with attention span, it’s to do with good writing. I read Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, which is about 1800 pages, and it held my attention because every page was interesting.
Oh come on, no-one really reads the Joyce chapter.
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It was “interesting” :P
You know, the same way that listening to a math rock band playing atonally in six different time signatures at the same time is interesting. Not something you’d necessarily want to put yourself through again, but you’re still kind of glad you’ve done it once
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If the audience loses interest, it’s not because the story is going nowhere, it’s because the journey is not interesting.
Correct and it is also a typically nerdy aspect of analysis that we focus a lot on plot, it’s easier to measure objectively.
However things can engage you for other reasons, you really like the characters, the artwork/cinematography/prose.
I love The Trip which barely has any story at all or my favourite Hellblazer story is a bunch of people talking in a pub. Something like Rise of Skywalker has so much plot it can’t contain it and falls down as a result.
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You can also have those moments where two characters are simply talking to each and it it has your attention totally and completely.
Yup a lot of my highlights of Game of Thrones were just dialogue sections, usually between Tyrion and Varys or Diana Rigg and Charles Dance.
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You can also have those moments where two characters are simply talking to each and it it has your attention totally and completely.
Yup a lot of my highlights of Game of Thrones were just dialogue sections, usually between Tyrion and Varys or Diana Rigg and Charles Dance.
Possibly the last great episode of Game of Thrones was that “night before the battle” episode in the final season, which almost entirely consisted of this kind of thing.
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To be fair to Al though there are many examples where TV shows in particular just tread water on plot advancement and become dull. There’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution though. I think things like Robert McKee’s rules actually have a lot of value but I have a lot of personal favourites that completely ignore them.
Yeah, I think it’s one of those you-have-to-know-the-rules-to-break-them things. And it’s not like these are new rules or like they didn’t know just how to break them even hundreds of years ago. I mean, there’s this whole plot of how Hermia is in unrequited love with Lysander and Helena with Demetrius and he with her but the Elven lord of Oberon mixes things up by using a love spell and everything gets turned around and it’s actually quite complicated but suddenly there’s a troupe of layman actors rehearsing their dumb-ass version of Romeo and Juliet and this has nothing to do with the actual story and what the fuck is going on?
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To be fair to Al though there are many examples where TV shows in particular just tread water on plot advancement and become dull. There’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution though. I think things like Robert McKee’s rules actually have a lot of value but I have a lot of personal favourites that completely ignore them.
Yeah, I think it’s one of those you-have-to-know-the-rules-to-break-them things. And it’s not like these are new rules or like they didn’t know just how to break them even hundreds of years ago. I mean, there’s this whole plot of how Hermia is in unrequited love with Lysander and Helena with Demetrius and he with her but the Elven lord of Oberon mixes things up by using a love spell and everything gets turned around and it’s actually quite complicated but suddenly there’s a troupe of layman actors rehearsing their dumb-ass version of Romeo and Juliet and this has nothing to do with the actual story and what the fuck is going on?
That’s when literature really reached the bottom.
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How do you all feel about decompressed storytelling in comics? (at $.3.99 per)
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a good reason for it.
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There are storytelling tricks you can do with thought bubbles that don’t work as well with narrative captions. Imagine a splash page of a whole team reacting to some event, where everybody is thinking something different about it, which tells us more about the characters than it does about the event if done properly. How do you do that with a caption at the top of the panel? And if you’re going to scatter around multiple caption boxes to show different people’s thoughts, well that’s basically just thought bubbles with a different shape.
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There are storytelling tricks you can do with thought bubbles that don’t work as well with narrative captions. Imagine a splash page of a whole team reacting to some event, where everybody is thinking something different about it, which tells us more about the characters than it does about the event if done properly. How do you do that with a caption at the top of the panel? And if you’re going to scatter around multiple caption boxes to show different people’s thoughts, well that’s basically just thought bubbles with a different shape.
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If you would like to see a masterclass in storytelling, watch Genndy Tartakovsky‘s Primal.
It is an animated series about the bond between a caveman and a dinosaur. It is extremely violent and bloody but also heartwarming. Most importantly, there is no dialogue. Emotions are conveyed through actions and facial expressions.
It is a fantastic series. The second half of the first season just started airing on Adult Swim.
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Watching a little bit of the Yesterday movie. It suspended belief that a world blackout would alter the past. I feel it would be almost impossible to make a sequel which would most likely involve restoring the original timeline. It wasn’t a sci-fi movie to begin with. It just used it to suspend belief and took things from there, like Peggy Sue got married, Big, Back to the Future, and Quantum Leap.
Funny how some stories that use a little bit of suspending belief pique the interest of the general audience than stories that get too technical.
PS – Seeing that old John Lennon opening the door was creepy.
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Depends on what you’re doing, doesn’t it?
I will say that especially when it comes to genre shows, the audience knows the way these plots work so well these days that can’t just go through with a standard development and expect everybody to be happy. Hell, these days everybody even expects the twist. Wait, so maybe you could just go through with the original standard plot now and the twist would be that there’s no twist in spite of everybody’s expectation…
GoT showed that it’s not hard to really surprise your audience, you just have to be willing to commit to killing your darlings.
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GoT showed that it’s not hard to really surprise your audience, you just have to be willing to commit to killing your darlings.
“I’ve been planting all these clues that the butler did it, then you’re halfway through a series and suddenly thousands of people have figured out that the butler did it, and then you say the chambermaid did it? No, you can’t do that,” Martin reportedly said while addressing whether fan theories and online speculation influence his writing process for the “Song of Ice and Fire” series of novels on which HBO’s adaptation is based.
Especially in genre fiction, if a twist or surprise completely goes against all expectations and anything that the author has been working toward, it will likely fail or disappoint readers. Honestly, readers and audiences are attracted to the genre because of what they’ve gotten from it – because it is reliable – and any novelty must still provide that same pay-off.
What turns me off today is that there are so many stories in many media that seem to think that the “macguffin” doesn’t matter or that the answer to a mystery doesn’t matter. In an Indiana Jones story, whatever the object is for the conflict can be anything, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter what it is.
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Especially in genre fiction, if a twist or surprise completely goes against all expectations and anything that the author has been working toward, it will likely fail or disappoint readers. Honestly, readers and audiences are attracted to the genre because of what they’ve gotten from it – because it is reliable – and any novelty must still provide that same pay-off.
Yeah, sure, you can’t just disappoint expectations and that’s that, you have to give them something in return. I think Martin managed to pull that off pretty well with the Red Wedding and the aftermath.
Honestly, readers and audiences are attracted to the genre because of what they’ve gotten from it – because it is reliable – and any novelty must still provide that same pay-off.
This also kind of makes it easier to be innovative, to work within genres that rely heavily on giving people the same stories again and again. It’s why Moore and Miller made such a huge splash in superhero comics in the eighties.
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I remember a discussion recently over the question of GHOSTBUSTERS is basically a comedy or if it is really a horror comedy. I came down on the end of comedy since the horror elements had no real scare behind them, but what I found more interesting was the idea if Ghostbusters is really an adult comedy that has somehow become perceived as more of a movie for kids. If you look back at that era, there were a lot of horror movies that whose mature themes have really been dulled so that you might think they are fine for children. GREMLINS spawned a whole sub-genre of puppet monsters, but few of them (CRITTERS, GHOULIES, PUPPET MASTER, etc.) are really suitable for children. BEETLEJUICE is another one where you kinda remember it as being much more tame than it really is.
Often, the tones of these movies actually were made less horrific in the development process. BEETLEJUICE originally was about a demon who genuinely wanted to terrorize, murder and rape people. Jim Carrey’s THE MASK was originally meant to be in the same vein as Freddy Kreuger in the NIGHTMARE movies. However, the production companies came to the realization that comedy served the material better than straight horror, and “straight horror” at the time was already comedic. The WAXWORK, HOUSE and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD films for example. Even DAWN OF THE DEAD was darkly satiric more than terrifying.
However, this brings me to unintentional horror movies that were sold to kids. Well, at least one… THE CAT IN THE HAT starring Mike Myers (of SNL and Austin Powers fame – not the one from Halloween) as the titular character.
If someone set out to intentionally take the Genie from Disney’s ALADDIN and use him as a devious demon out to corrupt the souls of children, it would be hard to believe they could come up with a film much different than the one we actually got. Filled with the sort of vaguely nauseating imagery that would be more at home in an early (or very late) David Lynch film or the almost equally insidious THE MASK 2: SON OF THE MASK, I really cannot imagine a movie more horrific that does not actually intend to be.
So, the question is, is that possible? Could someone intentionally write and make a movie that is really a horror film, but convince everyone that it’s a hilarious family romp?
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Poltergeist is another that’ll pass the checklist so got a family friendly PG rating
What???
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In Thailand, it is funny to see them blur out the cigarettes and smoking.
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We had cable back in the 1970s so I watched the unedited movies growing up. Every once in a while, I’d catch the censored version on network TV and that was always such a disappointing experience as I knew what had been cut or bleeped.
One of the most awkward moments in my adult life was around 1982/3, when my parents got HBO as part of their cable package. I sat in the living room with my father watching the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice. If you’ve ever seen it, you’ll remember the scene where Jack Nicholson ravages Jessica Lange on the kitchen counter where she had been making bread, both of them covered in baking powder. One of the hottest sex scenes I’d ever seen in a film to that point, but all I could focus on is the fact that my dad, who goes to church every day, is sitting in the room with me.
No censorship on HBO. Damn it!
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In Thailand, it is funny to see them blur out the cigarettes and smoking.
It continues to amaze me that in the US you can’t show a naked butt or a female nipple on network television, but you can show a bullet smashing through a man’s skull, or the entrails spilling out a guy who’s been sliced open by a giant knife. Violence is cool, but anything remotely sexual is TABOO!!
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Violence is cool, but anything remotely sexual is TABOO!!
That’s an essential part of the American eugenics program. Kill more people and have fewer babies.
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It continues to amaze me that in the US you can’t show a naked butt or a female nipple on network television, but you can show a bullet smashing through a man’s skull, or the entrails spilling out a guy who’s been sliced open by a giant knife. Violence is cool, but anything remotely sexual is TABOO!!
That’s because you can make money selling bullets.
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