FORMATTING TIP: Accent, dialect and foreign language in dialogue

foreign language in dialogue - a tower of babel?

A powerful tool in creating distinctive characters is their language, using accent, dialogue and even foreign language. In the real world, everyone speaks in a way that is slightly different from everyone else. In sociolinguistics, this is called an idiolect. (from Greek idiōma ‘private property, peculiar phraseology’, and idios ‘own, private’) A few years ago I … Read more

Wow Them In The End – Give Your Screen Story An Amazing Ending

A great ending can save an otherwise problematic or difficult script – like The Muppet Man. Or have you seen Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood? Industry pros know that to go into profit, you need word of mouth – and repeat business. Great endings deliver just that.

Think about your favourite movies. Most will have an extraordinary ending. In this article I won’t give you the secret to writing a Muppet Man ending, but you may learn a few tricks to make yours more memorable.

Masks, Archetypes and Metaphors [and why the Donald doesn’t don]

people with diy masks

In this post, I want you to bear with me, as I meander through Covid-19, The Don and masked superheroes, to finally demonstrate how masks and metaphors improve your screenplay.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mask

Early in the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, some governments recommended against wearing masks for reasons you may have read in the media at the time. I followed that science, and didn’t wear a mask.

It felt wrong, as I belong to a white minority in an overwhelmingly Asian suburb of Sydney, where face masks had been commonplace long before Covid.

But there was another reason I felt naked without a mask.

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