“I’ve got a great idea for a movie”

I asked my students to write down story ideas for a feature film on a small slip of paper — just a short paragraph made up of about four or five sentences.

I was hoping that they would learn early on how to write their pitch for a movie producer. Because coming up with a story idea and writing it down may be easy for some, but trying to tell that idea in so few sentences (so the movie producer doesn’t get bored) is a challenge for all. And it becomes more challenging to turn that brief paragraph into log lines — some sort of teaser that will intrigue the movie producer to listen to the pitch some more. It is from these log lines that the tagline for the movie ad is usually drawn. For instance, Season 5  of Lost could have had this premise for the pitch:

The season continues the stories of the survivors of the fictional crash of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815, after some of them are rescued and those still stranded seemingly disappear to an unknown location and time with the island that they inhabit. This season is about why the people who have left the island need to get back. [This is adapted from the Wikipedia post on Lost (Season 5)]

From that premise, we can see the possible log line in the passage: “This season is about why the people who have left the island need to get back.” And from this possible log line comes the tag line, as shown in the poster: “Destiny calls.”

But then, that means my students should have very interesting story ideas to begin with, and not the usual fare that you and I get to watch on television or on the widescreen.

Now, it can be argued that all stories pared down to their basic parts will reveal that there is really only one story. (You can ask Vladimir Propp and other scholars who have done just that — dissected the narratives they could get their hands on so they could show us the formula on which the stories are based.)

However, it doesn’t mean the end of innovation if not originality. Because whatever the formula, there is always a way to twist it or tweak it around some more. After all, there seems to be no end to the slew of TV shows and movies that promise something new.

That’s where story engines can help, by providing innumerable combinations and permutations of characters and plot outlines for various genres. Behind the story engine lies the theory that says, as Anthony Friedmann outlines in his Writing for Visual Media, all stories have four “through lines” (179):

1. the overall story through line
2. the main character through line
3. the main vs. impact character through line
4. the impact character’s through line

It is in how my students will weave something out of these through lines, especially where the lines intersect, that something more intriguing than their original story ideas may reveal itself. (to be continued)

Teaching creative writing?

Posed this question, as some form of what Louis Menand refers to as “modern reflexivity,” after yesterday’s Creative Writing 200a (Thesis) Workshop. Googled “answers” or “insights” to the question, and got two interesting takes:

Show or Tell: newyorker.com

Shared via AddThis

And from a Brit’s point-of-view, here’s:

Teaching Creative Writing by Russell Celyn Jones, from The Richmond Review.

The Last Journey of Ninoy

Poster from Rogue Magazine

I just watched Jun Reyes’s The Last Journey of Ninoy on ABS-CBN’s Sunday night feature. For us who grew up living through Martial Law when the press was muzzled and the news was “managed,” it is refreshing to see a documentary that’s able to dramatically portray — without resorting to sensationalism, too — what really happened to Ninoy during those times.

Because for us who got fed only on what was considered “the true, the good, and the beautiful” during those dark times, there were a lot of questions the answers to which we could only read between the lines of type. Even the so-called mosquito press, despite their stinging bites against the Marcos regime, during the last few years of the dictatorship could only give us little. We had to filter whatever news as rumors. We became great puzzle-solvers and conspiracy-theories experts.

Reyes’s docu provides those answers and more. For instance, I always wondered how Ninoy and the others were rounded up that night in September 1972? The docu shows us footage of his arrest. It seems like a full battalion came to arrest him at the hotel where he was having a meeting with other Marcos opponents. And because it is video footage, we get more than the still shots that surfaced later on.

But it is not only the video footage that provides us new insights into these events. The writing — and the research that went into it — also delivers what really seems to have been on Ninoy’s mind when he made the decision to come back to the Philippines. That is, he literally meant what he said: “The Filipino is worth dying for.”

By framing the docu along the timeline of his decisive return back to the country — taking the circuitous route from Boston to LA to Singapore/Malaysia to Taipei and finally to Manila — we also witness the twists and turns of his political journey from being the ambitious and young politician to shrewd senator and presidential aspirant to detainee and renewed Christian to exiled patriot and to — what he must have hoped against — the martyr to democracy.

This is a must-see for all Filipinos.

Clutter

There’s always something therapeutic in cleaning up the clutter that have accumulated while you were busy doing something else. Something that seemed urgent at that moment, and perhaps it was, but which at hindsight was just really one of those things.

So some housecleaning is really like therapy — except that you don’t pay for it, and you get to have a neater place to live in. And that’s exactly what I did this day.

Somehow, it also made for an expansive mental outlook. Neat!