StoryScience_'s profile picture. Story Structure Specialist 
-- Filmmaker, Writer, Educator

Mark Voelpel

@StoryScience_

Story Structure Specialist -- Filmmaker, Writer, Educator

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If you're looking for a place to start, consider this: Every single story you've ever loved is all about a protagonist (one or more) who wants something they don't have, and they want it more than anything, and they do everything they can to get it. Start with that and see what…


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“Good dialogue illuminates what people are not saying.” —Robert Towne

PAGEawards's tweet image. “Good dialogue illuminates what people are not saying.”
—Robert Towne

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In mathematics, understanding is less about grasping concepts and more about becoming accustomed to them. - John von Neumann

PhilosophyOfPhy's tweet image. In mathematics, understanding is less about grasping concepts and more about becoming accustomed to them.

- John von Neumann

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Understand. Don't memorize. Learn principles, not formulas. - R. Feynman


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What makes it a gut-punch is that it's photographed from Tommy's POV, so that you, the audience, are getting murdered, and you realize that in "real-time" with Tommy, in a fraction of a second, before getting shot in the head. Brutal and, literally, unforgettable.


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The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

onlypoemsmag's tweet image. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

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Nobody cares if your slug lines are in bold, underlined, single or double-spaced. I myself barely pay attention to them. My eyes tend to skim right over 'em and most of the time I can use context clues to understand what's going on in the scene without them. At the end of the day…


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Psycho marked the fifth and final time that Sir Alfred Hitchcock earned an Oscar nomination for Best Director. He never won.

From Manu

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“A teacher bears testimony. Her function is both to exemplify and to provoke. Emerson taught me that what I can gain from another is never instruction but only provocation.” —Harold Bloom, Possessed by Memory

BretVDB's tweet image. “A teacher bears testimony. Her function is both to exemplify and to provoke. Emerson taught me that what I can gain from another is never instruction but only provocation.”

—Harold Bloom, Possessed by Memory

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What a great, tiny (and beautifully structured) story


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As with most great and memorable Antagonists in great and memorable movies, he is both


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at some point you get tired of pitching and say “fuck it. I’m making this thing.” that magical moment kicks off a level of creativity you didn’t have access to when you were busy asking for permission. make your film.


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Anyone can write a terrible first draft. Do you have the courage to write a terrible last draft


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Sobre las "polémicas" de los Óscar : una Academia y un formato en el que Alejandro González Iñarritu, por ejemplo, tiene más premios individuales que: Lynch, Cronenberg, Tarr, Zvyagintsev, Kubrick, Tarkovski, Leone, Kurosawa, Kitano, Fincher juntos, jamás puede tomarse en serio.


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Kubrick's work has something in common with Shakespeare's. Both artists were completely dedicated to designing every single thing, every single choice, at every level to support the content. Everything they made was a complete and obsessive union of form and content. Which is…


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Federico Fellini on making 8½ (1963): "It’s difficult enough to remember the films I have made, the motifs even. Anyway, for some time I had had in mind the idea of making the portrait of a man in its many layers: his memories, fantasies, dreams, his everyday life, a character…

RadiantFilm's tweet image. Federico Fellini on making 8½ (1963): 

"It’s difficult enough to remember the films I have made, the motifs even. Anyway, for some time I had had in mind the idea of making the portrait of a man in its many layers: his memories, fantasies, dreams, his everyday life, a character…

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You've heard the advice to not direct on the page in your screenwriting. It's bad advice. It's a misunderstood form of good advice: avoid using camera angles on the page. But this isn't because you don't want to direct the story; this is because camera angles are clunky,…


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It makes the beginning of the film more dramatic and is a good set-up for making the final reversal even more unexpected, so the inaccuracy of that line is a small drawback compared to its benefits. Also Cregger “writes forward” not “backward,” so he came up with the story’s…


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Unfortunately, in order to write the book, you have to write the book.


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Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.


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I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe…

ProfCarlSagan's tweet image. I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe…

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