The Artist’s Vision

“Why do you want to build an amusement park, they’re so dirty.” -- Walt Disney’s wife, on his idea for DisneylandFor those of us born after 1955 it is difficult to imagine a world without Disneyland. But for the people who were born the other side of that year, it was just as difficult to imagine a world with Disneyland in it. Mrs. Disney was correct: amusement parks were dirty places. She could

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Target Practice

"The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." -- MichelangeloWhile teaching a class, I once mentioned that it wasn’t just luck to repeatedly produce good work as a storyteller. I said that if it were being in the right place at the right time, you could not have people whose successes span decades, such as Alfred

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Hero Worship

"One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being." -- May SartonWhat happened to heroes in stories? In older films and stories, heroes were characters who made sacrifices. They were people who thought of others before themselves. At some point we decided that this was unrealistic, and characters like a square-jawed Superman were too corny for us. We were more sophisticated

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WHAT’S WRONG WITH EMOTIONS, ANYWAY?

When was that last time you felt anything in the movie theater? I mean really felt something for the characters. Did you care who lived and who died? (I don’t mean intellectually, but deep down in your gut.)When a film is really working people come out fired up. They are still giggling at the funny part, or still worked up by exciting part. Or they are still sad because of the melancholy part.

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SUPERIOR POSITION

 From an interview with Alfred Hitchcock: "There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise,’ and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is

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"The Humble Improve"

“The Humble Improve” – Wynton Marsalis

The sketches in this blog were done by my friend Derek Thompson who works for Pixar and has sat in on two different seminars of mine. This was his way of taking notes.





A few months ago I had the privilege of teaching my seminar at Pixar. Anyone who knows me knows that there are few modern storytellers I respect as much as I do those at Pixar. They

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The Amazing Disappearing First Act

"Learn the fundamentals of the game and stick to them." --Jack Nicklaus

I hate to come back to the whole “three act” thing, but I find over and over again that people are not adhering to it. My belief is that the lack of strong first acts in films in recent years has much to do with the steady decline in movie attendance. No first act, no emotional involvement.

I think that I mentioned

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The Other Side of the Rollercoaster

It is at this time of the year that the studios put out their big movies – their “tent-pole” films. Their marketers will call these “non-stop rollercoaster rides!” Rollercoaster is the term that they use to describe films with relentless action. They promise all of the thrill, chills, twists and turns of tallest rollercoaster at Magic Mountain or Great America or wherever.Why are these movies

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Inkblot Cinema

A while ago I had a talk with a musician friend of mine. He told me that he had gone to see a modern classical concert. He said that it was an awful cacophony, and asked, “What happened to the art of communication?” I thought that was a very good question, one I have often wondered about myself.I saw a documentary on television about the phenomenon of genius; in it they said that it was a western

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A Look Inside My Brain part 2

Flickering Images from Marcus Donner on Vimeo.


In this post I will once again explain my process while making a short documentary for the Seattle international Film Festival.I feel that when doing a creative work it is best to place restrictions on one's self. These restrictions, or rules, give the piece an internal consistency. They also force you to be more creative. There is an old

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A Look Inside My Brain

Because I think it’s important that I show you the principles I espouse applied to my own work, in this blog entry I will breakdown a short film that I directed. 
Two years ago I was asked by the Seattle International Film Festival to participate in the Fly Filmmaking Challenge. These are films made ‘on the fly’. They selected ten directors to each make a five-minute documentary. Our subjects

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On The Shoulders of Giants

Sir Isaac Newton once said that, "if I see further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." He was of course referring to the great astronomers who came before him, people like Galileo and Kepler. Most physicists believe Newton to be the greatest scientific mind ever in their field and yet Newton gave the credit for his success to others.Everyone I know who is good at what they do will

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Paddy Chayefsky’s Dead

Starting sometime in the 80’s film directors became art directors. The look of a film became more important than any other aspect of the film. So all of the guys who cared more about style than substance have been touted as geniuses. It is not unusual nowadays to hear a critic wax poetic about the look of a film regardless of the narrative substance of the film. Not to pick on Memoirs of a

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MYTH OF GENRE part 2

If you think about it, Jaws is just a monster movie. And, like a lot of monster movies, incidental characters are picked off as our hero tries to stop the creature. But, somehow, the film transcends genre. It’s because it has an armature and a character of change. Lots of films came out after Jaws which tried to repeat its success. One film used an orca whale in place of a shark, and another

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THE MYTH OF GENRE

Genre is visible. People know if they are watching a western or science fiction. But invisible ink is about the inner workings of story, not the costumes the characters wear.Among the people who know me, I am known as the guy who doesn’t like any film that comes out. This isn’t true. It’s mostly true. Anyway, they rack their brains trying to figure out what it is I do like and why. They

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DIALOGUE part 4 (ADDRESS AND EXPLAIN)

This is related to “address and dismiss” but serves a different function. The best example is in the first Star Wars, when Luke Skywalker sees the Millennium Falcon for the first time. After it was revealed, a hush came over the audience as they took in the magnificent ship. Then Luke exclaims, “What a piece of junk!”The crowed erupted with laughter, because that’s not at all what we were

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DIALOGUE part 3 (ADDRESS AND DISMISS)

The first time I noticed this technique, I was watching John Carpenter’s The Thing. In the film, an alien creature with the ability to assume any form terrorizes a group of men in an isolated research base.In this particular scene, the alien has assumed the shape of one of the men, but then begins to distort. The neck stretches impossibly and tendons snap. The head detaches from the rest of the

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DIALOGUE part 2 (SOUNDING NATURAL)

Over the last few years, I have noticed that every character I read, or see in the movies or on television, sounds like another movie or television show. Real people don’t talk like movie people. Listen to how people speak. They didn’t all grow up in your neighborhood, nor do they all have your educational background.Because I’ve worked in both animation and comic books, I know a lot of

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DIALOGUE part 1

My barber wants to make a film. He wants to write a screenplay, so he wants to know the format. He figures that once he knows the format, he’s set. There is nothing else to know, right? As he said to me, “I already know what I want people to say.”Most people are under the impression that scriptwriting is coming up with dialogue. Most critics seem to think this as well. They will go on and

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The Strange Case of Sherman Alexie

I was once asked to give a talk about storytelling to a convention of high school media students with Native-American writer Sherman Alexie. The problem was no one told Sherman, so he spoke the entire time. That worked out perfectly for me because I got a great story out of it.Sherman doesn’t believe in formalized story structure, he believes that it is a Hollywood construct. He began his

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We Live in the Dark Ages part 2

The more I talk about, and teach, structure the more I see that people have a fundamental misunderstanding about what it really is. Story structure is not an edict from on high, which says, ‘One must tell stories like this!’ It is more basic than that – it is the way people naturally tell stories. And storytelling is as natural to human beings as language itself.Here are the three parts of

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