Visuals are a universal language that engage our intuition and imagination.
Key Element – the Shining Moment
You must have that one defining moment around which everything else pivots. It is purity, clarity. It is the image on the movie poster, the book cover, on YouTube thumbnail. It is the bumper sticker quote.
Is it dialogue or action? It can be either or both and it can be truly just a moment or it can last an entire scene sequense. Sometimes it’s the long-awaited kiss, sometimes it’s jumping in front of someone to take the bullet.
In Armageddon, the guys draw straws to see who’ll stay behind on the asteroid and trigger the nuke that will blow it to smithereens and save Earth. Bruce Willis’s Harry Stamper sabotages the guy who drew the short straw, pushes him into the spaceship, slams the door, and takes on the responsibility of blowing the nuke. He’s sacrificing his own life to save all of humanity – that is the Shining Moment.
Written Descriptions
In prose you are the director, art director, costumer, makeup artist, and acting coach for every aspect of the story. Sure, you leave some things for the readers’ imagination or your story won’t engage their imagination, but they want you to create and evoke a rich world for them to explore.
For scripts to be sold and turned into a visual medium, you must first impress a development exec or reader with words on a page. Scripts suggest to the director, production designer, cinematographer, lighting director, costumer, and actors what you envision, so they can use that as a springboard for their own interpretations and creativity.
You want to use adverbs, adjectives, verbs, and nouns that liven up the page. E.g. instead of “walk”, you could use plods, scurries, prances, etc. Instead of “eats” you could use picks at, devours, gulps, or for a classier approach, dines. Give inanimate objects human characteristics such as “leaves shivering in the wind”.
Make your pages more powerful by using potent, visceral words that engage our imagination and our love of story.
Cinematic Techniques
This section has suggestions on framing, composition, lighting, sound, music, and so on, to create the effect you’re after, particularly for those Shining Moments that Show ME the Love!
Conclusion
Excercises in Awareness & Writing
Now put to use what you have learned in each chapter using these brief exercises.
Further Reading
Further Viewing/Media
Chapter One
Love of Land & Country
This land is your land, this land is my land....
Woody Guthrie – “This Land is Your Land”
One of the most basic loves people have is a love of their homeland. By bringing out this aspect you can deepen your characters and give them even more to care about, fear to lose, fight and even die for. These stakes are high and unmistakable. It can be an effective reflection about how they feel about other characters – either by comparison or contrast.
After gender identification what we notice most or most want to know about others is their ethnic origin which may tell us something about their patriotic allegiance. Sometimes this seems evident by the colour of their skin and/or their speech. The assumption is that people will carry the imprint of their homeland and will act in certain ways depending on where they are from.
On a planet increasingly stressed by both natural and manmade changes, love of the very land itself may be the essential key to alleviating the ongoing damage and bringing Earth back into balance with itself and every life form on it and in it.
The Defining Myth
The Garden of Eden, that idyllic land where there was no sickness, want, or death. And where the land itself was used to create humanity – man made from the dust of the very earth.
Most cultures look back with yearning to some Golden Age when they were living in a better place and everything was better, from the weather to the crops to the neighbors (or the lack thereof). This idealization of the actual physical earth as the source of all that was well before and which could be well again engages some driven and sometimes desperate part of the human psyche that imagines and desires perfection.
Exemplar Movie
Out of Africa, “I had a farm in Africa.”
Why it exists (evolutionary back-story)
Love of the land is a basic instinctual reverence for that which supports one’s very existence. The physical land supplies the resources necessary for sheer survival and at some level we just know that, or we used to anyway, back when everyone knew where their food came from. These days, maybe not so much because love of your local grocery store just isn’t quite the same as love of the fertile land.
The desert Fremen of Dune loved and respected their land and though to everyone else it was a bleak forbidding wasteland, they learned to thrive on it. The Fremen were patterned after the nomadic Bedouin of Arabia and North Africa.
How it works (physiology & psychology)
We have a specific, direct connection to the land because it is what we are made of. The land is in our bones and in our teeth, as well as our hearts. As is often a plot point in scientifically-slanted procedural dramas, deductions about a victim can be made from spectro-analysis of the various minerals and other markers in their bodies.
How it serves us now
Ecologically speaking, the developed world seems to have lost touch with this basic love of the land. We are refusing to admit that there may be troubles in paradise. We are misusing and abusing the planet and the evidence of that is all around us. Mother Nature ultimately wins so it seems like it would behoove us to be on her side.
Like kids on a playground in an endless game of “King of the Mountain”, peoples keep shouldering each other off the land, usually with force of arms backed up by provable or sometimes specious historical or theological claims.
A character engaged with ecology can not only be an integral part of your story but can also make a point about your personal perspective on the planet, resources, etc. The current trend of apocalyptic stories are set against a damaged environment.
Examples in Myth and Legend
The Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman were both cursed to wander homelessly.
Moses and the Israelites searched forty years for the Promised Land.
The Hopi myths tell of their wanderings up, down, and across the North and South American continents in search of their perfect homeland.
Examples in History and Current Events
Ecology and the environment motivate many people. “Tree-huggers”, deep ecologists, and land rights organizations stand up to rampant and often destructive development. Examples are the Environmental Protection Agency, the Endangered Species Act, various Native American groups, Greenpeace, and others. Documentaries often address these issues, such as The Cove about dolphin hunting in Japan, Al Gore’s movie Inconvenient Truths, and Silent Water.
Naturalists are people who not only love nature but love to be out in it, as do Stephen Maturin in the Master and Commander series, Grizzly Adams, and Jeremiah Johnson. The Australian Aborigines have a phenomenally close connection with the land. Both The Last Wave and Australia are films that explore their love of the land.
Survivalists are people who resort to nature as a rejection or fear of civilization. They have learned to live in the absence of civilization, often in a post-apocalyptic world such as in Waterworld, The Postman, Road Warrior, Tank Girl, The Road and the reality TV series Doomsday Preppers.
Conquerors measure their success by the amount of land they control as did Genghis Kahn, Attila the Hun, the Mogul invasion of India, Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the Conquistadores. The Mission shows how that worked in South America. The Great Wall of China was built to keep out invaders from Mongolia.
Examples in Media
Lawrence of Arabia’s T.E. Lawrence - "Englishmen like the desert because it's so… clean." Anthony Quinn - “You British dream of the desert.
Us Bedouins dream of green fields and fountains.”
The French family in Apocalypse Now Redux is so tied to the land that they do not evacuate their plantation event as the Vietnam war ramps up, but maintain their colonial lifestyle in the midst of that dangerous conflict.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the Count travels with dirt from the homeland in his coffin. In Saving Private Ryan one of the soldiers collects soil samples from every place they have invaded.
A key scene in Gone with the Wind shows Scarlet O’Hara lifting a handful of the red dirt of Tara and swearing never to be hungry again.
The humans in Battlestar Galactica were searching for their homeland -- Earth.
Lost Horizon portrays a very special relationship between land and people. There, the humans have held back Nature’s trek of time, as long as they stay in the Himalayan retreat of Shangri-La. But if they step off that special territory, time catches up with them in a dramatic way as they quickly fast-forward to what should be their normal age.
Field of Dreams is about baseball and not the environment, but this magical piece of land is so powerful on so many levels that it has become a shrine for baseball fans around the world. Some even buy samples of the dirt to take back take home.
And of course, Avatar is about the Na’vi’s connection to their land. The antagonists want parts of that land in a calculated military-backed imposition of extraction capitalism. The hero changes sides and helps them save their land, thus winning the heart of his true love.
Examples in Music
“America the Beautiful”
“The Hebrides” aka Fingal’s Cave Overture – Felix Mendelssohn
“Oklahoma!”
“New World Symphony” - Dvorak
“This Land is Your Land” – Woody Guthrie
"Woodstock" – Joni Mitchell
“Till the Last Shot's Fired” – Trace Adkins
http://www.dardensmith.com/projects/songwriting-with-soldiers-history/
Symbols
The dirt itself. The fertile soil of Tara in Gone with the Wind or the devastated Midwest plains in Grapes of Wrath.
Wide expanses of the landscape. Mountains. Vast plains. Mines. Amber waves of grain. Jungles.
A rock, pebble, plant.
Crystals.
Key Element – the Shining Moment
Kissing the earth.
Carrying the homeland soil with them.
Returning to home from far, far away.
Planting their feet on the ground again. Maybe even barefoot.
Gazing with love and awe across the landscape.
Written Descriptions
Elaborate. Spell it out. Don’t just have you character say, “I love Texas”. Have them say something about the great plains being the bottom of the Permian Ocean and that “I just cruised across the bottom of a long-gone ancient ocean and saw creatures beyond my imagination”.
“I love LA” by Randy Newman. Listen to his lyrics about why he loves Los Angeles.
Karen Blixen’s Letters from Africa is a book about her many years out there on a coffee farm. Her real name is Isak Dinesen and her life inspired the book and the film Out of Africa.
“Not enough understanding exists regarding land and it’s place in the Irish soul. There’s a primitive feeling for acreage on this island; there always was, there always will be. A man will still kill for a field more than he’ll kill for money, revenge, or a woman....After all, in some of our earliest and wildest mythologies, our gods mated with the earth, and our ancestors chose to lie in the earth after they died.” p.566 Ireland – Frank Delaney
Anthropomorphize the land – Mother Earth, the Fatherland, the rolling hills like a woman’s curves.
Cinematic Techniques
Shooting “on the deck” (on the ground) conveys a close connection between your character and the land or it can convey the character of the land itself. Dry barren earth, rows of plowed furrows, sprouting plants, small animal holes, the spongy carpet in a three-canopy jungle, crunching snow, etc.
Environmental shot: wide angle, hold it a long time, let the land speak for itself, fuse the viewer into the land, allow your audience enough time to absorb the entire environment. Director David Lean was very good at that, particularly in Lawrence of Arabia and Ryan’s Daughter. Writer-director Terence Malick in Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line made the land itself a large part of the story.
Just the opposite of this is the film Koyanisquatzi in which the camera was locked down with an attached intervelometer recording single frames over a long period of time. The result is a continuous series of speeded-up time-lapse photography which imparts a sense of longer geological time.
Sweeping aerial shot: moves along the land in a visual carress. Out of Africa, The English Patient, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Wings (the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture), and Battle of Britain. The 1971 Oscar-winning documentary Sentinels of Silence features a stunning 18-minute helicopter ride over the ruins and landscape of the pre-Columbian Mayan empire. The Mexican government still shows this film in their embassies around the world.
Conclusion
Because it is such an integral part of being human, bringing this love of land into your characters makes them more sympathetic and identifiable. Millions of people have fought and died over claims of ownership and the “right of return”, from Genghis Khan to the Conquistadors, from the Vikings to the Ainu, from the Boer Wars to Zionist claims in Palestine. There is a very rich well of history and current events from which to pull dramatic conflict in this type of love.
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Exercise #1 – Awareness
Answer these questions for one of your characters. Do you live now where you were born? What do you think of when you think of your place of origin? Does it draw you or repel you? What is the worst thing that could happen to your land? What would you be willing to do to protect your homeland?
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Exercise #2 – Writing
Write some dialogue where one character is explaining their love of the land to another character who just doesn’t get it. E.g. a fifth-generation rancher to a big-city girl.
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Further Reading
Dune - Frank Herbert
Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Ireland - Frank Delaney
Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson
Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age – Richard Heinberg
Outlander – Diana Gabaldon
Silent Spring – Rachel Carson
The Thorn Birds – Colleen McCullough
Further Viewing
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Australia
An Inconvenient Truth
Battlestar Gallactica
Blood Diamonds
Burden of Dreams
Days of Heaven
Deep Blue
Emerald Forest
Enemy at the Gates
Far and Away
Fitzcarraldo
Giant
Grapes of Wrath, The
Green Acres
Iwo Jima
Koyaniskatsi
McCleod’s Daughters
Munich
Oklahoma!
Places in the Heart
Road Warrior
The Field
Thin Red Line
Thornbirds
Wall-E
Warriors
Waterworld
Woodstock
Silent Water documentary
Mythic Challenges
WATER www.onedrop.org
Love Calling: Writing Songs with Soldiers http://www.dardensmith.com/projects/songwriting-with-soldiers-history/
CHAPTER TWO
Familial Love
Remember this, all of you. Nothing counts so much as blood.
The rest are just strangers.
Nicholas Earp - Wyatt Earp
The old saying goes, “Blood is
thicker than water”, meaning that family connections are stronger than any other ties....supposedly. Though it’s a holdover from our herd, pack, and tribal past, it’s still very much in play today.
Unlike love for a large impersonal thing like land, this type of love is very personal and specific between individuals. It can also engage groups such as family units, tribes, and some religious and fraternal orders.
Family sagas are so engaging because unless we were left in a basket on the church steps most of us have family of some sort that comforts us, drives us mad, inspires us, discourages us...and sometimes all of the above.
Family dynamics are so dramatic that most adult therapy clients deal with the leftovers from childhood and most young therapy clients are dealing with the current effects of the family units.
Show Me the Love! Page 2
