Film Courage: How does someone decide where to start their story?
Mark W. Travis, Director/Author/Writer/Instructor: Wow! Where to start the story? Now I’m assuming we have this little three or four or five minute story? You mean where to start that story?
Film Courage: If they [the writer] are going to tell people their life, what if they don’t want to say It all started where I was raised in such-and-such a town. What if they want to start it from the time that they left college? Because they feel like that is when their real self began?
Mark: We need to talk about two things, now I understand more. We need to talk about sequencing (sequencing of information) which has to do with the events in the story. Do you really want to start with the beginning of the story? Do you want to start with something in the middle? In other words playing with the sequence, the chronology of events as you tell the story. So that is one thing.
The other thing we can talk about when we say tell them the story of my lifewhich is another topic of how an autobiographical story is put together because it’s put together differently than a screenplay. It’s put together differently than a novel. It’s put together differently than fiction. And how we put together the process of what the story is really about through the writing and don’t make the determination at the beginning. Does that make sense?
Film Courage: So sequencing and then…
Mark: Sequencing and then structuring the autobiographical story which are two different things. The structuring is which story comes first…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
Check out Mark’s book The Director’s Journey
Check out Mark’s book The Film Director’s Bag of Tricks:
How to Get What You Want from Actors and Writers
CONNECT WITH MARK W. TRAVIS
Markwtravis.com
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MARK W. TRAVIS is regarded by Hollywood and independent film professionals internationally as the world’s leading teacher and consultant on the art and craft of film directing. He is known as “the director’s director.”
Fueled by the desire to generate organic and authentic performances in an instant, Mark developed his revolutionary Travis Technique™ over a span of 40 years. Not limited to filmmakers, The Travis Technique™ has proven to be an essential set of tools for all storytellers, writers, directors and actors.
Mark Travis has taught at many internationally acclaimed film schools and institutions, including Pixar University, American Film Institute, UCLA Film School, FAS Screen Training Ireland, NISS – Nordisk Institutt for Scene og Studio (Norway), Odessa International Film Festival (Ukraine), CILECT – The International Association of Film and Television Schools, and the Asia Pacific Screen Lab (hosted by Griffith University Film School, Brisbane, Australia).
Productions directed by Mark W. Travis have garnered over 30 major awards, including: an Emmy, Drama-Logue, L.A. Weekly, Drama Critics’ Circle, A.D.A, and Ovation awards.
His film and television directing credits include: The Facts of Life, Family Ties, Capitol, Hillers, and the Emmy Award-winning PBS dramatic special, Blind Tom: The Thomas Bethune Story. Also the feature films Going Under (for Warner Bros. starring Bill Pullman and Ned Beatty), Earlet (documentary), The Baritones, and The 636.
On-stage, over the past 20 years, Mark has directed over 60 theatre productions in Los Angeles and New York, including: A Bronx Tale, Verdigris, The Lion in Winter, Mornings At Seven, Equus, Café 50s, And A Nightingale Sang, Wings, Linke vs. Redfield, The Coming of Stork and others.
Mark is the author of the Number-One Best Seller (L.A. Times), THE DIRECTOR’S JOURNEY: the Creative Collaboration between Directors, Writers and Actors. His second book on directing,
DIRECTING FEATURE FILMS (published in April of 2002) is currently used as required text in film schools worldwide. His third book, THE FILM DIRECTOR’S BAG OF TRICKS: Get What You Want from Writers and Actors was published in 2011. Mark’s popular DVD, HOLLYWOOD FILM DIRECTING, is available now.
MARK TRAVIS and ELSHA BOHNERT offer workshops and consultations on all aspects of storytelling for writers, directors and actors.
MARK TRAVIS and ELSHA BOHNERT offer workshops and consultations on all aspects of storytelling for writers, directors and actors. ELSHA BOHNERT is Chief of Staff of Boyden Road Productions and the director of The Travis Story Center in Los Angeles, California. She is the author of DON’T TRIP OVER THE GARDEN HOSE (Deuxmers 2013). Her stories and poems have been published in literary journals and she is an award-winning visual artist as well, with works in public and private collections throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Elsha teaches workshops in “Art & Writing for Healing” and is the only teacher authorized by Mark W. Travis to teach the “Write Your Life” Travis Technique™.
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