Logan Burdick: Filmmaker/Writer: The magic of being a screenwriter or any of these crafts is to figure out the pattern and then once you understand it then figure out how to bury it so that no one’s paying any attention to it.
Film Courage: Logan, what can you tell someone that’s never written a screenplay but loves film and television about the craft of screenwriting?
Logan: I think obviously it goes without saying that you have to read scripts. I don’t know how you would approach it otherwise. I feel actually reading them and then trying to figure out through whatever means are available to you whether that’s reading books or just trying to take things apart yourself, how do you reverse engineer to figure out why this works? The hard thing with that is that there’s a lot of things scripts are doing simultaneously. You have to figure out why it works from a pacing perspective and a plot perspective and a character perspective and in theme and emotional arcs and all those things. I think that the best way to do that is to read scripts and then try to reverse engineer them. Again there’s a lot of great material where people have done that, Robert Mckee [Story] and I forget who wrote Save The Cat [Blake Snyder]. I have not read Save The Cat, but I definitely read Story when I was younger. The only other thing that I would say about it is don’t think that any one way is the only way. I think it’s important to immerse yourself in a bunch of different people’s perspectives and then I feel by doing that you’ll actually start to understand why it’s working. I think that emulating is an important part of learning. Even children learn at the very beginning by just copying. They’re just emulating what someone else is doing. They don’t understand why. That’s important but I think to really transcend that you need to figure out why it’s working and you have to understand it on a much more intrinsic level of again I always hate to be too mathematical about it but so much of it is why this line here, why this beat here, what was planted when and why does it pay off here and…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Logan Burdick is a writer/director who has spent his professional life immersed in the digital media landscape (as a creator, producer, and production/development executive), and seeks to infuse the style, culture, and stories of that world into traditional storytelling. Logan’s latest script IT TAKES THREE is a modern influencer twist on a Cyrano de Bergerac story when the coolest guy in school discovers that the new girl sees through his popularity and good looks, he enlists the class nerd to take over his social media accounts to add substance to his style.
WATCH ‘IT TAKES THREE’ MOVIE
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