[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: Jill we often hear that story structure is easy and that it doesn’t require much effort. Do you agree?
Jill Chamberlain, Script Consultant/Author/Writer: I think it’s to get the right structure for your story, that’s 90% of the work. Is it easy to do that? It depends on how good you are with story structure but it’s everything right? I obviously was not the first person to say this but story is structure. To get it right is all the difference between a story being effective and not being effective or drawing us in or boring us. That’s what it is.
Some people have a real hangup about the idea of structure. Even the word seems to offend them. I was at a party one time where I ran into a student of mine and she introduced me to a famous documentary filmmaker (who I’m not going to name) and introduced me as her teacher who wrote this book on story structure. His attitude to me was a little bit like structure schmuchture! I was amused and I said Let me understand something, for your documentary films, do you just stick a camera on one person and have them talk for an hour and a half without any edits? No cuts?
He said Of course not. We employ editing, we have b-roll, we do all these things to tell a story. I said Well if you’re employing editing and a b story and b-roll, you’re employing structure. That’s all structure is, it’s the events that you choose to show in the order you choose to show them in, that’s all it means.
It constitutes I think 90% of the work. Now how good you…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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About:
Jill Chamberlain is the founder of a screenwriting school, a script consultant, a screenwriter, and the author of The Nutshell Technique: Crack the Secret to Successful Screenwriting.
The Nutshell Technique is considered the go-to manual many professionals swear by. It’s on the syllabus at film schools all over the world and has been published in Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Italian, and in audiobook format.
As a script consultant, Jill has fixed and fine tuned scripts for Oscar-nominated screenwriters, top television showrunners, screenwriters whose movies have made over a billion dollars at the box office, award-winning independent filmmakers, and for many, many spec script writers.
In 2006, Jill founded The Screenplay Workshop with Jill Chamberlain (Screenplayworkshop.org) where she has personally taught thousands of screenwriters feature film and episodic television writing. Complete beginners to Emmy-winning screenwriters and award-winning producers enroll in her classes.
Find out more about her and her script consultancy at jillchamberlain.com.
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