Inneresting 31
issue 31
December 11, 2020
The built world of your story
Building out a world for the story can be just as difficult and important as telling your story.
Building off of what we looked at in , this week we’ll take a look at films that use architecture as a foundational part of the storytelling.
When architecture gives a story structure
Jacques Tati made the comedy Playtime as a response to The International Style - a form of modernist architecture he saw everywhere he looked. This blog post offers citations and sample images to show how Tati found a playful absurdity in the architecture. Tati created a visual comedy that still influences filmmakers.
It’s difficult to talk about influential architecture in film without bringing in Blade Runner, so let’s get to it.
Let’s start with this article from American Cinematographer featuring Ridley Scott and Syd Mead explaining their ideas behind how they wanted to use the architecture to suggest a different kind of future from how other movies were portraying a futuristic landscape. For a behind-the-scenes look at the model-building used in the film, check out this photo album from the model shop.
And if you want to take an even deeper dive into the making of Blade Runner, you’ve got to check out the book Future Noir, Paul M. Sammon’s collection of interviews about the pre-production, post-production, and legacy of the film.
Architectural Digest spoke with Bong Joon Ho on how the sets of Parasite were influenced by the psychology of the characters. Their interview
You can also find additional details about how specific parts of the set were designed in this article from IndieWire.
Video essayist Kogonada set his debut feature in Columbus, Ohio in part because of the history of modernist architecture there. This choice shaped the story, the characters, and the style of Columbus, which Travis Warren Cooper discusses in this essay.
Highland How-To: Renovating Your Story
Highland offers multiple tools to help you restructure your story as you write.
Want to gut renovate your pages without deleting? You can use the Omit tags to mark off parts of your pages that you don't want to render in a Preview or Export. Just looking to drag a scene out of sequence and save it for later? Highlight it and drag it into The Bin.
And whenever you have a draft where you want to show your changes, just turn on Revision Mode. Highland 2 will mark every place you cut, paste, and create with asterisks and your choice of color.
For more information on Highland 2, check out our Knowledge Base.
Other Cool Things
Want to relive some iconic moments? Take a look at this scene from Reign of Fire where characters in a post-apocalyptic world act out the revelation of Darth Vader’s true identity for a group of children as a bedtime story.
For a play-length version of this idea, check out this recorded performance of Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play.
And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
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