The Other Side of Paradise
Earlier in the year, I unwittingly became involved in a short film project. The project was intended as an action showreel for my friend Tony Nicholas, an actor and fight choreographer. He showed me initial footage, which was great. But, searching for a story (as I always do), I started asking a lot of why questions. If you were being shot at, why did you tend to your friend instead of shoot back? Why does the bad guy shoot you, then decide to fight you? If he wanted to fight you hand-to-hand, why didn’t he just call you out immediately? Etc. To be fair, at this stage there was no…
33,016
Films, television series, and books ultimately come down to the same thing: the written story. Something that is beginning to annoy me in storytelling – particularly in film and television – is the use of flashbacks. To the best of my knowledge, JJ Abrams’ television series Lost popularised the use of flashbacks to introduce backstory. Lost has an ensemble cast of characters. In the two seasons I watched (before the constant baiting and switching turned me off), each episode would focus on somebody different. Throughout that episode, we’d get flashbacks about the character’s life before they got on the island. A younger, much-less cynical version of me enjoyed this –…