Writing A Great Script Fast In A Nutshell

Step 6 - Story Flavors.. . ... .. . ... .. . ... .. ... . ... .Next Step 7

Step 6: Story Flavors & Genres

List your Top 5 Favorite Story Flavors using the list below to help you come up with ideas. Think also of combining Story Flavors such as an animated supernatural comedy or a romantic crime thriller.

1) Action/adventure: Big adventures, hero survival, daring stunts, and action sequences.
2) Animation: Far-out or surreal visual elements with objects that can turn into other things. These stories usually show us something real actors or sets cannot do as easily, such as talking animals or living toys.
3) Ensemble:Stories about groups of characters unified by same theme.
4) Experimental: Avant-garde rule breakers. Creating films that audiences may not even understand.
5) Biography: Find meaning of the person's life (theme), and make the person the hero (or anti-hero) in his or her own tale.
6) Buddy: Friendship or nonromantic close relationships developed over a series of events.
7) City symphony: Films about a single location with different perspectives, characters, events, and time frames.
8) Comedy: Show how characters in the best situations still manage to mess up or create fish out of water tales. These stories are often used to showcase the brutality of social life.
9) Crime: Murder mystery, detectives solving cases, reporters investigating crimes, prison stories, heists, spy stories, criminals/victims getting revenge, courtroom dramas, organized crime.
10) Disillusionment: Protagonist's view of life changes from positive to negative.
11) Documentary: True story about event, people, process, subject or place.
12) Drama: Passion, madness, dreams of human heart.
13) Education: Protagonist changes worldview from negative to positive by learning something new.
14) Fantasy: New-world rules playing with time, space, and laws of nature.
15) Historical: Stories from the past often work great to show us some themes of our present situations at a comfortable distance.
16) Horror: Bad, evil, scary, creepy things.
17) Journey: Trip, road trip, or travel tale.
18) Love story: What gets in the way of romantic love?
19) Maturation: Coming-of-age story.
20) Mockumentary: Fiction that looks like a real documentary.
21) Music video: Short film for a song and hopefully some story, theme, or context.
22) Musical: Songs used to tell stories from any genre. What are the new digitally enhanced musicals going to look like?
23) Myth: Hero journeys, ancestral memories, prehistory, moral conduct, or urban legends.
24) Obsession/addiction/temptation: Willpower versus obsessions/addictions/temptations.
25) Personal anthology: Video diaries, personal events.
26) Postmodern: No single lead protagonist with distortion of time and space.
27) Punishment: Good protagonist turns bad and is >punished.
28) Psychodrama: Madmen, serial killers, crazy people, nuthouses.
29) Reality shows: Real-life, voyeuristic-style stories. TV shows such as The Osbournes or Survivor.
30) Redemption: Protagonist goes from morally bad to good.
31) Science fiction: Possible future, unknown past.
32) Societal problems: Political, racial, medical, educational, business, environmental, family.
33) Sports: Big character change in relationship to sporting event.
34) Supernatural: Spiritual or freaky occurrence in unseen realms.
35) Tragedy: Cautionary tales, somber themes, catastrophic characters.
36) War: Combat, prowar/antiwar.
37) Western: Wild West. Good versus evil. Gun fights, cowboys, bank robberies, cattle drives, Indians, ranches, horses and saloons.

What new Favorite Story Flavor Combinations can you create that you would just love to see in a film?

 

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