Things We Like: Supernatural

Posted on November 12, 2015 by D Standard 1

Get this:

According to the lore, it’s really tough for a TV show to last more than a few seasons. It’s even tougher for it to stay good. And it’s basically impossible for it to stay at the very top of its game (and the top of everyone else’s game too).

But Supernatural doesn’t follow those rules. It’s like nothing we’ve seen before, Bobby.

Much like great rock’n’roll is based around “three chords and the truth,”, Supernatural has a similar stripped-back but insanely high-yielding premise and story engine: two brothers, a ’67 Impala, and an unending supply of monsters.

Unending supply of monsters not pictured

From that simplest of foundations, the various show runners, from Eric Kripke through Sera Gamble to Carver/Edlund, have forged eleven unstoppable, powerhouse seasons. We have to say it again: It’s seriously rare for a TV drama to be punching with the same weight after eleven seasons.

Yet Supernatural is hitting harder than ever.

How do they do that? How do they deal with the apocalypse in season 5, and still keep raising the stakes in season 11? They find a way. They work it out. They always do. Here’s how —

They take the key ingredients for good drama: dynamic character dynamics (yeah, we went there), reversals, setups, payoffs and callbacks, developing motifs, and a constant evolving of the stakes, and the format. And they use a few key, powerful questions to power it: What does family mean? Where is home? What does that even mean when you’re constantly on the run, on the move, on the hunt?

Dean. And a scarecrow (spoiler: not one of the good guys).

And then they execute that with extremely smart, clever, self-aware writing, inventive but grounded directing, and some truly great acting.

Sam, covered in blood. Pretty regular occurrence.

In this show, drama, plot, character, emotion and humor are all intertwined. They’re all one thing. There are heavy moments, terrifying moments, light moments, all bound by a roughhouse humor, the kind of humor that helps you cope with the uncopable, that helps you deal with stuff that’s way above your pay grade. It’s humor like a bar brawl; the Winchesters trade quips like punches, sometimes alongside actual punches (they are brothers, after all).

A show can’t last for 11 seasons without rock-solid emotional and psychological underpinnings, and an engine that can yield constant and evolving conflict. Supernatural is a masterclass in show construction, character development, and the art of the 22-episode arc (and the art of the 229 episode arc as of the time of writing!).

Supernatural always evolves in ways you never expect

Watch the pilot again, and see how show creator Eric Kripke did it. It’s deceptively simple. We see the two boys at a very young age as the defining incident of their lives takes place, then we cut to 22 years later when Sam is at college, and the same incident repeats, just as Dean comes back into Sam’s life. The gears of life grind on, and Sam has no choice but to follow Dean into the wilderness.

And THAT’s how you set up a series in your pilot.

Sam was supposed to be the lead character, the Luke Skywalker, while Dean was positioned as the Han Solo type, essential, but secondary to the lead. That soon changed as both brothers took and held center stage. The writers gave Dean more to do alongside Sam, and that’s one of the key strengths of the show: if you want your show to last, give your actors something to do. Both Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles get intense emotional scenes, awkward and hilarious physical comedy, subtle snark, action, confusion, heartbreak, fear, hope, cynicism, soul-less fury, and much more besides. The showrunners keep throwing stuff at them, and they keep hitting acting home runs.

Supernatural keeps things fresh and relevant in other ways too. It’s important to nourish your fanbase, to be self-aware, to be able to poke fun at your own show, and not be scared to evolve your format and characters. The show gradually introduced two essential characters, the angel Castiel, and the demon Crowley, firstly as small roles for a few episodes, but, as the brilliant Misha Collins (proving that “acting on camera” really is one of his “special skills”) and genius Mark Sheppard worked hard, crushing it on a regular basis, they proved how capable they were with the show’s tone (and how popular they were with the fans), and they became series regulars alongside the brothers. With four leads, the emotional and plot possibilities increased exponentially, allowing for season-long arcs based on Castiel/Heaven, and Crowley/Hell.

Castiel, Crowley, Dean and Sam.

Nourishing the fanbase and having the skill to be meta without sacrificing the integrity of the show (going beyond postmodern to a post-postmodern state, a kind of genuine and sincere postmodernism) has also helped the show stay as damn good as it’s ever been. The 200th episode was a beautiful example of how a show can deconstruct itself and still move you to tears. Once a show proves it can do that… it can do any damn thing it wants.

So, 11 seasons in, Supernatural shows no signs of slowing down, and there’s no reason it should. It’s the show that has everything.

Writing short movies

Posted on October 1, 2015 by D Standard 1

When you first start writing something, it can be hard to know what it is.

You might have a line of dialogue in mind, or a character, the beginning of a scene, even just an emotional atmosphere. You might write a few more lines, but still not know… is it a primetime sitcom? An edgy cable sitcom? An indie movie? A webisode? It’s only as you keep on writing (and keep on writing, and keep on…) that you realize what shape your story is… e.g., is it novel-shaped, movie-shaped, short-story shaped, just a single scene… or maybe, is it short movie-shaped?

(This is why the best way to write something is to write it… if you don’t start putting words next to other words, you’ll never get to the words after that… eh, that sounded better before we wrote it — but you get the idea! You won’t write if you don’t write. Boom!)

What counts as short-movie shaped, you ask? (Thanks for asking!) Well, we’ll tell ya.

Firstly, you don’t really have room for the traditional three act structure of movie storytelling. If you’re on the (ideal) shorter end of the spectrum, up to 10-15 mins, you don’t have a lot of runway to set up a story, develop it, and pay it off. Everything in a short movie has to be brutally efficient: each line, each beat, each shot has to work hard to propel your short to its (hopefully awesome) ending.

So a short movie will usually drop you into a situation, which means your writing has to be extra sharp, and your characters have to show themselves quickly and organically. If you want to think of your short movie in acts, each act might only be around 1-3 minutes.

The key to short movies is the reveal, also known as the punchline, or the twist, or the pay-off. A short movie is basically one set up, and one payoff. You can structure that any way you want. As we saw in our last post, Eric Kripke balanced his set-up and pay-off pretty evenly, Colin Trevorrow’s set-up was in the first 30 seconds, and the rest of the short was all pay-off, while Neil LaBute’s short was 99% set-up, with a brilliant pay-off right at the end.

So, as you can tell, the other key characteristic of a short movie is how flexible it can be. That’s the beauty of shorts.

Sorry. Again.

Their lack of formal structure allows you to be truly experimental and bold in your storytelling; the smaller canvas rewards bolder strokes.

Your short movie story could be real-time, or a day in the life, or have massive time-jumps and cover years, or even centuries. What makes it a short movie is that set-up, and pay-off.

You’re usually playing with one idea, or one concept. It could be a war between neighbors that gets resolved in an unexpected way, or someone having a really bad day, or something that’s a set-up and pay-off at the same time — one joke or idea played out to its conclusion, as in Jay and Mark Duplass’s 2003 “$5 short” This Is John, which got into Sundance, and opened a lot of doors for them. It’s the simplest of ideas, executed inventively.

As with all writing, there needs to be tension, conflict, something the lead character is fighting against, or fighting to get. Things need to go wrong in some way. In This Is John, all John wants to do is leave a successful answerphone greeting (remember, it was 2003. Old!). And it’s the one thing he can’t do. It’s the tension between dreams and reality played out to escalating, tragicomic effect.

Your short can be simple, like that, or it can be grandiose, like Neill Blomkamp’s Alive In Joburg (which was later developed into District 9), which obviously has a bigger budget, but it still uses guerrilla tactics to create the impression of scope and scale.

It doesn’t hurt that he had the CGI skills to pull it off. Don’t worry if you don’t. Remember, This Is John was literally just one brother pointing a handheld camera at another brother talking into an answering machine. And it got into Sundance, and it did great there.

As Jay Duplass has said, “the best thing to do is just make your stuff, and make it as best you can at the level you can make it at… and it will speak for itself.”

Watching short movies

Posted on September 24, 2015 by D Standard 1

Fun fact! If you want to make a short film, a good first step is to watch short films. It’s a great way to see what cool things other filmmakers have come up with, and also to see just how endless the possibilities are for what short films can be. You’ll see so many different ways of opening a short, of setting up a story, of telling and resolving a story, all within the space of a few mins (sometimes shorts are more like 20-30 mins, but most are 15m or under). And you’ll realize, you can do anything! Yay! Also? You can do anything! Argh! What will you do??!

We’ll cover what makes a great short movie story next time, but for now, let’s focus on seeing what’s out there, and how some great directors got their starts.

Eric Kripke, creator and showrunner of CW’s Supernatural, got his start with short movies. His second, Battle Of The Sexes, was at the higher end of the short movie budget spectrum ($28,o00), but it showcases what short movies can do best: the reversal. We start with a low key situation (man hitting on a woman in bar), which partway through is flipped entirely into a more sci-fi comedy direction. Many short movies depend on a twist/punchline/reveal of some kind, since they are more in line with short stories, or even jokes. Your time and space are generally limited, meaning you have to deliver a setup and payoff, fast. In this case, the payoff is the super-elaborate and over the top scenes in the restroom, as compared to the sedate atmosphere in the bar. Check it out:

One filmmaker who has had a meteoric rise is Colin Trevorrow. His first short was Home Base. This led to his first indie feature the much-loved time-travel romance Sundance hit, Safety Not Guaranteed.

And that? It led to FREAKING JURASSIC WORLD (not the official title, although that would be really cool if it was).

And what did that lead to?

FREAKING STAR WARS EPISODE IX, BITCHES!!! (again, oddly, not the official title…)

The power of shorts, huh?

Sorry

Home Base is a more classical short is some ways: establishing shots, a quick set up, and an extended payoff. It’s more domestic than Battle Of The Sexes, although that could be Home Base’s subtitle, since it deals in a darkly comedic way with the fallout of a breakup. Take a look at how Trevorrow sets up his scenes, and how he uses the majority of his 8 minute running time to develop the payoff of the promise made by the guy in the first couple of lines. Fair warning: it’s completely NSFW!

These shorts are both somewhat elaborate in the way they payoff their twists. But there are other ways to do this, simpler, more low budget ways. Julia Stiles gives a brilliant performance in Neil LaBute’s short, Sexting (also probably NSFW). Here’s the trailer for it:

It’s very, very simple, one scene, mostly one take close on Stiles, and has a brilliant reveal right at the very end. It’s the reverse of Home Base — the entire short is the set-up to one quick sucker punch of a twist at the end. It’s a fantastic example of how a short can be incredibly simple — one locked off camera on one actress for one take. It’s a great way to showcase an actor (Stiles is excellent in this), and potentially an incredibly cost effective way to make a short that has real impact. It’s only available as part of the bundle of short movies called Stars In Shorts, which is available on iTunes; however, watching that bundle is highly recommended, since it contains a huge variety of different styles and approaches.

These are just a few examples of different shorts. Take some time to watch as many as you can; it’s eye-opening, inspiring, and lets you know — anything is possible. You just have to think of it.

We’ll focus on that next time: finding your story, and writing it!