Character or Genre

I was watching the movies Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse and notice the distinction between the two to be quite drastic. Resident Evil I thought was far better than Resident Evil: Apocalypse for one reason, I cared about the characters. While those are just one example of character and genre it was a pretty good example.

Resident Evil was a rather successful film in the fact that they created suspense, horror and mystery all in one film. The story opened with non stop thrills until the end and had me trying to figure out more of the story with every plot twist. The key element I found was that the movie was a story about characters and their discovery that happen to run into a virus that is infecting people in a bad way, and they don't know how it is happening and they must figure it out or face infection or even death.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse is different in the fact that when the movie starts the hype begins with a thought of, "what is going to happen next." The sense of mystery quickly dissolves when there is a lot of blatant exposition that solves all mysteries and leaves nothing to the audiences imagination. This second movie in the series loses its unique intrigue and no longer becomes a movie about characters and what they must learn and becomes a movie about zombies with a few characters in it. To top it off the threat level goes down because the audience now knows how to kill the undead and it becomes a movie about who has the most super powers and is prettiest who will survive.

I think James Manogold hit the nail on the head in his commentary to the movie 3:10 to Yuma. He said that often times directors get all excited about making a western [genre] movie and watch as many western [genre] movies as they can. The result often ends up with them trying to make a movie that has all their favorite parts about the genre result in making a movie about a genre instead of making a movie about the characters. -- The characters are what people relate to because they would be a character in a movie not a genre in a movie.

My end thoughts are: Don't make a movie about a genre, make a movie about the characters.

Plot Holes

I was watching Bounty with some friends who had not yet seen it and made a few discovers that were confirmed by some of their comments afterward. As a writer and filmmaker I always develop a very detailed back story for each character to give them depth. Now I have learned more about how to incorporate those back stories into the script having gone through the process a number of times since my first Screenplay, Bounty.

The big learn that I realized was even though you may have a detailed back story to give reasons as to why characters do certain things the audience does not know those back stories and it thus creates a plot hole in your script. We may know exactly why someone acts a certain way, why a character is allowed to stay alive, etc. but the audience will often times walk away asking, "why not just shoot the guy and be done with it." As writers we need to let the audience know why a character does things they way they do them. The challenge is to not make the reveal blatant exposition.

Humblings of Criticism

So it has almost been three weeks since my film, Bounty, was release on DVD and BluRay and it has been interesting, especially reading the reviews people have on the film. I find it very funny reading some of the reviews that absolutely despise the film and have nothing good to say about it, then the next day I meet someone who loved it.

I would have to say that the whole experience is very humbling yet at the same time I have learned to ignore some reviews and really take to heart others. I'll be the first to admit that I can make the next one better but one thing that would inhibit me from improving is if I blew off every negative comment about the film with the mentality of "they don't know what their talking about." Behind every comment there usually is an element of truth and many of the reviews I have read to be the most helpful have pointed out things they do appreciated about the movie as well as thinks that they feel fell short of the genre or a quality film.

In short, even the ones that make some pretty ridiculous statements have something to say that may help me improve on the next film. My art has matured greatly since I made Bounty and I can only get better from here. So, with more attention to editing, power lines, script, sound...and hopefully a longer shooting schedule. The next movie will be leaps and bounds better than this one.

Everyone has to start somewhere and fortunately my first start actually landed a distribution deal. And there is more to come!