"Why Action Scenes Suck"

Hi, everybody.

This upcoming Saturday, our focus will move away from head construction back to storytelling fundamentals. And so, to that:

Movies and comics are two different things, duh, but with often-similar priorities: Making stories clear, exciting and involving, even if it's just two people talking.

This video races through some of the ways this can be accomplished. Its focus is upon action scenes, but there is a lot of essential truth about all kinds of storytelling being told here, at a breakneck pace:

Link to video: Why Action Scenes Suck

Your challenge as a storyteller is to give viewers a reason to care, whether your story is epic... or personal... or a mix.

To do that, know your characters and have them act and react in character. There's a good example of this in the video, when they show the Hulk vs. Iron Man action scene. Yes, the shots have the longer, more continuous action these guys justifiably prefer. But just as important is what happens when the action stops and there is that terrific pair of facial closeups that brings our attention back to the two personalities in conflict... personalities that were well established earlier in the film. Showing who your characters are means knowing them first.

I hate to be sexist, but I find that female cartoonists have an advantage in this area. Their stories tend to be based on a few key relationships.

One of the glories of the Avengers films is that so much tension and humor comes from Whedon's exquisite knowledge of the relationships of those characters.

Odds are you have a few characters you've made up, whose relationships have a definite character in your imagination.

It all starts with that act of imagining.

BTW, consider how effective it is to show Hulk from above in his tooth-spitting closeup: It gives us Iron man's (briefly) higher--more dominant--vantage point, nicely setting up the continuation of the fight. Hulk is "down," but that look, and the tooth, turn the moment on its head, letting us see he's definitely not out.



JH