2020- 12- 15 met robert mckee, edited by Li Wanbing, and dictated by robert mckee.

Meeting robert mckee was dictated by robert mckee and edited by Li Wanbing.

The first part of McKee's lecture: turn your story into gold

The first chapter seeks the meaning of life through the joys and sorrows of the story.

The first section language is too superficial.

What is the story that can spread around the world, and what is its secret? What is the material of popular stories around the world? What makes them all over the world, overloaded with time and space? With the passage of time and space, people will go to see it again and again.

First of all, the audience needs anthropological experience. They don't look at what they already know, but want to experience the life experience and humanity they have never experienced before. Please make it into a good movie, showing the insight into human nature that we have never seen before.

The audience wants to open the leaves and see things they have never seen before, just like exploring in the jungle.

He hopes that in the core of this character, he realizes that this character is a person like me and finds himself in a world that has never been discovered.

The main characters will resonate with the audience. In fact, the protagonist lives in a place where the audience has never lived. The core of the story is the humanity that the audience can recognize, which will make the audience feel happy.

The second section is about stories, not lines.

Be sure to know your personality and his psychology in the third quarter.

The fourth section discovers the hidden connection between things in life.

Chapter two inspiration is never enough.

Section 1 An unexamined life is not worth living

Story is a metaphor of life, more vivid than life, and it is a metaphor of life.

The second section must combine literary talent with story talent.

Between fact and abstraction is the field of our story creation. So we must make up for it. Take someone's thousands of hours and tens of thousands of hours of life as the prototype and compress it into two hours of life. Biography is actually a fiction of a person's life. When we look at ourselves, there is a difference between fact and truth. Even when we deal with facts, we know that facts are not equal to the truth, and we should explore the essence of life.

The third section establishes drama on the basis of social conflict.

The fourth quarter must hint at the character's heart.

Chapter III What's the difference between classic plot and anti-plot?

The first section arranges the story like playing billiards

In an anti-plot, what really works is accidental factors, and life is random. Counterplot usually overturns causality and emphasizes contingency.

Section 2 How to Find Novelty in Familiar Things

The plots are realized continuously and follow the same law. In the anti-plot, there is a discontinuous reality, and the only continuous one is the author's idea, which can determine how things develop and what happens.

In Europe, people who go to the movies are people with low education. If a movie is very popular, it is definitely not good.

The classic plot will become a mirror of people's hearts and memories. When we go back in time, we want to find out the meaning of life.

According to the classic plot, because this is the way we human beings think.

People who like anti-plot movies are all intellectuals. They are smart audiences, but they are a small audience. This is the law.

The setting or structure of the story. The place or space where the story takes place.

The fourth quarter how to overcome cliches

The only way to solve this problem is for us to do research and become the god of the world you created.

First, read your own script in space.

Second, write with your own imagination.

What is the way to save the creative dilemma?

Section 6 the relationship between stories and types

There are six types of romantic movies. There are 14 types of crime movies. Only through thorough research can we find innovative types of movies. It combines educational plot, love, comedy, social drama and action movie ... this is the movie "Fantasy City".

Choose to let the masks of the characters be removed until they finally show what the real characters are, but let them show the real characters under great pressure. This is a story that must be done for the main characters.

It is necessary to reveal what real people are like through character comparison. ..... The true nature is revealed through characterization.

There must be a difference between external and internal. What is real must not be what it looks like. ..... We all want to pretend to be better people than ourselves, because it may be smoother to move forward with a mask.

There are five kinds of movies, and the nature of the characters has changed.

The first is educational melodrama, which changes the attitude of life towards oneself and society from negative to positive. The second kind is disillusioned drama, which thinks that life is meaningful at first, but in the end, through a series of events, the belief is destroyed, leading to a tragic ending and a negative attitude towards life.

The fourth is the movie of redemption plot, which is a process of moral transformation. It may be crime and corruption at first, but in the process, he became a good man.

Fifth, we are a film with a depraved plot. At first we were good people, but at last we became bad people.

What do you mean too handsome? A woman went to an ice cream shop and saw paul newman. She tried not to talk to him: isn't he human? Don't disturb him. Then I went out and found that I didn't take ice cream. I got up the courage to ask the clerk, who denied it. While they were arguing, paul newman came over and said, You put the ice cream in your bag.

About 75% of film creation time is spent on events and characters, and 70% of events are used to design climaxes, which are all foreshadowing, and only climaxes are great enlightenment. The climax of the story is the biggest leap in creation. If the climax is not wonderful, all the efforts will be in vain. About 25% of the work is spent on dialogue in the script.

70% of the energy is used to shape the final choice of the characters, not to shape the characters.

Chapter IV Writing is a manifestation of life.

The first section three kinds of stories

First of all, the story of idealism

Second, pessimistic movies.

This kind of film shows the world we don't want to see. For example, when passion controls us, it will ruin our lives.

Third, satirical movies.

A film that combines idealism and pessimism. Love will not only sacrifice itself for idealism, but also destroy itself for pessimism. Love is a subtle torture, in which we will suffer, which is a disease that can never be cured.

The second part reveals the truest feelings.

A good story will make the audience feel that it is a metaphor for life.

Three things: first, the audience needs a reason to sit in the dark theater, and why he wants to read this story.

What made you miserable for two hours? It's a desire for stories. The design of the story aroused the interest of the audience. How to arouse the curiosity of the audience? Humans are not only curious, but also want to know the truth. Motivated to be explained. Why? How's it going? The story design revolves around the curiosity of the audience, constantly making them guess what will happen next ... directly leading them to the main events of the design.

Second, the audience needs to feel life. A good story will make the audience feel that it is a metaphor for life. Need to have the rhythm of life. On the one hand, human beings need peace, relaxation and calmness, on the other hand, they also want dangers, risks, challenges and difficulties.

Third, judging from the writer's creation, the writer experiences the world with the eyes of the characters. The author will perform all the characters and can see the world in which the characters live through their eyes.

In the fourth quarter, the protagonists have the same diversity.

The hero must have desire, and his desire must be meaningful. Put all the created characters in your heart and have a dialogue: what do you want tomorrow, what do you want the day after tomorrow, and what do you want at last? In other stories, the characters are more complex, with both conscious and subconscious desires, and the audience knows it well. These two desires are contradictory. The character thinks what he wants, but the audience thinks the character is not.

When creating, the two desires of the characters will be contradictory. Roles need willpower and desire. Whether the characters have desires can be distinguished from whether the characters insist on pursuing their own desires. The hero should do everything possible and capable to achieve his goal. As an author, how to set this extreme story, how to tell it in depth, and how to tell the characters' hearts? It is necessary for the author to set the breadth and depth of the characters' activities. With these two elements, we can shoot a story that goes beyond the similarity of the audience.

Can't let the audience say: does he really want this? If the audience says so, it means that the audience is very dissatisfied. Then this story should be rewritten.

Sympathy: I like him. He's cute and charming. He is willing to be friends. It's lovely to be a lover or a neighbor. This is sympathy.

Identity: This person is the same as me. Whether others like him or not, his core human nature is the same as mine, even though there are many differences outside. So that the audience will agree with him. This character is a person. Like me, I hope he can get what he wants. If it were me, I would definitely fight for something. The audience is fighting with the character!

Section 5 The screenwriter is the first actor to play a role.

Section 6 It takes great wisdom to tell a good story

Section 7 Writing from the inside out is the most successful way of writing.

Write from the inside out: inspiration, outline of steps … compress the outline, and finally write the dialogue. From the outside to the inside, we tend to pay attention to dialogue and words and grasp the scene.

Chapter 5 Repetition is the biggest enemy of movies.

Section 1 Each role should have a clear track.

The first principle is polarization. You must divide your role into two poles, two opposing sides. Each character has a different ideal and life state, and has different ideas. Every character is unique, and no two people are the same. If people have the same views and reactions, then they will become one. This is to reduce conflicts. In a strong role combination, the more polarized the roles, the greater the possibility of conflict.

The temptation to imitate has always been there. It is a shortcut to our success, but we must find ways to make something different from others. If everyone copies other people's things, only art rubbish will be left in the end.

The role of incentive events in the second quarter

On the one hand, the hero generally doesn't understand that his balance has been broken. On the other hand, this incentive event is a combination of two events. For example, in a crime film, there are two exciting events, one is a crime that has been discovered and the other is a crime that has not been discovered. The combination of the two will upset the balance of life.

The event we are talking about is not what risks the protagonist has to experience, but what the protagonist needs to react to the event, even if he refuses, it is also a reaction. The bad guy was killed in a small town, and the retired sheriff refused to do it again: I have retired. Rejection is also a reaction. What does a person want to do when his balance is broken? Restore balance. No one wants to live an uncontrollable life. The protagonist's main motive is to rebuild the balance of life.

This is a driving force, let him take action and fight. Fighting from different angles, such as nature, interpersonal relationship, confrontation with the material world and social system, is to rebuild the balance that has just been broken. When an event arouses the desire at the conscious level, it will arouse the deep desire, and when it is realized that there is also a desire at the subconscious level, these two desires will conflict.

Let's see where it must be: the first major event must happen in the first quarter.

The audience should be kept waiting for 30 to 50 minutes. If it is a special case, we need some subplots.

This is the second most difficult scene in the whole script, and the most difficult scene is the climax of the last scene. This is the starting point of the creative climax, that is, the starting event of the fuse, which is more important than all events except the climax.

The third section, the beginning event that challenges the limit of our life.

Conflict is as important to a story as sound is to music.

Time is subjective. We should guide the audience through stories and make them ignore time, which will disappear. Film and television are not only auditory arts, but also visual arts. The two are perfectly combined, with vision accounting for 80% and hearing accounting for 20%, and these 20% are divided into dialogue, music and sound effects. We need the audience to keep staring at the screen. Once their eyes leave, they will lose interest.

Writing means that the scene keeps moving forward, making the entanglement complicated and the plot more and more complicated: complex, intricate, personal conflict, external conflict, social conflict, natural event conflict.

According to Aristotle's Poetics, the time of acting in the theater and reading a work are inevitably related to the necessary reversal of the story to be told in the future. There are at least three turning points, which is the lowest number. To achieve perfection, three acts are often not enough.

The fourth quarter is a typical three-act drama rhythm.

Start an event and break the balance of the characters' lives. Plus subplots, there are thirteen major turning points, and there will be a turning point in less than ten minutes. The ending can't be repeated, if so, it will make people feel that it is an anti-climax. Not too close, usually every ten minutes. If the climax value is positive, then the ending should not be an upward ending, and the last two climaxes must be contradictory. The ironic plot, in the ironic story, should have both positive and negative values.

When they are under pressure, they choose themselves instead of the people they love. If they can improve their career in their work development, will they sacrifice their career prospects or give up themselves?

Love is sometimes positive and sometimes negative. Let the story be full of irony and show a complicated love. Just because there is a subplot that deliberately opposes the main plot.

The second method is to explain the main plot by sub-plot, but in a different way. If it is a love story, the main plot is a romantic love story, and the sub-plot is a comedy love story with different ending forms, which is called "echoing the sub-plot".

Thirdly, we need a foreshadowing subplot, such as A Beautiful Life, in which the protagonist and his wife are loved in an inspiring event and taken to a concentration camp.

The fourth is to create entanglements with subplots and complicate the main plot. For example, jumping from violent plot to emotional plot is a relief to our emotions.

The fifth section let the gap and contrast constantly appear in front of us.

There are only two emotions in life: happiness and pain.

The important skill of the story: foreshadowing, telling people to take action, and the world will respond in unexpected ways. At this time, the audience will recall the stories they saw and look for answers from the lives of the characters. This was implanted in advance.

In the story, logic can be implanted backwards, and it can always be changed back to the past. Logic is easy, similarity is difficult. The biggest difference between story and life is that life can't go back at all, but stories can always go back and be redesigned.

Section 7 Imagination is the problem

There are only two emotions in life: happiness and pain. Happiness includes happiness, pity and nonsense. Pain includes anxiety and sadness.

The turning point of emotion comes from the turning point of value. What the audience feels is the value risk that the characters are experiencing? For example, the characters are poor at first, which is negative from the perspective of survival value.

Section VIII Period of Ascending Action

One page of the script is equivalent to one minute of screen time. ..... Most shots can show the charm of this scene in two or three minutes. If this time is exceeded, the photographer will repeat the same visual effect, the expressive force will be reduced, and the visual effect of the film will be worse and worse.

In movies, there are both traditional scenes and French scenes created by literary techniques. This length determines the rhythm of the story. The whispers of lovers are slow, the court is high-speed, one's decision is low, and the riots on the road are high-speed.

There is one kind: from individual to group, from individual to universality. Individuals are simple and slow at first, and their behavior has symbolic and common significance.

Section 9 must conflict, must conflict with the opposing forces.

How to ensure the strength in the confrontation plot? This is the core value of the story. Can be positive, about justice. Heroes represent justice and opposing forces represent evil, but it is generally not that simple. For example, justice is opposite, it is opposite to some extent, but it is not diametrically opposed. If justice is fair, it is unfair.

There are two ways: hide the negative value behind the story line, or hide it in the hearts of the characters. These can all involve the negative side of the story, and they can all develop into perfect characters and stories.

Incest is the desire to copy one's genes.

I encourage you to consider these limits and go deep into the essence of society, which will give you a chance to generate a powerful resistance force, whether it is a happy ending or a sad ending, in short, it will push the story to the extreme.

Section 10 Meaning, Creation and Emotion

This story tells us: Why and how does life change? Therefore, we should talk about human behavior from the depths. People must prove that they are alive by making decisions. Storytelling is an attribute of change. When characters experience got into trouble and knew what he wanted, the story reached its climax. ..... How to understand the actions taken by the characters at the climax? One is the climax and the other is the turning point.

A three-act drama needs four main events, one starting event, one, two and three acts, and each act has a climax, in which many storytelling techniques are designed.

The novelist Henry Jeames wrote in an article: What exactly is an event? A woman puts her hand on the table and looks at you. This little thing, in a certain scene, a gesture or a look can be a crush event, meaning: I love you, or we are finished, or the most powerful event in the story. ..... create an orgasm with gestures.

Among readers, women want men to give her a gesture and look at her. The climax of this film is very powerful and shocking, which is not only meaningful to the characters, but also the greatest tragic symbol of the tenth century. We have been asking: Can we forgive the Holocaust committed by the Germans? No, never forgive.

The author's task: to reach the climax.

The key to the climax of a story is to combine two things: spectacle and truth. Spectacle is not an explosion, but a visual way to show the creativity of a master.

The ending has three functions:

First, the process of expressing the story and revealing the breadth of the story. But the climax is only related to the main characters, family, society and so on. His family and people around him have also been influenced by him, and the ending needs to be known.

Second, weave sub-plots. The climax of the sub-plot may be ahead, but it may not reach the ending, so an ending is needed to weave the main plot and the sub-plot. But this is often not good, because subplots are usually solved in front.

Third, push the audience to a meaningful emotional experience. They can't help laughing or getting angry. If strong feelings are aroused in their hearts, you will give them a signal that everything has been completed, giving people an effect that the curtain is slowly lowered. Give the audience a chance to breathe, their mood can calm down a little, and then leave the cinema.

Chapter six arouses the curiosity of the audience with anxiety and worry.

The meaning of the first section will come from coincidence

Section 2 Mystery, Suspense and Irony

In suspense, you will be anxious about what happened to the protagonist. There will be sympathy for the characters in irony.

Show it to others, don't tell others.

What is the California scene in the fourth season?

Section 5 Flashback can be done well or badly.

The explanation in the sixth section has no meaning.

Section 7 A real person is never enough to be a character.

When a character evaluates another character, it is not necessarily true, but it can help us understand who this character may be, and the audience will continue to observe.

When using nouns and verbs, you write names and actions, not adjectives to describe them. For example, if you move slowly, you might as well limp, pace and slide past like a waltz.

For example: "Who came in, the same as before." You can't use "like" in movies. When a person enters a room, it means that he has entered, not "liked".

Section 8 Law of External Image and Internal Image

Part II: McKee Film Review: Let's reject cliches.

Part III: Interview with McKee: Dialogue with China film and television circles.

I encourage students who study scriptwriting to imagine this role as the most ideal actor in their own minds when creating. ..... The person who plays this role in the end will be very grateful, because when you wrote it, you wrote it for such a standard actor.

It is extremely stressful for the author to write something and publish something every day. I would never do that.

If the author does not have a strong sense of direction, the structure will collapse as soon as possible.

The characters in China's costume films have a sense of purity. Whether goddess, princess, prince, villain or devil, they all have a sense of moral purity. If this character is so pure, we will face two problems:

The first problem is empathy, that is, in the face of such a pure person, it is difficult for us to achieve a kind of empathy effect between human beings with him, and there is no way to connect them because he is too pure.

The second problem is the diversity of movements, because you are too pure, but you have to set him up for two hours, because he is too pure, he can only repeat the same movements over and over again.

I've been doing this for 25 years, almost 30 years. One word in our writers' association has been eliminated, that is, rules.

I also watch National Geographic. I see a shark. I will never forget it. It is a very ugly shark in the ocean. Do you know what it eats? It eats newborn sea lions and eats them when it is asleep. It can always find sleeping sea lions at the bottom of the sea. It just eats the baby while he is sleeping. This is the scariest story I have seen in the past two days.

The fourth part reports McKee: McKee in the eyes of China media.

Taste and judgment; Have the desire to tell stories; And the spirit of sticking to the truth in the writing process.

In this way, the audience actually got a double pleasure. The first pleasure is the pleasure of anthropology, the pleasure of discovering the new continent, and the second pleasure is the pleasure of human nature. The pleasure is that you find that these people in these stories are actually the same as you.

We should realize that culture is so deep, but human nature is so deep. You must break through the cultural cortex and go deep into the depths of human nature.

Three things should be avoided in writing: dull scenes, awkward arguments and cliches. The story must conform to the real specific cultural background. When we enter a world we have never seen before, we are actually digging ourselves. We will find that the core of the story is to replace a scene or life that we have never experienced with a character with our general cognitive characteristics.

A good story should contain universal human truth and human experience. But it must be told in a brand-new and unique way, so that the audience feels that they have entered a special world that they have never set foot in, and in this world, they have found themselves again. They and themselves appreciate each other in this new world, and live in stories greedily instead of all mankind through this impossible thing in real life. This is a story that I think is exciting.

How to write a good story under censorship? One is to create another world by analogy, such as artistic role, symbolic meaning, fantasy world and so on. All these can imply the meaning of reality; The second is the era of dislocation. The past is the mirror of the present. We can look for materials in history to compare with reality.

As a creator, you should first understand the reality, what people are doing and thinking, and then bring their problems and your own problems into the film.

There is a saying in Hollywood: Before you meet a real prince, you may have to kiss many frogs.

In essence, this story expresses why and how life has changed. It begins with the balance of life balance-a "trigger event" happens-which makes you lose your balance, such as getting a new job, or the boss will die of a heart attack, or a big customer threatens to leave. The following story describes how the protagonist is crushed in the face of ruthless objective reality, regardless of his own efforts to restore balance. -has been telling the fundamental conflict between human subjective desire and cruel reality.

We all long for happiness, but life won't let you do it.

How do storytellers find and dig up stories worth telling?

He should ask some key questions. First, in order to restore balance. What does my hero want? Desire is the blood of the story. Desire is not a shopping list, but a core demand. Once satisfied, the story can end. Secondly, what prevented my hero from satisfying his/her desires? Is it internal work? Doubt? Fear? Confused? Or is it a contradiction with friends, family and lovers? Social conflicts within the organization? Physical confrontation? The power of motherhood? A deadly disease in the air? No time to finish the work? The damn car won't start. Opponents come from people, society, time, space and anything in them, or any combination. Third. In the face of these opponents, what action does my hero intend to take to realize his wish? In the answer to this question, storytellers discover the true nature of their characters, because the choices a person makes under pressure can best reveal his true nature. Finally, the storyteller leaned back, looked at the story he designed and asked himself, "Do I believe this? Does it neither exaggerate nor flatter the struggle? Is this an honest story? Will the sky fall? "