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Home » Jennine Lanouette Has Seen the Future of Script Analysis – and It Ain’t Print

Jennine Lanouette Has Seen the Future of Script Analysis – and It Ain’t Print

Jennine Lanouette has taught screenwriting, been a story consultant and lectured on story structure and script analysis for a couple of decades. That doesn’t mean, however, that she’s totally satisfied with the current status of just how this whole industry works – and it is an industry, whether it’s ‘Hero’s Journey’, ‘Save the Cat’, or the ‘Syd Field Paradigm’.

“About 20 years ago, screenplay writing became popular,” says Lanouette, who has studied screenwriting and dramatic history at Columbia and NYU. “It’s more or less replaced the desire to write the Great American novel.”

In her lectures and writing, Lanouette situates the audiences’ involvement to how well the writer delivers on the three-act dramatic model — yes, that same one that has been around in the West since the time of Aristotle. (She notes that Aristotle only wrote notes to analyze what went into the best drama of his day, but he didn’t attempt to codify it. That came later via other writers.)

Today though, most scriptwriting courses promote a few catch phrases and offer a simple, linear three-act progression built around plot development only. In her search to go beyond simplistic models so that writers didn’t feel limited by the structure, Lanouette realized that she could give equal consideration to character and theme, and how they could function in determining a screenplay’s total structure.

That’s when she developed in the following chart, “A Meditation on Character, Action and Theme.” Here theme and character take on equal importance to action, or plot. (The diagram is part of her article in Filmmaker magazine that you can access here.)

Ditching the typical linear layout of plot-centric screenplay analyses, Lanouette’s chart gives equal weight to character, theme, and action (plot).

But, while that’s a useful approach, it alone is not the future of script analysis we noted up top. This is…

The opening screen of Lanouette’s ‘The African Queen’ eBook.

Lanouette has been working to take script analysis into the modern era, using iPads and Macs as well as Android tablets to offer all of the multimedia capabilities we’ve come to expect. Apple’s iBook Author was useful to go this route – she used the app to develop her initial eBook – but it limits playback to OS X-based devices, and don’t try web streaming it.

Plot and character in The African Queen are charted together on this screen in Lanouette’s eBook.

She’s recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the first of a series of dual platform eBooks that use the information she has developed for lectures on some 13 different films. Future plans will take that to the full 24 film lectures now in her notebooks.

Like the DIY movement in filmmaking, eBooks have been gaining popularity as an ideal way to get your message across to today’s readers. You might go the route of the Amazon Kindle self-publishing platform, for example, or other variations from Barnes & Noble (Nook) and Apple (iBooks).  However, Amazon does to authors what Apple does to music, profiting at a whopping 30-percent of every sale.

A web-streaming version is also in the works, so those without tablets won’t feel left out. (You can check an initial version of it here.)

The completed $20,000 campaign allows for the creation of eBook s on her first two choices for analysis, The African Queen and Thelma & Louise. Other films in the pipeline include Traffic, The Crying Game, Chinatown, Sunset Boulevard, Annie Hall, and Pulp Fiction.

Much like she might do in one of her classes, Lanouette addresses the reader directly in this screen from her analysis of ‘The African Queen’.

As Lanouette notes, her take on multimedia eBooks “makes for an engaging and enjoyable learning experience, even for the heady, in-depth structural analysis that I provide.”

While the campaign is finished, you can still check out her Kickstarter page to see a few short video examples of what she’s up to.

Also, it’s worth checking out Lanouette’s Screentakes website for updates on the eBooks as well as articles and short videos that show some of her thinking about script analysis. One current favorite of mine is this short compilation video, Sympathetic doesn’t have to mean likeable.

 

About Dan Ochiva

New York City-based journalist and NYCPPNEWS founder Dan Ochiva writes and consults on film, video, and digital media technology.

Community & Partner Links

How Sony’s New Virtual Sound Technology Can Change How We Hear Films

Kami Asgar and Jessica Parks are post-production heavyweights who work with major studios, namely Sony. As a sound designer (Asgar) and as a post executive (Parks), their collective resume touches on everything from Apocalypto to Grandma’s Boy to Venom.

Parks has recently shifted her focus from supervisor to hands-on sound design, and we talk about how it’s never too late to pivot on your career path and find the thing you love doing wherever you are in life.

Click on this link to read the rest of the article on No Film School’s site.

NJ – Governor Murphy signs $14B Incentive Program Bill – the NJ Economic Recovery Act of 2020

 Film tax credits — amending existing programs to include provisions for so-called New Jersey film partners and New Jersey film-lease partners and allowing an additional $200 million of tax credits annually over 13 years.

Click this link if you want to read the full article on the Lexology site. http://bit.ly/35NtDx6

Film Commish announces date for production restart

In her December 18, 2020 news update, MOME Commissioner Anne del Castillo announced that the Film Office is now accepting permit applications for production activity that begins on July 27th.

She also announced awards now (Awkwafina) and more. To read all of the Film Commish’s bloggy sort of news column, click here.

Stimulus Offers $15 Billion in Relief for Struggling Arts Venues

The coronavirus relief package that Congressional leaders agreed to this week includes grant money that many small proprietors described as a last hope for survival.

For the music venue owners, theater producers and cultural institutions that have suffered through the pandemic with no business, the coronavirus relief package that Congress passed on Monday night offers the prospect of aid at last.

To read the full article on The New York Times’ site, click here.

If you want to start production, here’s the latest news from the Mayor’s Office

Phase 4 production guidance is available on the Film Permit website. All production activity, whether it requires a Film Permit or not, must comply with New York Forward Industry Guidance.

For more information see, please refer to the State Department of Health’s Interim Guidance for Media Production During the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency. Please review the guidelines and FAQ before submitting permit applications. The Film Office is operating remotely, so please allow additional time for Film Permit processing.

The above paragraphs contain links to the various FAQ – just mouse over the relevant words.

Nikon to Stop Making Cameras in Japan

Nikon has fallen on hard times as of late as its camera sales have cratered, and now there’s a new indicator of how dire its financial situation is: the company is reportedly pulling the plug on making cameras in Japan after over 70 years of doing so.

To read the full article on Petapixel’s site, click here.

NVIDIA Uses AI to Slash Bandwidth on Video Calls

NVIDIA Research has invented a way to use AI to dramatically reduce video call bandwidth while simultaneously improving quality

What the researchers have achieved has remarkable results: by replacing the traditional h.264 video codec with a neural network, they have managed to reduce the required bandwidth for a video call by an order of magnitude. In one example, the required data rate fell from 97.28 KB/frame to a measly 0.1165 KB/frame – a reduction to 0.1% of required bandwidth.

To read the rest of this article on Petapixel, click this link.

 

 

 

Union Health Plan Dodges Film Workers’ Suit Over Virus Relief

Law360 (October 9, 2020, 5:22 PM EDT) — The Motion Picture Industry Health Plan’s board can’t be sued under ERISA for allegedly flouting its duties when it relaxed plan rules in response to COVID-19, a California federal judge has ruled, nixing a proposed class action filed by two cinematographers who still couldn’t qualify for benefits.

In an order entered Thursday, U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner granted the board of directors’ motion to dismiss Greg Endries and Dee Nichols’ Employee Retirement Income Security Act suit accusing board members of breaching their duty to treat all plan participants fairly.

Endries and Nichols, members of Local 600 of the International Cinematographers Guild, said in July that the board left them and others “out in the cold” in its attempts to address the problems COVID-19 caused for plan participants.

But Judge Klausner agreed with the board’s contention that the case, which alleged a fiduciary breach, should be tossed because plan administrators don’t act as fiduciaries when they amend health care plans.

Read the full article on the Law360 site by clicking here.

Russo Brothers Received Close to $50 Million From Saudi Bank

Anthony Russo and Joseph Russo photographed at the PMC Studio in Los Angeles for the Variety Playback Podcast.

The Russo brothers, directors of the all-time top grossing film “Avengers: Endgame,” quietly secured a roughly $50 million cash infusion for their production company AGBO from Saudi Arabia earlier this year, multiple sources tell Variety.

In a deal brokered and closed at the beginning of the pandemic, the Russos received the investment from an undisclosed Saudi bank in exchange for a minority stake in the brothers’ Los Angeles-based shop.

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