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Out of inspiration to write ? use story maps ( the Google Earth) for writers
Take a look at the world's map through the lens of curiosity and appreciation. Experience life from "their" perspective.
Refining your craft
Watzen's team is spread across the world, from the west south of Argentina to the north east of Ukraine. When each one of us tells a story, it sounds very different. We feel so excited, exploring the scenes from eyes other than our own.
We are writing this because some of us has been doing this, visiting Google Earth, and exploring places and events with deep understanding of the cultures of others. So, today's topic is a combination of world-building and Anthropology research.
In the Korean movie "Snowpiercer", and A24's "The Lighthouse", we see the train, the fog and the landscapes creating their own power in the film. Not a single character is above their class in the train. Every life is daunted by the wave sound.
We come back to our group of writers to get to know their perspective:
📜 Anthropology and ethnic/ racial culture is continuously changing. The most reliable way to find the current cultural landscape is conversing with young people of that culture and engage with their art.
📜 Controlling the scale is the key function of the location. Writing about a serial killer blending within societies and moving from city to city focuses the perspective of the story into the societies themselves. Some movies start from a small room, such as a laundromat, only to move to wider landscapes to explore the consequences. Others begin from prominent place such as the White house, to set the stage for something affecting the nation.
📜 There is a delicate balance in introducing NPCs, since the audience is feeling their emotions as part of the story.
📜 Environments elevate challenges, widen their impacted people, or shift their significance on a new group.
📜 There is an interrelation between settings, symbols and world-building. The story impact is perceived as combination of recognizing the world's roles, finding out what the settings make possible/ impossible. In addition, characters interactions' whether friendly or not have to be guided by the world and their settings. Audience shall be aware of the roles, not get introduced to them when the biggest scene is happening.
Major effect
"There was this place I saw in a movie". The audience might recall the story's world more than the film's name.
It is suggested to write the Story Planning, and Story Development sections, then using Story Refinement to enrich your research
Relevant Storytelling elements
As the figure depicts, the elements are affecting multitude of story elements
- World represented & Verisimilitude
- Characters' interactions
- Theme Analysis
- Character-World interaction
- Symbols and metaphors
The challenge of balancing world-building
with focusing on the story
Writing the world is too fun. Yet, most "sets" and "backdrop" are simple and cost-effective. Audience are usually immersed the most with a crafted place, un-natural and curious. The practical way for writers to build the world is through: strategic use of space, effects, and audience's imagination.
"In Holy Spider, Iran isn't just where the story happens - the setting transforms a serial killer thriller into a critique of systemic misogyny." ~ Ali Abbasi
Cinematographers marvels created for us the theater experience that we love. For the writers to help make the film remain in the long-term memory, we use multiple methods to combine the narrative with the city, society, the room, and the universe.
🗿 Vertical Hierarchies
In films like "Parasite" and "High-Rise", physical elevation becomes social commentary. The higher spaces represent privilege, while lower spaces represent struggle. This vertical architecture creates natural conflict and character motivation.
🗿 Cultural Intersections
Films like "The Farewell" use location to explore cultural collision. The protagonist's journey between America and China physically manifests her internal identity struggle. Each location carries its own rules, expectations, and pressures.
🗿 Historical Echoes
"La Ciénaga" uses its Argentine setting to explore post-colonial class dynamics. The decaying country house becomes a metaphor for fading aristocracy. The swimming pool, murky and stagnant, reflects social decay.
🗿 Urban Microcosms
Movies like "Holy Spider" use specific city locations to represent larger societal issues. The streets of Mashhad become a character themselves, reflecting systemic problems through architecture and atmosphere.
🗿 Rural Transformations
"Another Round" uses Copenhagen's distinct drinking culture to drive its story. The school, bars, and streets create a landscape where the characters' experiment feels both natural and increasingly dangerous..
💡 Practical Tip: tools like watzen.ai help you craft each story element
Strong endings merged with the world
There is a lot we would like to discuss about ending. But, we will only talk specifically about the points of cultural inspiration and cultural worlds:
It has been proven through studies of audiences social media posts that the audience mention of the world increases +28% when the world is playing a vital role in the ending of a film.
"If you give us what we expected, we get disappointment". we connect to another person’s sense of being lost. Because we have all been lost. And that’s why the ending is going to work. Because without this there can be no catharsis.
Suggested
Solution
After determining your message of this film to your audience as story planning, you might want to add storytelling elements that would help you craft the story properly in story development, the more you bring your hard-earned expertise into articulate points, the more you help others find the core jewel of your story. The Watzen software has plenty of gyms pulled from years of research, that would help you .
Specify how the environment has affected the characters backstory, even if you decide not to show it within the film. When developing the scenes list, make sure that characters from different worlds and cultural build up are spread across the different scenes. You can also decide to Dramatize some of the aspects, by imagining how being raised at a certain world would make a character radically different from others.