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| "To the boats!" Ratatouille storyboard by Louis Gonzales |
In his book The Sequence Approach, Paul Joseph Gulino lays out four tools screenwriters can use to keep the audience attention directed into the future. I love Gulino's book. Breaking up a screenplay into separate sequences makes the writing proces clearer and much easier to manage, while still relying on the basic three act structure. (Which is useful, because most screenwriting books rely on this) I might dive deeper into the sequence approach to screenwriting in a later post, but now I wanted to focus on these four tools.
Before he starts to explain how sequences work, Gulino talks about four techniques to manage audience attention. The techniques by themselves are quite common, and you will find information on them in most screenwriting guidelines, but I hadn't seen them put together like this before, or explained in this detail.
Below you will find a summary of this part of the book. I have collected examples from Ratatouille to illustrate how these techniques can be seen in a movie.
Telegraphing. Also known as pointing or advertising. Telling the audience explicitly what would happen in the future of the narrative. This can be done both verbally, “meet me in the park at midnight” and visually, we see a character packing a suitcase which tells us he is going away.
False telegraphing is when we tell the audience where the story is going, but pay it off in reverse. (surprise twist)
Another type of telegraphing is the deadline, or ticking clock.
Examples:
While Remy and Emile are up on the roof, smoking a mushroom on top of the chimney a distant thunderstorm can be seen in the background. Just as Emile notices the storm getting closer lightning strikes the chimney.
“To the boats!” After the colony gets discovered by the old lady the rats flee. Django yells for them to go to the boats, after which we see the rats depart on boats they turn out to have at the ready.
“I will return tomorrow night, with high expectations. Don’t disappoint me.” Anton Ego’s pending review is the ticking clock Remy and Linguini are facing in the third act.
Dangling Cause. This tool carries more emotional freight than telegraphing. In general a dangling cause is an expression of intent, a warning, a threat, an expression of hope or fear, or a prediction, which places a question in the audience’s mind for which no immediate answer is provided. It thrusts audience attention into the future by arousing curiosity.
Examples:
“If you are what you eat, then I only want to eat the good stuff.” Remy doesn’t want to eat the garbage the other rats are eating. Will he succeed in eating only good food?
"Take a good, long look, Remy. This is what happens when a rat gets a little too comfortable around humans." Django warns Remy not to trust humans. Will he be proven right, and will Linguini betray Remy?
Dramatic Irony. Also known as omniscient narration. Dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows more than one or several of the characters onscreen. It creates audience anticipation about what is going to happen when the truth comes out. That anticipation is known as ironic tension, and it is bracketed by a scene of revelation (the moment the audience is giving information of which a character is unaware) and recognition (the moment when the character discovers what the audience has already known, which serves to resolve the ironic tension).
Dramatic irony comes in two flavors, suspense, which can be used to inspire fear in the audience, and comic, in which a misunderstanding is milked to produce laughter.
Dramatic irony is a more powerful tool than telegraphing or dangling causes, and can sometimes sustain a feature-length film all by itself.
Examples:
Linguini had to clean up the kitchen, after drinking wine with Skinner. He’s fast asleep when Colette comes in, to work with him. Remy puts sunglasses on Linguini and makes it look as if Linguini is awake. Colette gets worked up because she thinks Linguini is being presumptuous. The audience knows the truth and is excited to know how this will be resolved. This is an example of dramatic irony used for comedy.
When Remy and Linguini had a falling out, Remy fees betrayed. Believing his father was right, when he said humans can never be trusted, Remy helps the rats get into Gusteau’s kitchen. While they are there, pillaging the place, Linguini comes in to apologize to Remy. This puts Remy in an awkward position because at any time Linguini might find out the truth. When he finally does, it leads to a, seemingly, final rift between them. This is an example of dramatic irony used for suspense.
Dramatic Tension. This tool is the most powerful of the big four. It is the primary subject of most books on screenwriting. ‘Somebody wants something badly and is having difficulty getting it.’ Will the character get it or not? This is known as the dramatic question. And a question has three parts, the posing of the question (Act I), the deliberation on it (Act II), and the answer to it (Act III). Dramatic tension thrusts audience attention into the future with the expectation of the answer to the question.
Understanding dramatic tension in three parts is useful also because it is echoed in the smaller subdivision of a dramatic work, successfully realized scenes and sequences also have this dramatic tension, and thus also have a three-act structure.
When working with dramatic tension as the primary tool in engaging audience attention, the answer is the dramatic question and the tension it creates is known as the main attention, to distinguish it from the various smaller tensions arising from in scenes and sequences. The main tension is what makes a movie feel like one movie, it is what we use when we describe what it is about.
In most cases the main tension is not resolved at the end of the picture, but at the end of the second act. And in the third act a new dramatic tension almost invariably asserts itself.
Example:
Can Remy become a chef? Yes, at the end of the second act Remy has beaten Skinner and is the chef of Gusteau’s, working via Linguini.
But fame gets to Linguini’s head causing the relationship between him and Remy to crack. The new dramatic tension comes from the question if Remy will be able to be recognized for his work. This is answered when Anton Ego, a.k.a. the Grim Eater, gives him a glorious review and they open a restaurant together.
Like dangling causes dramatic tension plays on the audience’s curiosity, but unlike dangling causes it needs an emotional connection between the audience and the protagonist to achieve its effect. The first act, or setup, is used to create an emotional bond between the protagonist and the audience. Once this bond is established the audience will have an emotional stake that goes far beyond mere curiosity and can sustain audience involvement for an entire film.
These four techniques are the ones crucial in achieving the most basic task of the screenwriter: keeping the audience wondering what is going to happen next.
