7.0 KiB
[D] How Groundog Day was streamlined. (Notice how focus shifts from munchkinry to the character, and from resolution of the problem to resolution of the conflict )
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Author: u/neshalchanderman *
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URL: http://creativescreenwriting.com/groundhog-day-streamlining-the-story/
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Score: 33
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Created: 2015-08-06T19:10:22
Post:
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+21] Time flies like an arrow (2 hours later)
Groundhog Day is one of my favorite movies of all time (we watch it every year on my birthday; perhaps you can guess what day that is).
One of the reasons that you have munchkinry in a story is because that's what a person really would do. You don't need to be all that clever to start thinking of exploits, but characters in fiction generally do a poor job of it because their authors just want to get on with the story. One of the things Groundhog Day does really well (something necessitated by average movie runtime) is spending a few minutes skipping through all of the munchkinry and effectively saying, "Yes, all that stuff, but this isn't the point of the film".
u/Chronophilia [+6] sci-fi ≠ futurology (3 hours later)
That's an excellent read. I've noticed this tendency to over-analyse and over-explain in a lot of stuff that's been posted on this sub (and in my own writing too). But I've always ignored my misgivings because... surely, it's a good thing when characters act the way real and sensible people would act?
Well, it is, but you don't have to show it all the time. A premise is not a story (sorry, all the [BST] posts around here), and the audience is easily clever enough to think of all the cool things they would do with Phil's powers - either that or they're not interested in munchkinry anyway. We see a few hints of that, enough to assume it's happening, but it's not the main point. So Groundhog Day focuses on character development and comedy instead, and is much more streamlined and stronger for it. The time loop is not such a complex idea that it needed an entire two hours to explain on its own.
Also, the writers of Groundhog Day had to cut out extraneous material to fit the story into a two-hour film. But don't think that just because you're writing in a format with no built-in limits on length, that frees you from cutting out scenes that don't contribute enough to the story. (I do have a specific person in mind here, but if you're reading this comment it's almost certainly not you.)
u/thakil [+5] (12 hours later)
Groundhog Day is an amazing film when it comes to economy of story telling. Broadly speaking, it's about Murray realizing that he can't win over Rita by changing her, but only by changing himself (and deciding that that's worth doing for itself). That's the romantic interpretation anyway. The other way to look at it is that it's about a man who would try literally anything, including multiple suicide attempts, before trying to better himself. This is not a film that runs away from it's concept (well, OK, it could have gone much darker than it did in terms of his consequence-less actions, but this was meant to be a film for everyone), and explores it thoroughly, but in a very clean, fast way.
u/redrach [+7] (3 hours later)
In the interest of streamlining a movie I agree that it's better to cut out munchkinry over character development, but ideally any such work should contain ample quantities of both.
Leaving out the entire reason behind the time loop feels like a strange decision, but it worked for the tone of that particular movie. Not so sure what I'd think of seeing the same thing again now.
u/None [+14] (4 hours later)
I'd like to distinguish between grinding and munchkinry. Grinding is repetitive actions to improve skills or gather resources. Munchkinry is a clever insight about a well defined set of rules to accomplish something in a non-obvious manner, typically achieving a large magnitude of effect relative to your efforts.
Munchkinry is cleverness. Motivated cleverness is interesting. Frequent motivated cleverness often results in an overpowered character and requires in turn an overpowered opponent. So as long as you're careful about that, do as much as you want. I think people tend to prefer it if you create balanced systems, though, which relegates most of the munchkinry to fan fiction.
Grinding is dull. It is rarely a problem to reduce the amount of on-screen grinding. You can omit pretty much all of it, but you do need to demonstrate your characters' abilities before major conflicts necessitate their use, so it can be useful to show a bit. Groundhog Day showed a little bit of Phil's grinding, with pretty much every incident being played for laughs and also succinct.
Typical shounen series tend to show more of the grind. They follow a standard format a lot of the time: show an upcoming conflict, demonstrate that the characters don't measure up, spend an episode training in a novel way, then go on to the previously mentioned conflict.
This gives a deadline, which provides a modicum of urgency, and it motivates the training. The novelty of the type of training increases interest. The training forms a miniature story arc of identifying problems, trying to solve them, eventually solving them, and seeing how much the character has improved at the end.
The recently linked manhwa The Gamer is a good example of what not to do. It shows a fair bit of grinding. While the techniques used to kill zombies vary, they only vary between "hit it with a baseball bat" and "hit it with a spear" for the most part. The zombies are effectively all identical for a run of about ten chapters.
u/Roxolan [+1] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (4 hours later)
I know it bothered me quite a bit in Benjamin Button, even though I didn't care in Groundhog Day. I'm not sure why.
Possibly because Benjamin Button has a bad (or at least not-good) ending. It left me frustrated that nobody in-universe ever tried to avert it by studying the reverse ageing.
u/rhaps0dy4 [+2] (5 days later)
A bit off-topic, but: could someone please define "munchkinry"? I've read it several times around this subreddit, but I still have no idea what it is. Maybe it'd be good to put it in the community wiki linked in the sidebar.
u/DataPacRat [+2] Amateur Immortalist (5 days later)
The general term comes from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Munchkin , while as it's used in this subreddit, it usually refers to applying http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MinMaxing to whatever the setting's laws of physics are.
(A typical example is a video game that lets your character craft Intelligence-boosting potions, which let him craft better potions, repeating until he has arbitrarily high Intelligence, which lets him craft potions to raise the rest of his stats arbitrarily high, thus being able to breeze through the rest of the game.)