What The Film Audience Wants
By: Zeeshan Contractor
Tags: Storytelling, Film, Hollywood, Movies, Filmmaking

For a film director, an audience is a group of people who go to the cinema or log into the internet to gain an experience.

Will the experience be good or bad, depends upon the storytelling style and the audience’s taste.

I’ve converted this blog into a short video if that’s your format of choice here

We’ve identified that the audience wants an experience, but what exactly is an experience? It’s something which entices the audience to come back for more or stay away for good.

What is the experience made up of for a film director? It’s made up of three main ingredients, concept, character and story.

These are the three main ingredients when combined together, give the audiences an experience to remember or forget.

Hugo

What is a concept? A concept is the equivalent of a seed that you plant in order to get the fruit. In order to get an orange, you need to plant the seed for an orange. Similarly, a concept is the seed which is the very beginning of the experience which will never grow if the seed isn’t planted right.

Let’s talk about the concept of one of the greatest movies ever made, The Matrix. What is the concept of The Matrix? Neo wants to find out what is the Matrix, this question was the concept of the film and this concept was the seed which gave us everything that came afterwards which brings us to point number two, The Character.

Who was the main character of the film, it was Neo. Was he an interesting main character? Hell yes! Why was he an interesting character? Because of two main traits.

Neo trying to bend the spoon

First, he was an intelligent software engineer. When you present somebody intelligent to the audiences, they automatically aspire to be somewhat like that character because deep down inside everybody aspires to be intelligent. Christopher Nolan took over Hollywood not because he‘s got some kind of a magic wand, but because he is the most intelligent film director and a storyteller of the modern times.

Secondly, Neo was driven by an interesting goal. He wanted to find out what is the matrix and we as an audience knew how it would lead him to find out something we will linger on for the rest of our lives. So, instead of being driven by the desire to seek something cliched like love or money, Neo was seeking the answer to his question, ultimately enlightening him with the purpose of his life. This purpose wouldn’t be to get married, have children and live a normal life, but it would involve something beyond our imagination.

As an audience when we realize this psychological state of the character, we fall in love with that character.

The third and the last point of making up an experience is the fruit itself. When the tree is grown, you receive the fruit which is the equivalent of the story. So what was the story of the matrix? In a nutshell, Neo takes the red pill, finds out what the matrix is, falls into disbelief, accepts the reality, becomes part of the real world, fights an agent, dies, gets reborn, fights the agent again and finally wins.

Now he finally realized the purpose of his life, to fight against the system that has blinded the whole world into believing something that is not real.

Neo is ready for a fight

So once you take a bite out of this fruit, you receive an experience, just like when the movie cuts to black and the end credits roll, the audience receives an experience. Whether you will like the fruit depends upon your taste buds just like loving a movie depends upon the audience’s mindset and how successfully you’re able to change those mindsets much similar to what Christopher Nolan did. He completely reinvented the superhero genre.

Once he was done with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, everybody out there wanted to reboot their superhero franchise and come up with the next hit similar to Nolan’s hit.

You as an independent film director, if you think deeply about these three ingredients, you will realize how most of the ideas in your backpack suck. Just like all the clichéd independent film directors out there, you quickly and randomly come up with a character and a story then jump on to the glorified technical aspects of the movie, especially the cinematography.

Just like Stanley Kubrick, the one thing that cliched film directors care most about is the cinematography. No matter how much you deny, it is the absolute truth about our current independent film directors.

Stanley Kubrick

Hopefully, this blog will provide all the new film directors and storytellers with a fresh perception about concepts, characters, stories, movies and ultimately the experience.

On a closing note, if you’re somebody who wants to become a film director, I wanna know what you know about the audience’s desire?

In the hopes of connecting with film directors and story lovers all over the world, this is Mr. Zeecon, in the making of a great story.