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Interweaving Timelines
Every episode covering Interweaving Timelines.
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DZ-78: Interweaving Timelines 1 - Destroyer
How does interweaving two timelines change how the audience feel?
AI✦The entire episode dissects how two plot lines featuring the same characters across different timelines are woven together, using DESTROYER as the primary case study for managing this structural approach.✦
Listen when you're writting multiple timelines and struggling to anchor your reader to one timeline's perspective.
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Stu and Chas are joined by Mel Killingsworth to dissect interweaving timelines. Not anthology films. Not Cloud Atlas. But films where two plot lines featuring the same characters, but from different timelines, are woven together… →
Films:
Destroyer (2018)

DZ-79: Interweaving Timelines 2 - The Social Network
How can interweaving two timelines change how we feel about a character?
AI✦The episode’s central question asks how interweaving two timelines changes how we feel about a character, using The Social Network’s flash-forwards and flashbacks as the primary case study for this structural technique.✦
Listen to understand how manage stakes when you're using flashforwards.
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In this Part 2 of Interweaving Timelines (aka The Stu Monologue Episode), Mel, Chas and Stu tackle Sorkin/Fincher’s The Social Network. As you’ll hear, it is clearly Stu’s favourite of the examples we cover and, ah, not Mel’s favourite. While all three bring their own biases and opinions on the reality of Facebook as it has become, we do manage to put the destruction of democracy to one side to actually analyse the meticulous craft that this film displays… →
Films:
The Social Network (2010)

DZ-80: Interweaving Timelines 3 - Little Women
How can interweaving timelines elevate the emotional experience for the audience?
AI✦Chas, Stu & Mel structure the entire discussion around how Gerwig’s non-chronological interweaving of Little Women and Good Wives creates emotional and thematic effects that the source material’s original chronological order cannot achieve.✦
Listen to explore non-chronological structures can make work thematically resonant.
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In our final part, part 3, of our Interweaving Timelines series, we — Chas, Stu & Mel — take a deep dive into Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women. In her adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s iconic novels, Greta chose to interweave the seperate timelines of Little Women and it’s sequel, Good Wives, to create a thematically and emotionally potent work. This differs from all the other adaptations, which have chosen to keep the chronological storytelling of the source material… →
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DZ-85: Choices & Decisions 2 - The Farewell & Wrath of Man
What is difference between choice and decision when it comes to audience experience?
AI✦WRATH OF MAN’s non-linear structure becomes a craft tool that decouples character decisions from their outcomes, requiring the audience to reconstruct causality and reassess their emotional relationship to the protagonist.✦
Listen when you want to show a character refusing to change despite every opportunity to do so.
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In our second part of our “series” on Choices & Decisions, we take a deep dive into THE FAREWELL and WRATH OF MAN, with a sidebar on NOMADLAND… →
