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Openings

Every episode covering Openings.

"the kind of darkness you only find thousands of miles from the warm safe room you’re sitting in right now. That’s really interesting. He is in second person. He’s directly talking to you."

— Stu Willis  |  DZ-105: Establishing Tone through Big Print

DZ-89: Opening Sequences

How does your opening sequence set up your audience?
AI✦Jessica Ellis, Chas, and Stu examine how inventive opening sequences in OCEAN’S ELEVEN, LONG SHOT, ARRIVAL, and A SERIOUS MAN establish character, genre, and theme while defying expectations.✦
⏱ 1h 48m
31 MAY 2022
Listen if you want to understand how great opening sequences establish character, genre, and theme while defying genre conventions
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Inspired by her tweet on how subversive an opening OCEAN’S ELEVEN has, Chas and Stu invited amazing writer/director Jessica Ellis onto the show to deep dive into opening sequences. How does a good opening setup character, genre, and theme… →

DZ-41: Theme and Worldview

How can your characters' worldview dramatise your theme?
AI✦The hosts pay particular attention to how pilots open--what they establish about character perspective and theme--using specific scenes from their show examples to demonstrate thematic setup.✦
⏱ 2h 32m
24 MAR 2017
Listen if theme feels abstract - we talk how how to make it visible through what characters believe.
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In this episode, Stu and Chas tackle one of the more esoteric topics in screenwriting (and writing in general): theme! To help us tackle this topic, we decided to look at television pilots, because we felt that television requires the theme to be more explicit. Our zig-zagging (and long) discussion covers thematic engines, music themes, thematic loglines, punishment vs reward, and - perhaps most of all - the worldview of characters… →

DZ-15: World Building Rules, Okay?

How does setting up rules help you build a world?
AI✦The entire episode pivots on the claim that opening pages teach the audience how to watch your film, making the choice of how you establish world rules one of screenwriting’s foundational decisions.✦
⏱ 2h 0m
4 NOV 2014
Listen when your opening pages feel like exposition dumps (which is bad, okay?)
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In our most epic/longest episode yet, Chas and Stu tackle world building in films. Specifically, how the rules make something a world and not just a setting. Starting with world-centric genres like sci-fi and fantasy, we also cover horror, crime drama and - er - “other”. We discuss a variety of techniques for setting up the rules of the world, including cold opens, voiceover, title cards and outsider characters! We’ve limited ourselves to the opening 3-5 pages... mostly... because (so the theory goes) they’re the pages that teach the audience how to read/watch your story/film… →

DZ-125: Oscars One-shot - BLUE MOON

What craft tools make a low-budget, contained, period drama riveting?
AI✦The opening titles reveal that Larry Hart will die alone in a gutter within seven months, and Chas argues this knowingness transforms the next hour and a half from tragedy into a question about how Larry would want to go out.✦
⏱ 1h 18m
26 FEB 2026
Listen if you want to understand how narrative POV, screenplay format, and dialogue craft can elevate a contained biopic into an Oscar-nominated film
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BLUE MOON is a talky, period-drama that film about an obscure songer-writer in the 1940s. Yet, it attracted world-class talent AND Academy Award nominations, including for it’s script. Join Chas & Mel as they explore how narrative POV, interweaving relationships, hooky dialogue, and even the screenplay format itself make the script for BLUE MOON so great… →

DZ-105: Establishing Tone through Big Print

How can we teach the reader to find the humour in our darkness?
AI✦By examining how these three stories frame their unusual tones in their opening pages, the episode isolates which levers writers can pull early to signal what the audience should laugh at and what they should take seriously.✦
⏱ 2h 6m
30 NOV 2023
Listen if you want to use an unusual tone in your screenplay.
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Chas and Stu finally start their long-mooted exploration of tone with a series that examines films and shows with unusual tones and dives into how the writers establish those tones in the first 5 pages… →

DZ-24: Forging story rules in TV pilots

Are your story rules in your pilot strong enough to play out over the life of your show?
AI✦Stu and Chas examine how pilot episodes establish their dramatic contract in the cold open and opening sequences, using THE SHIELD, THE WIRE, and BREAKING BAD as models for how to hook an audience into a series.✦
⏱ 2h 5m
4 AUG 2015
Listen if you wanna know great television pilots establish the dramatic, literary, and cinematic rules that sustain their entire run.
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Stu and Chas move away from the world of features and dive into the Pilot Episodes of some (New) Golden Age Television: THE SHIELD, THE WIRE, BREAKING BAD, and MAD MEN. And we sneak in some discussion about ANGEL, THE SOPRANOS and GAME OF THRONES… →