#active protagonist

An Active Protagonist, as the name implies, is an *Active Participant* in the plot; they make conscious decisions to move the plot forward, as opposed to:

Passive Protagonists, who don't participate in the plot hardly ever or at all, and exist simply to be dragged along by everyone around them and the plot itself.

Some examples of passive versus active:

Character sees a group of rebels moving through town, and impulsively sneaks off in the middle of the night to join them VS Character sees a group of rebels moving through town, and their parent, employer, friend etc drags them into joining them

another example:

Character gains some supernatural powers, and decides to make their small town a better place, one helped neighbor at a time, slowly building a group of seven super-friends as they work together to rebuild their town by seeing needs and addressing them VS Character gains some supernatural powers, and get forced into a super hero boarding school and are assigned a team as the seventh member, and the protagonist make *zero* attempt to do anything different, and just decides to go along with everything everyone else says.

" You can't have a passive protagonist for very long, without it being an encouragement to your reader to put the book down" "Yeah, If your character if you are expecting people to be attached to your character enough that they want to read or watch your entire story they have to want something for your character they have to want something your your audience has to be invested in what that character is trying to achieve with their life... if they're just bumbling along around and other people are active.... but, you can have a passive protagonist, but everybody else around them is interesting, because they're all doing things that your character has to react, to I'm like "well why aren't I piggybacking on *that* character?"

5 Ways to Keep Your Protagonist Proactive – Written By Janice Hardy

on Writers in the Storm blog: Get your protagonist up off the couch and into the story. When I was six, I wrote a series called Dog City that followed the adventures of a team of dog archaeologists as they searched for a lost city of, you guessed it, dogs. It was all of four books, bound in aged cardboard from the backs of legal pads, and custom illustrated. Laugh all you want, but that series…

So I'm about to write my first Act (1st 30 pages) of my feature screenplay for my screenwriting class with Claudia Johnson. 

I finished the Scene-by-Scene about a month ago (I did my work way too early) and so I'm just now getting to her chapter six- "Creating the Scene" which is all about how to craft an effective scene. 

A great scene will do three things: advance the story,reveal character, explore an idea, and build a visual context. A good scene will do at least two of these. 

So of course a scene has to advance the story- that one is pretty well known. Its combining this with the other things that becomes tricky. Especially for begining writers who have sort of one track minds- this scene where she's running through the grass shows that she wants to be free-

The next scene where she talks with mom in the kitchen advances the story. etc. etc. 

Now Linda remarks: "Sometimes a scene might seem to be only about revealing character, yet it might also introduce some useful ability of the protagonist, as she approaches her goal." So now this scene with mom in the kitchen isn't only about forwarding the plot but now we can see that our protagonist is very good at cooking- and this is going to help her solve her problem.

These character revelations should reveal character traits that will pay off in the future of the script. 

When writing a scene about a theme, the theme should be expressed by character's decisions and reactions- try not to use on the nose dialogue. Your audience will not thank you. Believe me, I did this in one of my film school short films and that is probably the scene I hate the most because its just hitting the theme on the head- to death, I might add. 

^Prime Example and its done with Voice Over. 

Building images- Its not so much visual design that you should think of here. But character traits. She uses this example: "to build an image of greed, the writer might show a person willing to do anything to make money." For example scrooge, skimps on the coal, refuses to indulge in christmas, doesn't give to the poor. etc. 

For thinking about scenes in the wider context of the script:

-Make sure the beats of the "A" story are clear, you don't need to show every beat, just make sure that they're clear.

-Make sure the beats of your subplots are clear. 

-Make static scenes interesting by adding action

Continuing through my notebook. The day is now September 3rd 2010. Lets see what Vicky had in store for us today.

Dramatic Irony:

- Starting with Hitchcock's "Bomb Under the table" (Aside: apparently this is from Hitchcock by Truffaut- a book for my Film Theory class, I'll have to look for it.)

-The Audience knows something the character does not- do this by extending the scene for example long repetitive shots, tight shots

-Suspense gives us somethign we're not expecting. Utilize juxtaposition of images here. For example in the Birds: One bird, cut back, two birds, cut back, three birds, cut back, 50 birds.

- "Bomb"-if the audience knows about the bomb then there will be suspense where as if they don't know they'll jump, but there's no suspense.

-Used in romance classics: a character needs to do something and happens to fall in love. For example: "Some Like it Hot".

                *Also look at "Some Lit it Hot" for an example of contrast to dramatic irony with Osgood in the end of the film.

- with dramatic irony you MUST have a moment of character realization.

We go to movies for the "Hard choice" that the character is going to face. 

-What choice is the character making and to what affect.

The "Always" according to Vicky (or to my transcribed notes of her lecture)

-ALWAYS leave a significant scene out in a cut. EX. In "Go" the decision to come over and the traveling is left out in the cut