As writer Alec Worley says, "A twist is a moment of revelation within a story that throws into question all that’s gone before." Twists are usually found at the end of stories, but can feature at any part of one. Twists use the audience's knowledge of a character, a setting or some other clear aspect of the story before revealing something to suggest the opposite, something completely different or unexpected. According to Worley, "The run-up to the twist itself must be in plain sight throughout and yet disguised so that the reader never suspects they are being duped!" Many viewers complain if something in a story comes out of nowhere and makes no sense, but if there was set up all the way through, then it becomes something much more interesting.
The five types of twist endings according to Worley are:
1. Reversal of Identity - Someone is revealed to be someone else or something else - another character, family to an unexpected character, a different gender or a different species (i.e vampire). Star Wars is famous for it's revelatory scene of Darth Vader revealing that he is in fact Luke's father, and the revelation of Luke and Leia being siblings. Though this is done over multiple films, this sort of twist can be done easily enough in short films as long as the hints or set up is there.
2. Reversal of Motive - often seen in crime stories. This one is fairly straight forwards - a character who may be thought to be a criminal could be a good guy, and good guy could be a bad guy, or you may find that a character is actually doing something because of a selfish reason, rather than 'the greater good' or whatever it is that they have lead the audience to believe.
3. Reversal of Perception - The hero (and by extension, the audience) release that the world is not what they thought it was. An example of this is in the game Dangan Ronpa, when a group of students find themselves trapped in a school, having to kill another student to leave and yearning for the outside world, when in reality the outside world has already gone to hell and the school they are trapped in is in fact one of the only safe places in the country or world. The Maze Runner has a similar twist, in that they are trapped in The Glades, a place devout of civilisation that keeps them safe but is actually one big psychological experiment to find ways of fixing the broken world outside.
4. Reversal of Fortune - often hard to pull off with and without the use of a deus ex machina. The character drives the story much less with this technique, with accidents or luck often changing the course of the story to take it somewhere unexpected. Emma Coats, Pixar story artist says that "Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating".
5. Reversal of Fulfilment - A character will reach their goal before suddenly losing what they gained by some other force/character. This can also involve goals of opposing characters to be cancelled out, or two characters both failing to achieve or achieving their goals.
"What DIDN’T you know the whole time?
When identifying a twist, consider the vessel of the twist itself. What is the thing that is reversed?
· A character’s BODY? (‘I thought you were a woman, but really you’re a man!’)
· A character’s OBJECTIVE? (‘I thought you loved me, but really you’re out to kill me!’)
· A character’s LOCATION? (‘I thought this was Heaven, but really it’s Hell!’)
· A glitch in a sequence of EVENTS? (‘Back off. I’ve had a gun in my pocket this whole time. Oh no, it’s really the banana I forgot to eat for lunch!’)
· The OBJECTIVES OF TWO OPPOSING CHARACTERS. (‘And so I’ve proved that age will always triumph over youth.’ ‘That’s what you think, gramps!’)"
No comments:
Post a Comment