The Art Of Storytelling

Whether a story is good or not, to some extent, mainly depends on the script. While how to write a script is a craft that needs talent and skill. The Hollywood movie represents the world’s highest level, while the domestic screenwriters are not so good. Learning the advanced composing skills of Hollywood is an effective way to improve the standards of domestic screenwriters. James Cameron’s film is often used as the analytic textbooks for students who major in film. By studying Cameron’s works, we may find out some ways of screenwriting.The shaping of the main characters in the movie is the priority. It concerns whether the story is splendid and whether the characters are believable. Cameron has a superb understanding of the truth of movie. His main characters show distinctive features when they come on the screen. And,they are either deficient or “heroes” in trouble. With the development of the plot, the main characters gradually confront harder moments. Emotion and thought about the world are given to the main characters by Cameron.The structure of the film is an important part of film theory. Both the movie creator and the theory researchers cannot neglect it. James Cameron has taught himself the film theory, which inevitably contains the knowledge about the movie structure. The movie structure can be divided into conventional and unconventional mode as well as four kinds of detailed space-time structure. From the perspective of story, the conventional movie structure, generally focusing on the conflict, is a kind of structure of more dramatic effect and is more commonly used in the film. While the space-time structure focus more on the expression of film’s form.If the movie structure is the skeleton of a person, then the plot of the film is the flesh and blood. The plot is composed by conflicts, and the development of plot also needs the conflict. Cameron’s film involves a variety of conflicts and has reasonable solutions for them. The conflict types and adversarial modes in his movie are usually traceable in screenwriting theory. However, he uses his own talent to create superb and different stories.This thesis focuses on the setting up of the main characters,the arrangement of the movie structure and the development of the plot in Cameron’s film to study Cameron’s art of storytelling.