Ninja vs Penguin

Penguin February 27th, 2008

I don’t know where the idea that the audience is dumb came from, but we see it everywhere. We see it when characters come out and say what they’re feeling or when they tell you the plot. Here’s what the audience already knows:

• They know story
• They know genre
• They are visually literate
• They have key expectations
• They understand subtext

They don’t know that they know this stuff, but they do. They know it because they have 5,000 years of story telling background. They’ll forgive your cliches and your mistakes as long as you don’t betray or cheat them with things that don’t make sense.

The trick is to give the audience what they want, but not in the way they’re expecting it. If you don’t give them what you want, you have no audience. If you give them what they want in the way they’re expecting it, you have cliche or boredom. If you give them what they want in an unexpected way, you have a great story.

-Penguin

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