Eat, Pray, Launch Your Documentary
In my Inner Circle this week, we were discussing how real life doesn’t always neatly fit into the classic three-act structure that works so well in fiction.
Since members of my documentary coaching circle are all familiar with my online courses in adapting documentaries to classic narrative structure, we took our discussion a step further. We explored what I call the “double boost inciting incident”, as illustrated in the recently released narrative film “Eat, Pray, Love”.
Since the discussion was so interesting, I want to share with you what this technique is and how to use it.
Before I do, this is a good time to announce that my online courses (mentioned above), which have helped hundreds of documentary filmmakers, will not be available much longer. I’m going to replace them with new offerings. So if you want to get “Editing the Character Documentary” or “The Ultimate Guide to Structuring Your Documentary”, please do so soon at:
https://newdocediting.com/products/
Now, onto the double boost…!
In the classic inciting incident, a single significant event occurs that throws the protagonist’s life out of balance. For example, a character gets a cancer diagnosis. This catalyst incident then gives rise to the character’s quest, in this case to heal.
But in real life, it often takes more than one incident to radically change the course of us habitual creatures. And since we are adapting and approximating the three-act structure, it makes sense that we would adapt some of the structural devices needed to, in this case, launch a film.
The “double boost” is basically two (or more) events that together give the protagonist the required momentum to launch a quest. You can think of it as a rocket ship which often needs an initial fuel boost to get off the ground, and then an additional booster rocket to break the Earth’s gravitational force and send the ship on its orbit.
As I mentioned, there’s a great example of the “double boost inciting incident” in the film “Eat, Pray, Love” (dubbed by the New York Times as “divorce porn”). I liked it.
Based on the best-selling book by Liz Gilbert, this autobiographical adaptation (starring Julia Roberts) tells the story of a woman who goes on a quest for spiritual meaning and love.
Both the book and the film start with her divorce, during which she prays for the first time to God to help her. She successfully leaves her marriage and then heads straight into a rebound affair. When that ends, she’s so completely miserable and jaded about love and the lack of long-lasting passion in her life that she sets off on a quest. She goes to Italy, India, and Indonesia in search of delicious food, spiritual connection and finally love.
You can see another example of the “double boost inciting incident” at play in a recent PBS release, “The Edge of Dreaming”. This personal documentary can be viewed at the POV website:
ttp://www.pbs.org/pov/edgeofdreaming
In this film, the protagonist/filmmaker has a dream that her horse is dying. She wakes up and goes out to the barn and finds her horse has fallen over, dead of a heart attack. Seven minutes into the 75-minute film, she makes sense of the event (since she is a scientist) by saying “coincidences happen” and “life goes on”. The dream and her horse’s death did not have enough launch power to change her life.
But then she has a second dream, 7 minutes later in film time. In this dream, a former lover comes to her and tells her that she will die at age 48. She wakes up extremely agitated. She already is 47. She says somewhat tentatively, “I don’t believe dreams can kill you,” but she clearly begins her quest to find out what this dream means.
At 32 minutes she gets ill and is hospitalized and at 57 minutes she goes on to shamanic journey to heal. I won’t tell you what happens, but I highly recommend watching the film for a great example of the “double boost inciting incident” which gives this real-life quest the necessary suspenseful story launch.
As our discussion ended, one of my Inner Circle members realized she had her own double boost inciting incident in her personal documentary. She gets by her uncle and then disowned by her parents, launching her on a search for right livelihood.
To learn more about how to craft a documentary with suspenseful narrative devices, check out my popular online courses. Again, these seminars will not be available for much longer!
