Story Spine In Rhino Theme

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Story and Focus in Rhino: A Brief Criticism of Story Spine in Rhino. Nearly all great screenplays, novels, poems, well, just about all creative writings have a story spine, a main theme, a primary path. Authors do not wander too far from the main story. Similar to walking down a worn trail in the woods, you can take a few side trails, but even these offshoot trails must help you keep you moving toward your objective, supporting the story theme, the spine. So you’d best return to and stay on the main path or you’ll soon have your readers or viewers lost in unimportant details, lost on meaningless side trails. In Helena Kriel’s draft screenplay Rhino, the story has wonderful potential, but in its present condition, it wanders too much from the story spine, it has too many side trails that do not directly support the main story. …show more content…

Ryan’s divorced father struggles to remain successful while still trying to be a father to his daughter. Early in the story Ryan makes a few video posts and talks about silkworms “Spun from all those thousands of silkworms! That’s right, thousands of these rockin’ little stripped(sic) guys — She pulls out a stuffed, stripped(sic) silkworm toy” (1 Kriel). Ryan also talks about rabbits, and then about how she loves elephants, but later the main story is all about rhinos. Additionally, a few script pages are used to shows Ryan and some of her interactions with her mother and step-father. These scenes do help to lead into when Ryan dies while reading a text from her bio-father. After Ryan dies (inciting event), Zack realizes that he must help save the rhinos for his daughter, although she focused on elephants and silkworms. Ryan’s death causes a change in behavior in the father, as his guilt drives him to take the trip to Africa he had planned with his daughter to see African wildlife. He takes his coworker, Jason, with

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