Genre: Tiny House/Documentation
Premise: After meeting through an online dating app, a young woman convinces her new beau to help realize her dream – build and live in a tiny house.
About: This video debuted on the Youtube show “Living Big in a Tiny House” and in just four days has become the fifth most viewed video on the long running series, tallying over 5 million views. While the focus was seemingly on the striking tiny house the couple built, it became evident from the 10,000 plus comments that the video’s quick rise to viral status was due to the odd relationship between the two owners.
Writer: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home & Studio
Details: 18 minutes, 39 seconds (4th draft)
I’m obsessed with this video.
And I’m fine if you think that’s weird.
There’s just so much going on here, I can’t look away.
To give you a little background, I love the Tiny House movement. I love the idea of going off the grid, finding a beautiful piece of land for cheap, then building a home that is both beautiful and basic. There’s something romantic about going off and living in nature.
I also know I’d never do it. I’m someone who needs people around me, a city of swirling insects above and below me at all hours of the day. Being in a city that’s always alive makes me feel alive. I could manage living in a tiny house for a month, maybe two. But I know I’d eventually crave the electricity that only a city full of millions can provide. And in that sense, Youtube has filled a nice hole in the market – which is to allow people to escape for 20 minutes into fantasies like tiny homes before returning back to real life.
This Tiny House video is unlike any I’ve seen before, though. Sure, the house itself is awesome. But as the video pushes forward, an underlying tension between the two principle characters begins to emerge. On the one hand, you have the overly excited host, doing his best to be upbeat and cheery. And on the other you have this girl who we’re learning has an unhealthy obsession with tiny houses. In fact, when the couple tells the story of how they met (through a dating app), the guy explains that the entire date consisted of her talking about how she wanted to live in a tiny house.
Mind you, THIS IS THEIR FIRST DATE.
Now I’m not going to make any assumptions here. But I’m going to make some assumptions here. This guy clearly saw a proposition in his head – I can be with this attractive girl… but it’s going to cost me moving out of my place, with my cats, and building and then moving into a tiny house. Beauty is man’s achilles heel. It causes him to lose all rationale and thought.
Flash forward to now where we have this woman’s crowning moment. The whole reason she wanted a tiny house was because of this show. Now she was getting to show her own tiny house to them. This may explain why she’s so happy during the tour. All of this is captured in one of the most shocking exchanges I’ve ever seen in a show like this. When the tour is all over and the girl is beaming, claiming that her “dream” has finally “come true,” the dead-inside house builder replies, “It’s a dream come true for you… it’s an achievement for me.”
Ouch.
So why am I reviewing this video today?
The first reason is because the idea of reading another Black List script about clickbait social issues makes me nauseous. But I actually believe there are a lot of lessons in this video about character and dialogue.
For starters, I love the relationship from a screenwriting point of view. When you’re coming up with your characters in a story, one of the first questions you should ask is, “Where’s the conflict?” Every relationship in your script should have some level of conflict, and the more prominent the relationship is in the story, the more important identifying that conflict is. The last thing you want is two agreeable characters who see everything the same way. That’s going to lead to a lot of boring conversations. If you’ve ever felt that every dialogue scene you’re writing lacks spark, this is often the reason. You didn’t do the work ahead of time to make sure there was an adequate amount of conflict between the characters.
Take yesterday’s script, for example. Billy and Freddy’s relationship started with a clear line of conflict. He wants nothing to do with Freddy while Freddy wants a friend more than anything. He doesn’t quite know how to get one, but that’s what feeds the conflict in their early interactions. The conflict changes when Billy becomes Shazam, and that’s okay. Relationship conflict can shift as the story evolves.
Getting back to today’s couple, you can see why there’s so much conflict. They have completely different world views. She’s active, takes charge and is used to controlling the relationship, whereas he’s passive and weak and doesn’t stand up for what he wants. This creates the key conflict within the relationship – resentment. You can see it in every glance. You can hear it in every response. He regrets this and he blames her for it. Now if you want to get deep, who he’s really mad at is himself for not having the balls to say no. This is a quagmire of his making. And he’s taking that out on her.
But what’s so insane about this relationship is that she’s completely oblivious to this resentment. She’s not picking up on his frustration at all. And so you have this weird tension whenever they interact, where he’s passive-aggressively responding to every question, and she’s echoing him, but in an euphoric manner. It reminds me a lot of the Jason Bateman – Jennifer Gardner marriage in Juno. He was clearly unhappy, being pushed into an adoption he didn’t want, yet she assumed that because she was ecstatic, he was as well. You see the exact same type of conflict when you watch the scenes with those two as you do here.
And the best thing about getting that conflict right is that the dialogue writes itself. You won’t even have to think because the dynamic has already been set up for you. The reason so much of the dialogue we write is bad is because we don’t yet understand the dynamic of the characters. We don’t know where each character is coming from. When you find yourself in that “no man’s land,” every line is forced. Every line feels written as opposed to said. So get that conflict figured out and a lot of your dialogue problems disappear.
“Sooo… we met online. It was one evening at the pub with my best friend and she wanted to play with my phone and my online dating apps and it sort of sparked from there. We had a date at a very seedy pub.”
“That was her idea.”
“Yeah, I needed a getaway plan.”
“Yeah, it was close to the station.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, just in case.”
“Yeah, annnnnnd… yeah, she really just wouldn’t shut up about these tiny houses and I really hadn’t seen much about them and she’s showing me all these Instagram accounts and I sort of really didn’t think much of it at the time but, yeah, she kept on about it so…”
The level of subtext in this exchange is nuclear. She didn’t choose him. Her friend did, possibly as a joke. She talks about meeting at a ratty pub, which he quickly makes sure to say was not his idea. She then tries to make a joke about bailing but he doesn’t laugh at it.
“Yeah, so I guess I convinced you to build a tiny house… to build me a tiny house actually.”
He grunts non-committedly
“Yep.”
“She did give me full disclosure.”
“I even gave him points and time to bail out. I was laying in bed and I was saying, are you SURE you want to do this?”
He puts on a clenched smile.
“Are you absolutely positive you want to do this?”
“After the trailer was bought,” he clarifies.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
I mean, you can cut the tension with a knife. I haven’t seen this much subtext since the Crane-Merry book burying movement of 1873. It’s like a 90 Day Fiance episode without someone trying to move to America.
What I want you to take away from this is the importance of character creation. Both these “characters” are incredibly well-defined. From there, ask yourself where the conflict in the relationship is coming from. If you can’t come up with that, you probably don’t want to use those characters. You’re going to be pulling your hair out trying to make their scenes interesting. And the dialogue will blow. Most of the time, when there’s a “perfect” relationship in a movie, one of them dies within three scenes. That’s not a coincidence. Had they kept those characters together the whole movie, we’d be bored out of our minds.
I hope this offbeat post was useful. Now who wants to buy a tiny house?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A fun exercise to help your dialogue is to play real conversations from Youtube videos and write them down as they’re being said. When you write your own dialogue, your fingers are habitual. They work in conjunction with a stubborn mind that wants to go to the same places, type the same words. For this reason, your dialogue always sounds similar. When you do this exercise, you’re forced to write dialogue you wouldn’t normally write, and it’s an eye-opener in that you see you have the potential to create voices you never knew you had in you.
What I learned 2: While you can do this same exercise with actual movies, it’s not as effective. All you’re doing is writing down finely crafted rewritten-to-death fake conversations. The reason I advise using real life videos is because you’re writing own what people actually say, as opposed to a writer’s interpretation of what people say.
