Movies like roller coaster rides.

Do you know that phrase: “That movie is like a roller coaster ride!”?

I decided to take it literally and actually create several roller coaster rides based on the twists and turns from some famous movies. You can find them here (together with the coaster parts I created for this project.).

Now, this exercise has several rules (that I immediately broke). Each part of the ride represents a type of moment in a movie. To name them:

A straight track is exposition. A period in the movie where there is hardly any tension.

The lift is a building up to a moment of tension (e.g. the hero enters the house of the killer) or a moment of relief after a strenuous moment (e.g. the hero captures a killer at the beginning of the movie but now gets a new case).

The drop is the following pay-off. The killer attacks. (The longer the drop the more frightening the moment).

Then there’s the turn. This is literally the turn in the story. For example the power shift that occurs halfway through the movie ‘The mist’.

A looping, then, is a moment of tension. The killer attacks and actually manages to slay his victim. I consider the looping more a frightening/shocking event than the drop in this sense.

And finally there’s the twist which is obviously a twist in the story.

I kind of liked making this project because somehow it shows the flow of the movie. As I said before I, pretty much, threw out every single one of those ‘rules’ I stipulated above but still. You can see, for instance, that Rear Window is actually a rather boring ride even though the movie is great. And the Sixth Sense is a far more a ‘fright and recover’ ride than The Mist (which simply plunges you deep down into darkness without a flashlight).

I’m probably sounding a bit captain obvious, but I had fun making these.