A return to New York and a return to the basics

Monday night I packed up my things and made the move from my home in New Jersey back to NYU to stay in Weinstein for a month while I look after high school kids, which I've done for the past 3 years.

The students arrive on Sunday, and it looks like we have some "V.I.P.'s" this year in the film program, which should make it... if nothing else, interesting. Aside from this, this past week a few interesting things occurred, although not too many.

Tuesday I was coming back from PBS and was around Washington Square South when a student I had passed by dropped her ID and kept on walking without noticing. Seeing this I went to pick it up and give it to her, so to get her attention I tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention. Upon turning around, the first words out of her mouth were "Oh my God," but not in a good way. It sounded more like a homeless man just went up to her with his pants down and asked her if she wanted to join him in his box for a few minutes.

Then, of course, she processes the words that were coming out of my mouth ("You dropped this,") and says "Oh my God," but this time in a good "oh what a cute baby you have there," kind of way and says thank you and we go our separate ways. I wonder though, do I give off a creepy aura or am I extremely hard on the eyes? Because I feel like that initial "Oh my God," was quite unnecessary.


On an entirely different note, since I feel as though this blog should talk about film or creative stuff that I'm working on or helping on or what have you, as opposed to my daily random life, I feel as though I need to post something film related here, which is hard because I haven't done much film related as of late. Despite that, I started to think about some questions about stories and story structure. It seems like, and it just might be because I'm too close to the material, that whenever I look at the projects I do I feel like something is missing. I started to wonder, "What makes a good story?" Here are some of the things I've come up with:

1.) A clear protagonist.
2.) A goal the protagonist needs or wants to achieve.
3.) An obstacle preventing the protagonist from achieving their want or need.
4.) Achieving or failing to achieve their want or need.
5.) A clear world and rules of said world that our characters live in.

So basically I've listed the main points that have been drilled into me in film school and STILL I feel like the projects I've done so far are missing something (aside from my personal take on whatever, because its not that) so I think I need to take some time and figure out just what a good story is so that I can try my hand at making one. I guess I'll try to post my findings if I come across any.