thoughts on storytelling

For the previous parts in the story rules series: Story Rules Part 1: Kill Your Ego Story Rules Part 2: Don't Reinvent the Wheel The story, and its message, is revealed through character choices. The characters choices reveal who she is, her strengths and weaknesses and her weaknesses is what creates the struggle, what reveals the solution, the message.

(You can find " Story Rules Part 1: Kill your ego " here) Storytelling should be easy. It is something we do everyday. It is something we've taken part of since we where born. It is something that comes naturally when we speak. So why then is storytelling so hard? Some how we start "unlearning" what we know when we start over-thinking on a subject. Just as when we try to walk perfect and natural we end up walking stiff and unnaturally, when we try to tell a story perfectly the story often ends up being stiff and unnatural. Often the reason we do this is because we try to reinvent the wheel as a cube.

The storyboard is a universally accepted step in the process of making an animated film. But how often do we question why we actually make the storyboard? Generally the answer is that the storyboard is a tool to make the plot of the screenplay visual. In my opinion this is not a good reason. Everything in a film, from the screenplay down to each individual shot or sound, should be there to help convey a message or theme. If we, while storyboarding, focus on the plot, which itself also is a tool to convey the message, we're only focused on illustrating a tool that tries to convey the message and not on illustrating the message itself. This may seem like nit-picking, but in my opinion, if we want to make a film that really moves our audience, we need to use every possible chance to improve on the how the message is conveyed. If we only storyboard the plot of the screenplay, we don't take the storyboard as a chance to improve.

On Concrete Babylon as on other films, after I've found what I feel is a story idea/concept that is good enough that it may be developed in to a film, the first step, or milestone, for me is to make the one-sheet. A one-sheet is a short description of the film containing a key image, story pitch and project description. The reason behind creating the one-sheet is that it sums up the project in a short and easily digestible way that can be used both for external parties, to help get funding, and, more importantly, for the creators to create a stable base to build the rest of the film on top of. The one-sheet also helps in defining the goals of the project and making them more concrete which allows the creators to work more focused and make faster decisions by being able to see if the different choices actually works towards the goals.

When you ask people what a film director does you will probably get several different answers, some of them as simple as "The director is the one who decides what happens in the film, the one who tells the actors and the rest of the crew what to do" and others will try to be more deep and say something like " The director is the person who controls the artistic vision of the film and tries to make the rest of the crew work towards that vision". In my opinion they are both wrong.

In the previous post I covered the basics of the three act structure and the 5 point story structure will build on that. But first I will do a quick run through of the info I've covered before.