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 Story Rules Part 3: Story Is Character & Character Is Story Story Rules Part 4: Lacuna - Create Space the Audience People often confuse lack of clarity and being hard to understand with being deep and intellectual. Nothing is further from the truth. If you have a message that you want to communicate, you need to make yourself understood. To make yourself understood you first need to make your audience want to listen. To make your audience want to listen you need to make it clear for them what they have to gain by listening to you. Remember that your audience never owes you anything. They have already invested either time or money or both to listen to you. If you don't repay their investment it is your own fault if they get bored and don't want to listen.

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 Story Rules Part 3: Story Is Character & Character Is Story Every storyteller loves subtext. Subtext is what takes a story to a new level, and does so by creating a synergy that lets 1+1=3. I believe it does so by adding a hidden number to the equation 1+1(+1)=3. This hidden number is the audience. Or with other words: Subtext is the part of the story told in the audiences imagination. To let the audience participate in the story they need to have room to do so. A gap needs to be created. I like to call this gap " Lacuna ".

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.

While walking the path of improving my storytelling, walking down several paths that led to a dead-ends, I've today have a few rules I try to follow as my main strategy. Always trying to improve, some of these rules probably will change in time, but I feel that they are fairly universal and apply to other areas than just storytelling. First of: Kill Your Ego Everybody wants to be successful in what they do, but we focus more on ourselves and on how we will be perceived rather on what our goal and the quality of our work. What we seem to forget is that it is only by being good at our craft that we will be seen as being good at what we do.

Here in Sweden there is an over reliance on voice over in animated films, and its done to the degree that, if you would turn of the sound when watching them, you'd have no idea of what was going on. All of the story is told in the voice over, the animation and visuals are only in the films to give some visual stimulation to the audience while they listen to the voice over telling them the story. You could say that most Swedish animation is illustrated radio rather than film.

This is a continuation of the article Subtext Through Metaphors and Metonymies. If you haven't read the previous article, please read it first . I learned a new and shiny word the other day "Lacuna", the word meaning a missing segment in a text or a silent part in music. Lacuna is a word that I think nicely describes what this article will get in to, how 1 + 1 can equal 3. The answer lies in the missing part...

We have all heard that great stories are told through their subtext. But what is subtext? Generally it's said that the subtext is what is not being said, but if this is the case, why doesn't a TV, that's been turned of, communicate a lot of wonderful subtext? Saying that subtext is what's not being said is just explanation using empty words and has no practical value. Subtext is the part of the story told in the audiences imagination . To use subtext optimally we need to influence and control our audiences imagination and do it with out them noticing it. If they start noticing the tools we use to try to influence them they will be paying attention to the tools and not the characters and the story - with other words: We've lost them.

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 starting of as filmmakers, a lot of people confuse being unclear with being deep and sophisticated. I used to think the same, now I know nothing is further from the truth. By trying to be different and deep by making a story hard to understand, not wanting to follow "traditional story structure", using over the top metaphors, telling the story non-linear and telling the story in a way that is often considered more "advanced" storytelling you are actually telling the story exactly as what you'd get when asking a five-year old to tell you a story. Behaving like a five-year old isn't as sophisticated as people like to make it. People tend to be afraid to give out too much information, especially at the beginning of the story, thinking that it will ruin the tension of the story, but the opposite is true. Not giving out enough information is what will ruin the tension.

The way I've planned the Concrete Babylon project differs from how I've worked previously. I used to plan my film projects very linear where I started with the story, decided on a theme and then wrote a synopsis before moving on to the outline to the treatment and to the screenplay, then I did the character and set designs, storyboard and the animatic before moving on to do the animation and, after a huge amount of time, when I was done I moved on to the editing and sound design. On paper this always looked good. One element building on top of the other, constructing the film one step after the other. But the problem was that nothing in the world works perfectly linear.

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.

Storytelling is natural for humans. It exists in every culture and existed far earlier than the earliest writing. We have told stories since we learnt to communicate and one can argue that the advanced form of communication we have evolved out of our need to tell stories. Storytelling is in our blood.

The pyramids of Giza of which Cheops, the largest, is known as one of the seven wonders of the world, have stood the tests of time and still impress us with their magnificence. Well, this is only partially true. There are several pyramids in Egypt other than the famous ones in Giza, but most of them have fallen and are in ruins. Why? I’m no expert on the subject but I believe it lies in the superiority of the structure of the pyramids in Giza, where each side is of equal size to all the others and is of no more importance, and where each stone holding up the pyramids are equally important as the pyramids themselves.

When I'm on the journey of making film and hit an obstacle, a wall that stops me in my path, the solution to breaking it down tends to always be the same. SIMPLIFY.

Storytelling today seems to only come in two packages. Either they are only about the spectacle, the explosions and car chases, the huge surround sound and the 3D-glasses, the chocks and the provocations. All just attempts of grabbing the audience's attention and distracting them from the total lack of content. They are stories that may be box office hits but still, after a few months, are totally forgotten. On the other side are the stories that are often called artistic, independent or labeled as being very original. These are stories that mainly are about the creator and about the creator being a super intellectual demigod who stands far above the meagre minions that are the audience. There often a hint of a message but in reality these stories tend to be just as shallow as the spectacle stories, just as greedy and even more egocentric.