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.

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.

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.

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.

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.