thoughts on storytelling

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.

The wish of making a feature film has been with me for several years but I have always had too big fear of failing, because of lack of knowledge, lack of skill or of finance or because of some other excuse, that I've never tried to fulfill my wish. I only spent my time trying to educate myself and "waited for the time to be right". But theoretical knowledge is only knowledge in theory until applied in practise and experienced, and waiting for the right time is waiting for something that never will happen since waiting never makes anything happen. I've decided that now is the only right time for Concrete Babylon to happen.

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.