Story Structure Spring 2018

Overview

Notes from Story Structure with Richard Keyes at Cartoon Network, March 2018.

Week 1

What is Story?

How do we get people to care?

E. M. Forster said, "The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot."

Character/Problem/Solution

Exposition > Rising Action > Conflict > Crisis > Resolution (Freytag's Pyramid)

For Forster "story" is more basic than "plot." Story is event following event, where plot is cause and effect, i.e. one event causes the next event.

Stories are psychological mechanisms used to make sense of the world (through emotion).

Stories make connections.

There is no real definition of "story." The meaning of the word changes in time and context.

Many things can be stories, e.g. a ledger to an accountant, tarot cards, paranoid collection of clippings pinned to the wall and connected with red yarn.

"Because" always starts a story. (Cause & effect)

"Stories to inhabit" as a goal for creating a story. Stories are compelling when the audience feels that they are living in them.

Disney makes story as a vehicle for characters in order to sell merchandise. It's all about the cast of characters for Disney.

Pixar makes story to make the audience cry. They are willing to have main characters that are annoying to varying degrees.

Historical story types

EPIC - Archetype of story

SAGA - large scale achievements of a family

YARN - goes on and on, stringing together tails, e.g. Arabian Nights

FABLE - Fictional moral lesson

ALLEGORY - narrative metaphor

LEGEND - Based on historical figures but distorted

PARABLE - Short germ of a story telling a single truth

FOLKTALE - Regional

GOSSIP - Stories about people within a community

HISTORY - Meta story containing many other stories. An explanation where cause and effect is paramount.

WAR - Every war has a story, or justification. The need to overcome the adversary. The adversary is always bad and an existential threat - for both sides of every conflict.

MYTH - Origin story. Cultural symbolism that groups people together.

FAIRY TALES - Things don't happen in rational ways. Crazy things happen and characters accept it.

Great story

1. Make me care
2. Take me with you
3. Be intentional - motivation drives the characters through the story
4. Le me like you (questionable considering some main characters are not likable)

Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling e.g. "What's at stake?" <-- ** Fundamental **

Distill a story to its log line, e.g. The Wizard of Oz. Then any number of other plots can be hung on that log line.

"Make me care" NOT show me how clever you are!

See the world through someone else's eyes (empathy).

You can identify with the protagonist OR be facinated by him/her, e.g. Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler.

Wish fulfillment through the protagonist -- vicarious experience.

How to identify when things resonate in different ways to different people, e.g. some people like when it rains, some hate it.

Making the audience care

Affective empathy is seeing someone and feeling what they feel.

Cognitive empathy is imagining how someone else lives; putting yourself in their shoes.

Example: a blind man begs for money with a sign that states, "Blind. Please help." A woman stops and writes a new sign for him and he's inundated with money. She returns and he asks what she wrote. "It's a beautiful day and I can't see it." The point being, figure out what other people need to know instead of broadcasting facts.

Pure heart in a dark world - e.g. King Kong (both the woman and Kong)

Justice - Compelling but interpreted differently by different people. One person's justice is another person's outrage.

When you know more than the protagonist - e.g. Hitchcock

Puzzles - e.g. detective stories. Puzzles are usually at the heart of the narrative for games, of course.

Visual narrative devices

Frames

Maike Plenzke - Ofelia, Pan's Labyrinth

Bill Perkins - Tangled concept art

Consider how frames tell a story in an image.

Foreground vs background. Contrast the two. Play the two off each other.

Often two people can be interacting in the foreground while another person in their own space is show in the space between the foreground characters. E.g. a briefcase is handed from one person to another in the foreground while someone seated in the background peers over a newspaper watching the handoff.

Dutch angle

Tilting the "camera" away from the horizon.

Out of this world experience.

Can clue you in that a seemingly innocuous scene is actually sinister.

Small exception to a large space

Extreme contrast between character and environment.

Time overlaps

E.g. multiple exposure, or simply showing a single character moving through a static space.

Two spaces

Things transform from one space to another e.g. below water and above, or looking into a mirror and seeing something unexpected.