Tag Archives: storytelling

Doggone! What a great picture!

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A dog with a toy stuck in a doggy doorA friend of mine took this picture and I absolutely love everything about it. It has just enough detail so you can figure out what is going on, but it hides enough so you can finish the story yourself.

If you look closely you can see that a dog is trying to take a toy outside, but the doggy door has closed on the little stuffed animal making it impossible to pull through. But who is this dog?

Is the dog big or small? Male or female? Purebred or mutt? What kind of temperament does the dog have? Is the dog a plucky type that will cock its head to the side while it tries to figure out the situation or is it about to rip the toy to shreds out of frustration? Maybe it’s the pitiful type and will eventually drop its head and look up with big sad eyes, saying, “Please help.” Does that toy even belong to the dog or is this a doggy thief, stealing a baby’s toy out of jealousy or just making off with a new find? Why is this dog trying to take the toy outside? Maybe there’s a dog party down the road and everyone is bringing their new toy, but this dog is going to be late. Maybe the rest of the dogs in the neighborhood will hear about what’s going on and move the party to this door so their friend can still play, or maybe all the other dogs are experiencing this exact same situation and they all think they are going to be late.

What do you think is going on here?

Storytelling, Pixar style

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Pixar logoWith the release of the new Pixar film Brave set for June 22, I am hoping beyond hope that it will mark a return to business as usual for the studio—the business of creating great movies. If the new film is going to put the unfortunate Cars 2 into the distant past, the studio needs a return to a focus on storytelling. Over about a month and a half, Pixar story artist Emma Coats tweeted her guidelines for telling a great story. Hopefully the rest of the Pixar artists have been paying attention:

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.

#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about until you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

#8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.

#9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

#10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.

#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.

#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.

#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.

#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against them.

#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on — it’ll come back around to be useful later.

#18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How would you rearrange them into what you DO like?

#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?

#22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

——–

Whether the film turns out to be good or bad, at the very least Brave will be a new set of characters and a new story, a non-sequel like Toy Story and Cars, and a non-prequel like the upcoming Monsters University. For me, new is always more exciting than used to be new.

Stories don’t grow on trees

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Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse

Permanent exhibits have caught the story buzz. “Story! We need a story! Beginning! Middle! End! We need plot twists and wizards and Dan Brown!! Ahhhh! AHHHH!!!” (that’s a transcript from a meeting I attended the other day by the way)

It’s a fantastic thing, designers and attraction directors focusing attention on devices that engage people, but there’s a dark dark side to storytelling. The danger for galleries, museums or themeparks is interpreting the word “story” too literally. While you want to create an experience that is immersive and involves guests on an emotional level, a designer can so carefully plot an attraction or exhibit that there is no room for a guest to drop their guard, invest themselves and create their own story.

On an episode of WedwayRadio, Sam Genneway of SamLand points out an excellent example of story gone amuck in comparing the two Disney themepark treehouses in America, one in Florida themed to the Swiss Family Robinson and the other in California themed to Tarzan. He says (paraphrased)—

…Disney wanted to create a set where people could be the actors and live out their fantasies on that stage.

Today it’s all about this business about story…we’re going to describe a story. With the treehouse…when it was the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse like it is still in Florida, even if you don’t know anything about the movie property you could walk through the treehouse and imagine what it would have been like to live in this treehouse. Would it have been fun, would you like living up here, would you like getting your water through that little conveyance system or something. Now you’re just walking through a diorama of a story and it’s almost just an exercise. It doesn’t wrap you up into it. Your brain doesn’t have to function if you don’t want it to, but you can’t help it at the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse in Florida. You’ve got to look at the little bed and go, “Wouldn’t it be cool to spend the night in here?”

If you can get to the point when you’re in an immersive environment that you let down your guard so much that you can start to have these little fantasies about your environment and you start to become a character that fits in appropriately within the culture of that environment, that’s real success!

The Swiss Family Robinson treehouse shows a living environment with places to work, cook, play and sleep, while the Tarzan treehouse shows…well, Tarzan. The first engages your mind and is an active experience that gives you room to think, “I wonder what it would be like to live here…” while the second shuts your brain down and is more passive, leading your brain to think, “I wonder what it would be like to not be in this treehouse anymore.”

Tarzan's Treehouse interior

Designed environments need to be focused, but they shouldn’t be so focused that there is no room left for the guest. Plotting an exhibit too tightly sends the message that “it’s this or nothing.” Of course with so many ways to spend our time there is no such thing as nothing, there is always something…as in something else.

I NEED ATTENTION!!!

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Rock'em Sock'em RobopeopleLast October I created this graphic, an image tagged with all my friends who wished me a happy birthday on Facebook. I wanted to do something special for people who took the time and I wanted to be sure they saw it, so I tagged and tagged and tagged…and got some attention.

—

15 years earlier my dad gritted his teeth as he wrote.

“While the image in question is of poor taste (and at the very least extremely obnoxious), it is certainly not pornographic. My family’s online account should not be banned from AOL for your maximum penalty of one year because of this. I can assure you that my son will not be allowed to use your service for the foreseeable future and the screen name he used to cause all this trouble—YeOldeFart—will be deleted.”

I was in high school when America Online was still the biggest game in town and I used to spend my precious 20 minutes (the internet cost $3 an hour so I tried to limit my father’s credit card to a dollar a night) in chatrooms. The frustrating thing about chatrooms was it was very difficult to get a whole room talking about something interesting (i.e. whatever I wanted to talk about), and once the conversation had finally come around my 20 minutes were up. I could start chatting with one or two people early, but most people were too slow and I needed more, plus there was always the chance that someone else would show up and distract everyone from what was really important…me.

How do I get alot of people to talk about what I want to talk about immediately???

It didn’t take long before I spotted a hole in AOL’s system. A person’s screen name was also their email address and chatrooms displayed a list of everyone in the room—everyone’s screen name, everyone’s email address. I would pop into one chatroom, copy the list of names and send out a mass email, responding to everyone who responded to me. I had essentially created my own personal chatroom where I was the only person anyone could chat with. I was the champion, my friends!

One chatroom’s list became two, two became ten and ten became “now we’re talkin’!” Since everything about the internet was still so new, people weren’t afraid of unknown senders and would respond immediately once they heard “You’ve got mail!” Each night for the next few weeks I would pick a topic and click send, juggling hundreds of conversations at once getting all the attention I could handle and once my 20 minutes were up I was satisfied.

One night I was topically disabled and couldn’t think of anything to annoy people with talk with people about. I was watching the show In Living Color and managed to get a screen capture of Jim Carrey making an insanely goofy face, so I decided that night’s topic would be that photo. Copy, paste, attach, send.

Some people were amused, some people told me they didn’t open attachments from people they did not know and of course some people were mad and insisted that I stop sending them emails (not realizing that all they needed to do was stop responding and they would never hear from me again). One person decided not to open the attachment but instead, according to AOL’s disciplinary board, forwarded the image to the internet cops and called it porn. AOL apparently didn’t open attachments from unknown senders either so they banned my family from their service. Kwathump! Case closed.

After a heartfelt appeal from my dad our online account was reinstated but YeOldeFart died along with my nightly entertainment. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had discovered something very important about storytelling, or more accurately how to get people to listen: never follow the rules.

AOL had created places for people to chat but people didn’t go online just to chat. What really drove people to the chatrooms was the larger fascination with the new concept of digital communication and when that man’s voice chimed “You’ve got mail!” people were thrilled. “Someone is communicating with me! How exciting!” I learned not to bother with the smaller chatrooms, they were a limited (and highly saturated) form of communication. I stumbled across what people really went online to do and told my story from there.

The same goes for Facebook. I wondered how to get the most attention, how to get you—lots of you—to think about me—only me. Of course I realized what everyone knows: Facebook is actually all about ‘me,’ 845 million “me”s. The only way to get everyone’s attention is to make what you post all about everyone else and Facebook makes that easy with their tagging system. Post a picture, tag a friend, they will be notified (and their friends will be notified—nice little bonus) and they will come see what is new in the world of themselves.

I decided I would create a Facebook photo album that would be a picture book called “Jonathan Has No Friends”—the epic journey of a cartoon me with a real head (like the “robots” in the graphic above) searching for my friends who were nowhere to be found. The plan was to take everyone on my friends list, turn them into similar cartoons and hide them all over the images, being sure to tag each and every one. This would certainly drive lots of traffic (attention) to my posts and to me. I scrapped the idea when I realized just how much work I would need to do for a couple hours worth of “I am the champion,” not to mention how many friends I might lose because some jerk was messing with their pictures. Luckily I got to resurrect the basic idea when my birthday came around and for a far better reason than just saying “look at me look at me!”

In the years since I lost “YeOldeFart” I have tried to use the username for other services (mail, games, social, etc.) but it is almost always unavailable. A little part of me smiles, hoping that maybe…just maybe…the person using the name is someone I harassed lo these many years ago. Maybe they remember the night they received an obnoxious picture of Jim Carrey from a mysterious person on AOL and wanted to carry on the tradition of obnoxiousness for new generations. Yes, I’m sure that’s what has happened. Godspeed, YeOldeFart. Godspeed.

Please forward to everyone on AOL

What museums can learn from movie dinosaurs

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Dr. Grant seeing Jurassic ParkEXT. PARK – DAY

GRANT

(to Hammond)

How did you do this?!

HAMMOND

(hushed pride)

I’ll show you.

In the film Jurassic Park, Sam Neil’s character Dr. Grant is so overwhelmed by the spectacle of living dinosaurs in front of him that he simply must know the rest of the story. “How did you do this?!” We as the audience have begun to experience the film through him so we must know the rest of the story as well, and so we follow along during the transition between act one and act two.

Steven Spielberg’s setup is masterful, taking only as much time as he must to orient us, tease us and drive the story forward. The beginning begins and then gets out of the way, however it most certainly begins. While Spielberg believes some storytellers have a problem of beginning stories that never stop beginning (see his quote, “People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end anymore. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning” in a previous post), there is a different set of storytellers that have the exact opposite problem—they never begin in the first place.

In many cases designed environments, particularly educational environments, forget the need to properly begin. They launch right into their story—save the environment, preserve artifacts, protect endangered species—trying to explain ‘why’ before their audience even realizes that they need to ask. Certainly museums and similar institutions have alot to say, but when the answer precedes the question there is no context, no meaning and no emotional engagement.

Modern exhibit designers have begun to understand the link between storytelling and education and realize if you want to successfully convey information you have to get your audience in the proper mindset. You have to take the time for act 1. Disney themeparks have perfected this with what they call the “preshow,” usually using a film or elements in the queue for an attraction to introduce the theme, establish mood, and orient and tease just enough that a guest is fully prepared to get into the meat of the story. You must have a first act or your audience will never come along for the second.

Before we can appreciate Roman artifacts we need to see Rome in all its glory. Before we are told how nature works we need to see it in full force. Before we are told how the scientists created “dino DNA” we need to see that dino slam down in front of us. If you find yourself trudging through a museum feeling bored to tears, it’s not your fault. More likely the design does not do the necessary leg work to properly inspire you to ask why, it does not provide you with the need to ask, “How did you do this?!” it just comes right out and says, “I’ll show you.”

In the film Jurassic Park, shortly after John Hammond promises to fulfill our request and pull back the curtain, the lawyer, previously the naysayer, is awestruck as well saying, “We are going to make a fortune with this place.” When museums and exhibits truly engage their guests by telling a great story they can make a fortune too.

Act 1: Jurassic Park

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Jurassic Park's mysterious amber

People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end anymore. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.
—Steven Spielberg

Spielberg’s quote they usually have a beginning that never stops beginning is appropriate coming from someone who created one of the best beginnings in film history with his blockbuster Jurassic Park. Say what you like about his method but the man knows how to tell his stories.

Jurassic Park’s beginning is one of the best because it does what a beginning is supposed to do—it begins and then gets out of the way. In the classic three-act structure (setup, confrontation and resolution), this film’s act 1 conveys an exceptional amount of information, not to mention a big dose of movie spectacle, in a pretty short amount of time.

Fresh off my visit to Fernbank’s dinosaur exhibits I decided to watch Spielberg’s dinosaurs again (I needed another dino fix). As old as the film is, each time I see it I’m always stunned by how concise it’s first act is. Jurassic Park begins with several major teases, introducing main characters, mood and future plot points intertwined so expertly that a viewer has no idea they are being setup with information for later. An audience is given just enough detail that when we see the first full dino reveal and we hear the line “Welcome to Jurassic Park” it is a true wow moment (a stunning achievement since everyone knows what the movie is about) that moves us into the second act.

When telling a story there is always a struggle to find that balance of establishing the ‘who what where when’ so that the ‘why’ becomes a question that must have an answer. Too little ‘who what where when’ and we don’t have an emotional need for ‘why,’ to much and we tune out and never make it that far. Storytellers of all kinds know how important the setup is, fully establishing detail and setting but they run the risk of going overboard and forgetting how much more important it is to actually tell the story they are telling.

Spielberg’s film finds just the right balance in its opening 20 minutes. An atmosphere of danger combined with an Australian game warden, shaky footing beneath a sleazy lawyer, industrial espionage at the hands of a disgruntled Newman, the old ways of unearthing the past vanishing before the eyes of two scientists on the verge of extinction, an eccentric millionaire with a translucent bit of amber on the end of his cane promising the experience of a lifetime, all leading up to the two front feet of a gigantic dinosaur slamming to the ground signaling that the story is no longer beginning, it has begun.

Anyone trying to engage a reader, a viewer, a tourist or a guest can learn alot from Jurassic Park. When your audience is awestruck by what is in front of them and begs, “How did you do this?” you can happily answer, “I’ll show you.” It is textbook act 1.

Dr. Grant seeing Jurassic Park

Getting tangled up in detail

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Tangled, Disney’s 50th feature-length animation, is not the studio’s first fully computer animated film but it might be their best (Pixar doesn’t count). The design is great (particularly the color, which made me finally tip over and get a blu-ray player) but the story is what really makes the film such a blast.

When you have lots of tricks in your toolbox, as CG artists do, the temptation is to use all of them. Sometimes focusing on the latest and the greatest might make a storyteller lose sight of why they began telling a story to begin with. In the book The Art of Tangled, one of the film’s key artists Glen Keane tells a story about showing off some of the beautiful effects to Ollie Johnston, a legendary Disney animator who mastered his trade under Walt himself.

Keane said:

” ‘Ollie I want to show you Rapunzel!’ I said, ‘Now, Ollie, look at the reflection of the light on Rapunzel’s dress! Look at the freckles on her face! We’ve never been able to do that before! I mean, we’d have to draw every frame like that! And look at all the frills and the fabric that we could never have done before!”

Johnston brought Keane crashing back to steady reality with a single thought. “Uh, Glen, what I was wondering is…what is she thinking?”

Detail separates good from great but Keane was a little lost in them (although only momentarily). Kevin Nelson, a designer for the film, tells a similar story.

I remember when I was a kid in school, they had this assignment: ‘describe your room.’ Be as descriptive as possible. When I was starting out, I described every single thing in the whole room—horrible amounts of detail. What they never taught us at the time was that you’re trying to tell a story with your detail. You don’t want to include the detail that’s not telling the story.

Because detail is so important to storytelling, it’s easy to forget that detail is not the story itself. A storyteller needs to be able to let themselves go and express themselves to the fullest, but unload too much and you run the risk of getting lost.

Brad Bird, director of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles vehemently asserts that “cartoon” is not a genre, it is just one way to tell a story. Detail is an aid, it is something that helps tell the story. Clever wordplay is not the story, a beautiful painting technique is not the story, a buzzword-y marketing campaign is not the story. The story is the story.

When a storyteller goes to work they should let down their hair, but they should do their best not to get tangled up in it. Get it?!?! (sorry…)

Tangled up...in hair

Sailing away with Peter Pan

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Peter Pan's Flight

The artists and designers at Walt Disney Imagineering are, first and foremost, storytellers. While they have many methods at their disposal, Imagineers primarily tell their stories visually since most began their careers in film—a visual medium—and only later became theme park developers. Filmmakers control everything the audience sees and Imagineers try to do the same within their parks. Over time both filmmakers and Imagineers have learned an interesting truth: often the most important piece of visual storytelling is not what the audience sees but rather what the audience does not see. This concept is put to great use through something as simple as a sail in the classic attraction Peter Pan’s Flight.

For a story to succeed a storyteller must set some ground rules (time, place, voice, etc.) and stick to them. In the case of Peter Pan’s Flight at Walt Disney World, the storytellers use the ride vehicle itself, specifically the front sail, to establish an important rule—everything of interest will happen beside and below you.

Peter Pan's Flight: ride vehicle

Shortly after you board the attraction your vehicle rises through the opening scenes where a few elevated details are partially obscured by your sail. As you lean around to see, however, those details drift behind and your brain directs your focus to the streets of London below. You can look up and forward again but there is only darkness so your brain quickly understands that the area covered by the sail is unimportant, uninteresting and uneventful.

In fact, there is quite alot going on above and in front of you, such as upcoming elements and ride mechanics, but through scene after scene the idea of only looking down is reinforced and we forget all about the dark obstruction in front, letting us lose ourselves in the story.

All of the carefully crafted misdirection throughout the ride that has trained our brains to disregard everything above is really a set up that pays off beautifully in the final scenes. As we drift past Wendy, trembling on the gangplank, our eyes are at last drawn around our vehicle’s sail and upwards towards the duel between Captain Hook and Peter Pan. We have not been fully conscious of it, but for the length of the ride we have been visually deprived and the sudden burst of light, color, motion and the final reveal of the attraction’s title character in an area our brains have dismissed as containing only darkness is an awakening for the eyes and the mind.

Peter Pan's Flight: Wendy on the gangplank

This is a well crafted story.

Great storytellers know that real fear is created not by things shown but by things hidden, real sexyness is created not by the skin that is revealed but by the skin that is covered, and a real sense of adventure is fostered not by a journey completed but by a journey anticipated. Walt Disney Imagineering continues to reach back to its filmmaking roots, showing guests something special often by not showing them anything at all.

The ride draws to a close and as we are still looking around our own sail, our vehicle drifts around the giant on-stage sail of Hook’s ship where we discover the happy finale that was always there, hiding on the very same set, just out of view. The ride vehicle comes in for a landing, people leave smiling, quietly humming ‘you can fly, you can fly, you can fly’ to themselves. One thing is certain—people know a well told story when they see it…so to speak. 

Codex and Dr. Horrible know their audience

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Codex and Dr. Horrible

The best storytellers know their medium and they know their audience, and in this case, I guess, the best storytellers are Codex and Dr. Horrible.

The other night I stayed up far too late looking for something to watch on Netflix. No, no, no… Nothing looked good. Among the hit-or-miss streaming options, Netflix offers the web series The Guild and Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. I had seen pieces of both but never really watched and since I couldn’t make up my mind on anything else I thought I’d give them a shot.

Both start incredibly fast. If you haven’t seen them, here’s the opening scene from The Guild:

INT. BEDROOM – NIGHT
WEBCAM VIEW: Girl wearing pajamas speaks into the camera. She has a hint of a stuffy nose.

CYD/CODEX

So, it’s Friday night. Still jobless, yay. Haven’t left the house in a week. My therapist broke up with me. Oh yeah, there’s a gnome warlock in my living room sleeping on my couch.

And then the opening from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:

INT. DR. HORRIBLE’S LAB – DAY
WEBCAM VIEW: DR. HORRIBLE laughs an evil, maniacal laugh into the camera. He wears a lab coat and goggles on his forehead. The lab is cluttered with various scientific equipment, schematics, disassembled electronic devices and some dirty clothes.

DR. HORRIBLE

Ahhhaaahhaaa! Haaahaaa! So that’s, you know, coming along. I’m working with a vocal coach, strengthening the, ‘haaa.’ A lot of guys ignore the laugh, and that’s about standards. I mean, if you’re gonna get in the Evil League of Evil you have to have a memorable laugh. What, do you think Bad Horse didn’t work on his whinny? Terrible death whinny. No response, btw, from the league yet, but my application is strong this year.

The series are a nerdy blast, showing what a few people with some time on their hands and a story in their brains can do.

In both examples, we leap right into the characters. Using the fewest words possible, the writers let us know exactly who this person is in the fewest words possible. Codex is a little bit of a mess, knowing her life isn’t quite normal but it isn’t really so bad…really. Dr. Horrible believes he has what it takes to be a super villain but, like the rest of us with a dream and a healthy does of self-conscious fear, is on the outside looking in. After a couple sentences the story has permission to start.

So what? There’s a big what. Since both series are character driven, a filmmaker could easily slip into overinforming the audience with deep character development before ever getting on the move. Also, since we are in the age of self-broadcast and self-publication on the internet, a filmmaker could feel unrestricted by TV time constraints and take all the internet time he or she wants, assuming the story can unfold at its own pace.

To do this for either of these web series would have been disastrous. Audiences would never have put in the necessary investment and would have moved on. Instead, Felicia Day and Joss Whedon knew their audience. Many storytellers force-feed what they think is important to an audience that has other priorities.

Now that time has passed since initial creation of Dr. Horrible and The Guild (which, most know, is still in production so many years on), we can see them as very amusing case studies. If you’re interested in speedy internet storytelling, storytelling within limitations and storytelling on a budget, take a quick look back at these two internet classics. Look quick though.