Examples:
- “Cuerdas”, Cortometraje completo
In the story, the girl has been helping the boy recover from a severe illness. She tied their hands or feet with a small rope and used her body movements to move the boy. She tells the boy stories, leads him to play role games, and brings a ray of light and hope to his life. In the girl’s loving company, the boy’s face gradually broke into a smile. One day, the boy’s leg miraculously kicked a ball. The girl was ecstatic. They thought things were going on the right way. But unfortunately, the boy died of the disease. The day before he leaves, the girl takes him for a dance with her body, and the scene cuts to their fantasy world where there is no disease. Twenty years later, the girl became a teacher at a special education centre, her wrist still holding the boy’s hand on the small rope.
How the main characters evolve: The boy and the girl are all crucial characters in this short film. There are no villains, and if there’s a villain, it’s the disease. The girl pays much effort to help the boy become healthy. The boy’s death gave her great pain, but she did not give up the love in her heart. She insisted on caring for special people as a child until she became a professional teacher in special education 20 years later.
How the characters drive the story: I think there are two essential points to push the story go forward. The first point corresponds to the Need in the Story circle. The girl wanted to make friends with the boy and found him sick and unable to move, so she worked hard to help the boy fight the disease. Here the story opens up. The second point corresponds to Take, where the boy died. The girl was sad, but she didn’t give up her love for special people. It elevates the spirit of the story.
2. LOUIS’ SHOES – Student Academy Award Winner (Gold) – MoPA
This is a short animation about children with autism. It tells the way of thinking of people with autism. Although the first half of the film tells the boy’s unacceptable experience, the film finally gives the boy a new environment full of acceptance and understanding.
How the main characters evolve: In this film, I think the boy is a flat character. He is still suffering from the disease and has not recovered from what happened. But at the end of the film, he firmly believes that introducing himself is not difficult.
How the characters drive the story: In this short film, the boy is not a character who actively promotes the story’s development. It was other classmates who treated him differently that caused the boy to switch schools. The boy accepts the change relatively passively, and the only active difference is his mood.
Similarities between these two films:
Reflections：
People need good stories. A good story is a page-turner that makes the audience think and resonate. There are a few things that make a good story:
People who create stories need to have strong emotions, and those emotions better are experienced by the creator himself. The story better is experienced by the creator himself, so that the story is true, not like it’s made up to resonate with the audience.
A story has a setup and payoff. If the story makes the audience feels strange, one of these two elements is missing. Leave the tale blank, give the audience time to think and take in.
A successful protagonist is necessary, he can not be perfect, can have small shortcomings. Still, in order for the audience to like him, he must be a round person, must have advantages. The character can be static. This is sometimes used in comedies.
Notes:
- But it’s forced on us in such a strong and obvious way that becomes too preachy, and it feels as though we are getting a lecture from our paren’ts or watching children Show.
- Storytelling is jocktelling. It’s knowing your punchline. It’s knowing your punchline, you’re ending, knowing that everything you’re saying from the first sentence to the last is leading to a singular goal. And ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings. We all love stories. Stories affirm who we are, we all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time past, president Future. And allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and, through others, real and imagined.
Greatest story commandment, which makes me care. Intellectually, aesthetically, just make me care.
What this scene is doing, and it did in the book is it’s fundamentally making a promise. It’s making a promise to you that this story will lead somewhere that’s worth your time. And that’s what all good stories should do at the beginning is they should give you a promise, so you could do an infinite amount of ways, it, sometimes it’s as simple as once upon a time.
Storytelling without dialogue, it’s the purest form of cinematic storytelling, it’s the most inclusive approach you can take.
It confirms something, I-I really had a hunch on, is that the audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don’t want to know that they’re doing that. That’s your job as a storyteller is to hide the fact that you’re making them work for their meal. We’re born problem solvers. We’re compelled to deduce. And to deduct, because that’s what we do in real life. It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.
Make the audience put things together. Don’t give them four. Give them two plus two. The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether. You succeed or fail at engaging the audience. Editors and screenwriters have known this all along. It’s the invisible application that holds our attention to the story.
All well-drawn characters have a spine. And the idea is that the character has an inner motor. A dominant and unconscious goal that they’re striving for is an itch that they can’t scratch. These spines don’t always drive you to make the best choices, and sometimes you can make some horrible choices with them.
Firmly believe that you’re born with a temperament, and you’re wired a certain way, and you don’t have any say about it. And there’s no changing it. All you can do is learn to recognize it and own it. And some of us are born with positive temperaments, some are negative, but a major threshold is passed. When you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you and to take the wheel and steer it. As paren’ts, you’re always learning who your children are, they’re learning who they are, and you’re still learning who you are, so we’re all learning all the time. And that’s why change is fundamental in stories. If things go static, stories die because life is never static.
Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty. By a British playwright, William Archer.
When you’re telling a story, have you constructed anticipation? In the short term, have you made me want to know what will happen next, but more importantly, have you made me want to know how it will all conclude in the long term. Have you constructed honest conflicts? With truth, that creates doubt in what the outcome might be.
Before we truly understood the invisible workings of the story, we were simply a group of guys just going on our gut, going on our instincts, and it’s interesting to see how that led us places.
And thank goodness, we were just too young, rebellious and contrary. At the time, that just gave us more determination to prove that we could build a better story.
Another fundamental thing we learned was about liking your main character.
We all live life conditionally. We’re all willing to play by the rules and follow things along, as long as certain conditions are met. After that, all bets are off. Before I’d even decided to make storytelling my career, I can now see key things that happened in my youth that really sort of opened my eyes to certain things about the story.
Everything Lawrence did in that movie was an attempt for him to figure out where his place was in the world. A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.
The best story infused wonder. Can you invoke wonder, wonder is honest, it’s completely innocent. It can’t be artificially evoked.
Use what you know, draw from it. It doesn’t always mean plot or fact, it means capturing a truth from your experience. Expressing values you personally feel deep down to your core.
- You’re really trying to make something that is not spontaneous, looks spontaneous. And so we’re paying attention to the nuance, the change we’re looking for, that change. We have to understand the locomotion first. And then the actions will go on top of that. When you look at something real, it can go through the filters of your eye, and then you can translate it the way you want it. So while the story is figuring it out, we have a sense of who are the characters, what is it They have to do, what do they want.
- story formula: beginning middle and end, or set up conflict resolution.
There’s a problem with this formula: The human mind is designed to recognize patterns. The formula is great for deconstructing existing stories, but how do we create something original?
And everything you don’t want to happen to yourself or your family or your friends should happen to your character. You love your hero, but you keep putting obstacles in his way. Writing a story is taking the path of most resistance. The point is not to answer, but to question. Not to solve, but to seek not to preach but to explore. That life is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense. You have one central character Who wants something intensely and goes after it. Despite opposition. And as a result of a struggle comes to a win or a loss, so you take that definition and you let the plot do your thinking for you. It’ll lead you quite naturally to considerations of theme, setting, point of view, and so on.
The scene is where the writer engages the imagination and the emotions of the reader.
The decision you make will depend on the themes you want to explore, on the character who is more interesting to you, perhaps the one most to lose. Now you have a sense of character, you know what he wants and why he wants. The ongoing conflict has to be resolved.
Well, you’ll figure it out, as you’re right because your ass is still in the chair and you just created a brave new world. And made up these people who never existed before. And you’re so excited you can’t get up.