Film Studies & Cinematography / Task 1 / Story Development

1.5.2024 - 10.6.2024 (Week 2 - Week 8)
Elysa Wee Qi En / 0355060 / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Taylor's University
Film Studies & Cinematography
Task 1 / Story Development

LECTURES

Week 3 / Develop Story Ideas

5 elements of story:
1. Character 
2. Conflict - progressing - decision - learnt
3. Setting
4. Plot - beginning to mid to end - climax - goal - problem - timeline
5. Theme - lesson 

Storytelling Process
Push the ideas to become perfect:
- Re-telling
- Re-writing 

The Pixar way of telling stories: 
1. Interesting - Car chases? Explosions? Fighting?
2. Emotionally connected - Joy, sadness, fear
3. Relatable - personal experience --> theme --> audience
- Write what you know
- Make your audience feel something

'What if' Questions
- Invite imagination to create a story to explore
- Good questions feel like a key 
- They shut down the logic and inspire imagination

Week 4 / Character

Fig, 1. How to create a fully developed character (15/5/2024)

Character development: putting a character in difficult situations and making them grow

External features: the way they dress, look like
Internal features: their personality traits, thoughts, feelings, backstory

Wants: what the character wants the most, the driving force for them at the beginning
Needs: what the character really needs, (maybe) the solution to the conflict, what is really important, the life lesson

Obstacles: what stands in the way of the character, what helps them grow and reflect on themselves

Character arc: what does the character want at the beginning and what do they realise at the end?
Stakes: can be external, internal or philosophical, helps the audience to understand why the character cares about their goal, adds weight to choices 
External stakes: physical consequences
Internal stakes: sense of self etc., facing a mental obstacle, emotional consequences
Philosophical stakes: good vs evil, has to do with values

Week 6 / Story Structure

Act 1 - beginning - 25%
- Establish character(s), protagonist, antagonist
- Setting
- Conflict/inciting incident --> goal --> theme

Act 2 - middle - 50%
- Conflicts
- Keep it interesting 
- Build up from act 1 to climax and then let down to act 3

Act 3 - end - 25%
- Resolution, happy or sad?

Story Beats 
- Quick summary that simply connects A to B 
- Focus on what's happening and not how

Story Spine
- Sentence starters that help you summarise the whole story
- Condense the story into simple 'beats'
1. Once upon a time...
2. Every day...
3. Until one day...
4. Because of that...
5. Because of that...
6. Because of that...
7. Until finally...
8. And ever since then...
The moral of the story is...

Theme
- Connected to the moral of the story
- The reason that the character lets go of the 'want' to go after the 'need'
- Don't be afraid to let the theme change, grow or develop as the story is being worked on 

Week 7 / Script Writing

How to format a screenplay:

1. Scene heading/ Slug line
- INT. or EXT. - interior or exterior
- Location / setting
- Day or night
Example: INT. CLASSROOM - DAY
- New scene or location means new scene heading

2. Action line
- Guide the sequence of events
- *Characters' names are in all capitals the first time

3. Dialogue
- Character name first (in all caps)
- Sits in the middle of the page
- Delivery direction put inside parenthesis
- Dialogue/line is put underneath the name

4. Transition
- Sits on the right side of the page
- Editing notes basically
- Scene heading comes after

INSTRUCTIONS

Fig. 2. Module Information Booklet

Project 1: Develop Short Story

For this assignment, we were tasked with coming up with a short story. With the knowledge given to us during lectures, we had to create a full short story complete with a title, logline, synopsis, theme, character & world descriptions, and a whole script.

I had the idea to create a story involving statues and humans. Initially, I wanted the moral to be about 'being yourself' and not becoming a statue by conforming to the expectations of society. However, I felt this wasn't really the message I wanted to portray, so I ended up changing it and having the moral be about not letting your fears or worries hold you back. 

First, I drafted up the story outline, including details like what happens during each act of the story:

Fig. 3.1. Project 1 - Story Outline (10/6/2024)

And then I created the script with the help of the Fountainize extension in Google Docs:

Fig. 3.2. Project 1 - Script (10/6/2024)

And finally, I combined these two to create my final submission. 

FINAL Short Story Submission

Fig. 4. Final Story Outline and Script Submission (10/6/2024)

FEEDBACK

Week 6
Specific Feedback:
- Storyline is good
- Can consider using animals (hermit crabs? With actual shells)

REFLECTIONS

Experiences
This was actually quite a fun experience. I really love storytelling, so being able to come up with my own story was fun. Even though it's not exactly new for me to come up with a storyline of my own, it's rare that I make characters for my stories, so this was a nice experience as well. I think it's useful to learn from videos by Pixar themselves and also learn specific techniques that are used to come up with stories, themes, and also ways to properly flesh out a character.

Observations
Creating a character isn't easy, even without having to come up with a design. A good character is meant to feel 'human', even if they aren't of a human species, meaning they have to feel like a person that the audience can relate to and therefore emotionally invest in. This makes the story something they can emotionally invest in and connect to as well. Not to mention character development, which means figuring out a character's 'want' and 'need', and how the character goes from wanting to learning about what they really need.

Findings
Even a big studio like pixar has multiple drafts for a story, some that even don't work out. There may be scenes that end up needing to be cut or rearranged like in Finding Nemo. This may be to make the story flow better, or to better help the audience understand and empathise with a character. Whatever the reason, I guess it's good to remember that even big studios have scrapped or changed ideas, and so it's not that big of a deal to have a story that isn't perfect right from the beginning. Letting the story/them change as you write it, or letting a character grow as you yourself discover them more, isn't bad either.