When John Lasseter was directing Toy Story he would tell the
animators that the goal was to get people to forget about the technology and
focus on the story and characters.
In any entertainment medium, the most important thing is
creating a feeling. A movie’s goal is the same as a song’s goal is the same as
a comic book’s goal which is to create an emotion that drives people to look
inward and outward. This article will be focusing on the art of telling a good
story.
First you need a character and that character needs to want
something and we need to establish the world he lives in. We will run with an
example to illustrate this point:
Once upon a time there was a gerbil who lived in his cage. Every
day he would do what gerbils do in his cage. Food was provided for him, water
was provided, entertainment was provided, yet what this gerbil wanted more than
anything was to learn to swim….
Now let’s be honest, swimming isn’t the most important part
of the gerbils longing. Mostly he wants to be free, but that freedom is
represented by his desire to want to learn how to swim.
Once you have a character and a desire you need to give the
character a life change. This can be anything from a coincidence to a miss-understanding,
whatever this is, it’s got to cause the character to start making hard choices.
One day, the owner left the room in a hurry, accidentally
leaving the gerbil cage door open. The gerbil looked outside the patch of
un-barred space, his nose twitched in contemplation. Momentarily the gerbil
glanced behind him at the bowl of food and water. There was a pond just in the
back yard. He was only a few feet away from the ajar door…
The character needs to make the choice to leave his
comfortable space. Luke left to become a Jedi, Harry left to become a wizard,
Rose left to travel with The Doctor, etc… if your character is not the type to
jump into situations like this you can have a little push to get them going
The gerbil turned from the open door to snack, but a meteor
rock fell and caught the rest of his cage on fire. He had to jump outside his
only home.
See?
Next there has to be perils and obstacles that stand in the
characters way. The journey to get what you want is hardly ever easy. I would
abide by the rule of three and allow at least 3 obstacles to stand in the way
of what the character wants. Each obstacle needs to be harder than the last.
The gerbil felt uncomfortable as he touched the cold tile
floor of the kitchen. He was soon motivated to keep going though when the table
started to fall over. He ran until the crash woke up the sleeping cat. The cat
had the “just after a nap” munchies.
The character needs to eventually hit rock bottom. Everything
that could go wrong has. Maybe he dies. Maybe he loses hope. Maybe he gets what
he thought he wanted.
After a long journey to get out of the mouth of the cat, the
gerbil eventually made it to the pond. He quickly found out that gerbils can’t
swim.
In the end, the character finds what he was really searching
for from the beginning. In our example the gerbil kept telling himself that he
wanted to learn to swim but in reality he just wanted freedom, whatever that
means…
The gerbil then found a city of gerbils and paid a down payment
on a little condo in the city.
Now things go back to relative normalcy, but nothing is
quite the same after you have taken siege of your life.
In reality, writing a good fiction story is writing about
your experience. Everyone has had a time when they changed their life. Everyone
has made a choice. Try to take that experience and your life and then turn it
into a new and lasting idea.
Application Activity
Feel free to spend a lot of time on this one because you are
going to spend a lot of time working with this story in the future. A story
team member from Pixar released a few ideas to help with storytelling. One of
the most interesting ideas brought up was a series of fill-in-the-blanks that
make for a good story.
Once upon a time there was a ___________ everyday
he/she/they would ____________ until one day ___________ because of that
____________ because of that ______________ because of that _____________ until
______________. The end.
It’s simple, but this will give you the perfect skeleton to
start your story off with. The activity today is to create your story by
filling in the blanks. This story will then turn itself into a full comic book
eventually, so get creative!
Be sure to like my Facebook page so that you never miss another
article or installment of Comics 101!
No comments:
Post a Comment