My hero, Walt Disney, was a master storyteller; he spent his entire life researching and creating new ways to deliver meaningful stories to his audience. Walt’s love for innovation fueled his ability to continue pushing the boundaries of storytelling until his last moments, I strive to do the same. This made my next research topic very personal.
I’ve been extensively researching the most important aspect of filmmaking, storytelling. In my research, I found it isn’t always the story we tell, but the way we tell it that makes for a great film.
Storytelling is an art, NOT a science
There is no perfect formula of how to tell a great story, there are no rules set in stone, and there is no magic wand. However, years of great storytelling in film have made understood guidelines to help facilitate the process of successfully telling a great story. Andrew Stanton, Oscar-winning filmmaker at Pixar, talked about some of these “clues” to great storytelling on his 2012 Ted Talk. “Make me care” Stanton said, the job of a good film opening is to make a promise to the audience, a promise that the story will have some resolution, whatever it may be. I found this to be eye opening, I returned to some of my favorite movies to look for that promise; I found all of them shared this concept of a “promise” that drove both the narrative towards a resolution and helped keep the audience engaged. Although this was revealing, the most important thing I learned from Stanton’s Ted Talk was the importance of evoking a sense of wonder in viewer; that’s what great cinema does, it evokes a sense wonder in the hope that through that wonder, the audience can learn something from the story.
Storytelling deals with emotion, a deeper and rawer form of human feelings; it’s because of this that storytelling could never be a science. However, storytelling has components of of one science field, psychology. In a 2018 Ted Talk, Will Storr talked about the aspects that storytelling shares with psychology. One of the six similarities he shared was a love for change, our brains are obsessed with change, every second of every day we are constantly exposed to change and our brains are constantly processing that change by trying to make sense of many individual stimuli. Andrew Stanton called this the “The rule of 2+2”, the basis is simple: Don’t spoon feed the audience, as humans we want to work for our meal. If you give the audience 4, the story is boring and they feel cheated; instead, give the audience 2+2 and let them figure it out. I personally love this guideline, I believe the audience will appreciate connecting the dots in a story as it develops.
What is behind great a great story?
One of the most common advice when creating a story is “write what you know”. This is often misunderstood, it’s not about only writing the mundane, it’s about including a piece of the ordinary in the extraordinary. Pete Docter, a film director at Pixar Animation Studios, said “Go ahead and write about monsters and explosions and car chases, but put something into it that talks about your own life.” Why? Because that is what brings life and reliability to your story. Everything we experience makes us feel something, by infusing stories with the essence of those experiences, it creates the opportunity for the audience to feel the same way;therefore, giving the story life. Docter talks about Monsters Inc, how it isn’t just about a monster who works scaring children, but it’s truly the story about a sully becoming a father figure to boo, something that Doctor was undergoing as they worked on the film. Including some personal aspect of real life in a story also makes it relatable, because the audience can better relate to the character's situation.
If a tree falls in the middle of the forest, does it make a sound? Change the context and the is much clearer than this old philosophical question; “If a good story is told for no audience, does it serve its purpose?” No! It doesn’t because one of the most important parts of a story is the audience! In an interview for the Atlantic, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner explained that if a story is told in the middle of the desert for no audience it loses its purpose. Great storytellers understand their audiences and tell their stories so that spectators can learn something from it. It is perfectly logical, a great story needs a great audience because if the viewer isn’t willing to learn anything from the story, they won’t.
I suppose the greatest aspect of a good story is it’s humanity. For as long as humans has been able to communicate with each other we have been telling stories, our history is nothing more than a recollection of past events, both facts and fiction, that we tell each generation in the hopes of delivering a message about our lives. Great stories are human because we are human, we innately infuse ourselves into the stories we tell, and that’s what in my opinion makes the greatest stories. If we want to truly care for a character, he/she must exhibit a human characteristic; Guillermo del Toro understood this when he filmed the shape of water, he knew that for the audience to care about the fishman, under all the makeup and visual effects, there had to be a certain humanity to him. We relate to, and care for, human stories better, so even if a story doesn’t seem human at first glance, it’s spirit must be human. Storytelling changes our perspectives
Recently I read The Things They Carried a novel by Tim O’Brien, although the book mainly revolves around the Vietnam War I learned a VERY important lesson from analyzing it, it’s a book about storytelling and how it has the ability to manipulate our perspectives. I have never better understood the importance of the quote “With great power comes great responsibility” from the deceived legend Stan Lee, storytelling gives the storyteller an incredible amount of power because the delivery of a story can make us laugh or cry and it can certainly shape our way of seeing/approaching a situation. This is why it's so important for storytellers to make responsible decisions about the stories we decide to tell, because we are all storytellers, and our stories will outlive us and affect all those around us. Through this project I want to tell a story that can change perspectives.
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