This article is the continued from series of articles –Story Writing For Animation. You can read them all articles by clicking here
Until now we have learned so many important ingredients for Animated Movie and in this Series of articles where at the start I promised that we are going to make the Magical Formula for Best Animation Movie. Actually we have just started the journey and it’s beautiful isn’t it? believe me it will end in Our Field of Dreams!
So when we watch the Legend Movies , its like they have created a magical spell that puts us in great state , we get so involved with the story world , characters , and the story so that it feels like we too belong in this story. At some point in life though unconsciously, though for few minutes but we forget who we are? We live the life that the story characters are living. Its like we know them from childhood, and we care for them. We love their smiles, their actions and everything they do.
But they are just moving pictures. . huh . . . I don’t buy it and I know neither you. We wanna believe that all those characters and their stories are real.
In this way we discovered that Our Involvement is magic ingredient in all the great movies.
First Discovery:
1. Magic Ingredient : Audience Involvement
Then we realize that there are 4 elements that belongs to Audience Involvement and they are
- Story
- Characters
- Emotions
- Motions (Hidden Element )
When you create Original Masterpiece, you must have the Original Masterpiece Idea.
That idea creates the Legend Story and finally that story Creates Best Animated Feature. .
And we started our journey with element STORY. After studying the legend movies we find out some important clues that are common to most of them.
At first we learned the principle that most stories start with great ideas but end in disgust only because the creator of story had never understood the complete picture of the Story.
So we must have to see the complete picture of the story in few lines where anyone will understand the Main Directive of the story and Its Resolution.
And we came along the concept of LOGLINE: which will show the whole complete Directive flow of the story in few lines effectively.
Now when we followed the pattern we realized that all the great stories had a common and basic structure of
SETUP-CONFLICT-RESOLUTION
Each good story we can divide in this structure and work separately on that parts so that we will have best animated story for Movie.
SETUP is where we introduce all the important aspects, elements of the story.
CONFLICT is where the biggest challenge of the story is introduced, improved.
RESOLUTION is where the challenge is resolved.
When we digged down little for SETUP we found out that SETUP involves five important elements that are
- World
- Rules
- Characters
- Character Relationships
- Motivation And Goal
1. WORLD
Every story has its World, though its start from “Once Upon a time . . .” The world exists before that story and it exists after the story. Your story World is immortal, and though you don’t wanna show audience the World that what was before and after the story, YOU MUST KNOW EVERY ASPECT OF YOUR WORLD!
2. RULES
Every story has its world, Toys world, Real world, Bug’s World, Animals World, Alien’s World . . . .
And every World has its MUST RULES that controls the every Story World.
Rules are necessary for every World, but Sometimes Rules can drive whole story and you can make great story out of it!
3. 4. & 5: CHARACTER, CHARACTER RELATIONSHIPS AND MOTIVATION & GOAL
A good story is all about Growth, Development, And Change in Character and Character Relationships. A good story is always told through Characters and not through ordinary Hero and Heroin.
All these characters are driven by some force that’s Motivation and they are after their Goal.
In SETUP it’s like we plant the seeds for Characters, Relationships, Goal, motivation and it Grows up to THE END.
In this way we learned up to creating the BEST SET UP for the story.
In next article we learn about the next important part of structure that’s CONFLICT.
Mahesh
For All Animation Story Writing Lessons click here
