Fryer, Bronwyn. Storytelling That Moves People. Harvard Business Review, 2003.
https://hbr.org/2003/06/storytelling-that-moves-people
Martinez-Conde, Susana, Robert G. Alexander, Deborah Blum, Noah Britton, Barbara K. Lipska, Gregory J. Quirk, Jamy Ian Swiss, Roel M. Willems, and Stephen L. Macknik. The Storytelling Brain: How Neuroscience Stories Help Bridge the Gap between Research and Society. The Journal of Neuroscience, 2019.
MasterClass, Staff. How to Write Three Act Structure. Arts and Entertainment. Sep 2, 2021.
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-write-three-act-structure#quiz-0
Watson, Stephanie. Oxytocin: The love hormone. Harvard Medical School, 2021.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/oxytocin-the-love-hormone
Webster N (1969) Webster’s third new international dictionary of the English language, unabridged: a Merriam-Webster. Cambridge, MA: Riverside.
Yorke, John. All Stories Are the Same. The Atlantic. 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/into-the-woods-excerpt/421566/
Zack, Paul J. Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling. Harvard Business Review, 2014.
https://hbr.org/2014/10/why-your-brain-loves-good-storytelling
Despite the different uses of voiceover in nonfiction and fiction films, it remains crucial the role of voiceover as a cinematic technique to convey information to the viewer. In my work, I've used voiceover as a tool to put the audience in the mind of the protagonist, amplifying the subjective experience so that the viewer is transported into the story.
Protagonist's thoughts and feelings are followed by the viewer through the voiceover, which functions as a narrative tool here.
Remembered Voices. Antagonistic forces stimulate the character's reaction and propels the narrative.
Storytelling plays a significant role in human life, and in humans’ understanding of themselves and others around them. It's used in businesses, in marketing and in commercials. It’s even used in magic tricks and has started to be considered as a possible effective tool to communicate scientific discoveries, which deal with purely objective facts, with the public so that more lay people support science-based policies. Storytelling has also become a research topic in itself, since understanding this universal human trait could offer a deeper understanding of who we are as humans.
But what is storytelling eventually, and what makes for a moving story?
Story is a series of events weaved together in which a balance is challenged, and the protagonist embarks on the journey of restoring that balance by fighting the antagonistic forces. According to webster’sdictionary, narrative is a “discourse designed to connect a series of happenings” (Webster, 1969).
Through narratives we pass down moral values and social conventions. We persuade friends to support us when we are in trouble. We get to know our partners on a deeper level and have an empathy for them, and through narratives we try to convince our future employees that we are qualified enough to efficiently execute the job or accomplish the task. We also use stories as we write our thesis to offer an understanding of our process to our peers and supervisors, and to explain how we came to our conclusions, if any.
As we engage with narratives, the neural activity in our brain changes, as professor of economics, psychology, and management, Paul Zack, explains the source of excitement in stories and how they can change people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Empathy plays an important role in our understanding of other’s emotions, and it helps us predict how others may react in certain situations. This is what happens in our minds as we watch a movie or read or listen to a story: we empathize with characters. Zack’s lab research, as he claims, has found that oxytocin – the neurochemical that’s also called “the love hormone,” (Watson, 2021). – functioning mainly to facilitate childbirth – enhances the sense of empathy and motivates cooperation with others (Zack, 2014).
Zack’s lab also did an experiment to check if it’s possible to “hack oxytocin system” by taking blood draws from participants who watched video narratives before and after the viewing experience and they found that, as Zack puts it, “character-driven stories do consistently cause oxytocin synthesis.” In later studies, his lab also found that in order to increase the desire to “help others, a story must first sustain attention – a scarce resource in the brain – by developing tension during the narrative” (Zack, 2014).
Talking about attention and tension as well as persuasion and character-driven stories here echoes some of Robert McKee’s thoughts on “Storytelling that moves people”. Mackee is one of the world’s most known screenwriting lecturers. Many of his students have made hit movies, like Forrest Gump and The Lord of the Rings, and many of them became Oscar winners.
In an interview with the Harvard Business Review in 2003, Mackee gives an account in a series of answers to questions raised by interviewer, Bronwyn Fryer, on why CEOs and managers should pay attention to screenwriting. According to Mackee, there are two methods to persuade. The first one is “conventional rhetoric” that uses communicating facts, statistics, and lists depending on the intellectual process, whereas the second method binds facts with emotions (Fryer, 2013). Because reason alone is not enough to stimulate people to act, Mackee explains, reason is better be combined with emotions. That makes for a “much more convincing” way, and that can be done in “telling a compelling story”, as he put it.
Even in scientific research, storytelling has become a tool to better understand classical research topics, like mental simulation in neuroscience, or a research tool to communicate with the community.
Some scientists assume that making more information accessible to the public in a traditional lecturer approach can engage a large audience and garner social support to technological and scientific issues, but this is not necessarily efficient since more facts and information don’t always change popular, sometimes wrong, views, as a research paper on the topic, “The Storytelling Brain: How Neuroscience Stories Help Bridge the Gap between Research and Society,” explains.
Unlike “The neuroscience of language”, which studies the production and understanding of words and sentences in our brains, “the neuroscience of storytelling” has only recently started to become a study area despite its ubiquity in human life. As we engage with narratives, we simulate the events in our brains, words turn into images. We see what is being described and we feel what the fictious characters feel. Stories have the potential to evoke mental images. There’s pleasure in “mental simulation,” thanks to narratives (Martinez-Conde, et al. P. 2-3. 2019).
But what is the narrative shape that can evoke strong mental images and engage people’s emotions on a deeper level? This question takes us back to Robert McKee.
According to Mackee, story “expresses how and why life changes”. It starts with a balance, then an event – in screenwriting called the “inciting incident” – occurs, throwing things out of balance, and the protagonist struggles to restore that balance faced with a cruel reality.
This means that a story needs to have a conflict, a struggle, to sustain tension as antagonists stand in the protagonist’s way to reach his/her objective. A desire should be blocked, before it’s met.
But does this mean that every good story should include a tragic aspect, a pessimistic angle to it? Would that make the story more truthful since life can be cruel and reflecting that cruelty would make the storyteller more authentic and thus more appreciated as well?
“All great storytellers since the dawn of time – from the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare and up to the present day – have dealt with this fundamental conflict between subjective expectation and cruel reality…
“The great irony of existence is that what makes life worth living does not come from the rosy side. We would all rather be lotus-eaters, but life will not allow it. The energy to live comes from the dark side. It comes from everything that makes us suffer. As we struggle against these negative powers, we’re forced to live more deeply, more fully” Robert Mackee (Fryer, 2013).
But the question that one may ask here is this: Does a character-driven narrative that starts with a balance, followed by a disequilibrium then a restored balance, imply that there’s only one-story structure – or rather one effective story structure?
The story consultant, lecturer and former head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production, John Yorke argues in an article published on the Atlantic, which was adapted from is his book “Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story”, that all dramatic storytelling has one shape, and that “all stories are the same” (Yorke, 2016).
The similarity springs from the mind, because through that kind of a built-in structure we make sense of the world, Yorke explains. Psycho, James Bond, Jaws, Avatar, Master and Commander, Alien, Thelma & Louise, Apocalypse Now, etc., all have the same underlying structure, despite their variations and genres, in which the monster “is vanquished and order is restored to community”. The monster can be an alien, it can be a mother, a father, a company, or one’s own fear.
In his argument, Yorke is talking about classical story form that traces back to Aristotle, who theorized a dramatic structure on Poetics, arguing that a story is built on a cause-and-effect chain where actions inspire reactions subsequently until the story reaches its ending (Editorial Staff. Sep 2, 2021). Though despite that many filmmakers and screenplay writers may implicitly consider the study of a structure as a betrayal to their genius, Yorke elaborates, all of them follow the same classical blueprint which they detest. He quotes American screenplay writer and director Charlie Kaufman, whose latest film was I’m Thinking of Ending Things, as he talks about the paradigm: “There’s this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn’t really interest me. I actually think I’m probably more interested in structure than most people who write screenplays, because I think about it” (Yorke, 2016).
Though Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich is a perfect example of the classical story from, Yorke believes as he refers to a study explaining that about the Academy Awards winning screenplay.
But do writers need to study that structure? If It’s unconscious and one has access to it since it’s fused in one’s mind, then why bother study it? Maybe one needs to understand the rules of storytelling, the craft? But if all stories are the same, wouldn’t it be boring to experience a similar structure that one can anticipate its dynamics and what it hides again and again?
Language has a structure, and we follow that structure to comprehend. But do we get bored of that language which retains the same underlying architecture, nonetheless offers endless possibilities of words’ re-arrangements, different sentence structures and possibly new meanings?
“All stories are forged from the same template, writers simply don’t have any choice as to the structure they use; the laws of physics, of logic, and of form dictate they must all follow the very same path…
Every form of artistic composition, like any language, has a grammar, and that grammar, that structure, is not just a construct—it’s the most beautiful and intricate expression of the workings of the human mind,” (Yorke, 2016).
A fight rehearsal done with the assistance of a professional stunt coordinator, Peter Lundberg. It was filmed by the project's cinematographer Amanda Muysio.
The idea of my short film Lagom Svensk, which has shaped my artistic research throughout several months of my studies at SKH, actually came from a personal experience.
One day someone stopped me in public and asked me to "go home". I didn't fully understand what I heard then, and I kept remembering that, trying to make sense of it, until I eventually decided to write about the encounter. That event then became a scene in a feature film, called Nothing Special About This, which I started writing a couple of months after I got admitted to Stockholm University of the Arts. Following screenwriting discussions with my professor, I later decided to make that scene a moive, and so it became Lagom Svensk.
A pursuit to dramatize a personal experience which included other people in the process, like actors. The aim here was to turn the perosnal into a public or collective experience, where viewers at the end get absorbed in the story so that they understand it and engage with it.
A very crucial stage in my process was the rehearsals. Despite it being a short, the plot is built up around the interactions of 6 actors. Every character has its own characteristics which distinguish it from the others. In order to make these differences clear, I had to discuss each role with its respective actor. How the character speaks and behaves? What motivates it? What does the character need from the other characters? What does it need in general? What is the emotional spectrum that fuels the character?
The rehearsals were a co-creation process in which I and the actors turned what was a text into a living, visual story.
Storyboard is considered the first translation of a screenplay into pictures. Making a storyboard helped me visualize the story roughly, and that made it easier for me to communicate the narrative in pictures with the crew and cast. Through this artistic practice I could organize the images of Lagom Svensk in my head. With every sketch I drew the vision became clearer and sharper - more concrete. Through storyboard I could illustrate how characters move in the space (of the shot), and It helped me outline limitations and the distance of interactions within each set design.
