TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "storytelling"
Stories We Tell a film by Sarah Polley
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
—Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
This movie looks fantastic.
(Source: youtube.com)
- Vérité.
- Investigative journalism.
- Personality-driven investigative journalism (and essay)
- Errol Morris, or Anti-Vérité
- Profile (individual)
- Profile (place)
- Competition
- Ken Burns
- Archival (related to Ken Burns)
- Diary/Memoir
- Odyssey/Mystery (related to Memoir)
- Performance
- Arty/Collage
- Nature
- Meta
- Prank docs
- Mockumentary
(via David Edelstein’s piece, “How Documentary Became the Most Exciting Kind of Filmmaking”)
Bradley Campbell uses napkins to diagram the narrative structures of radio shows.
What’s cool about mapping structure like this is that the pieces are moveable. You can rearrange the parts like they’re Tinkertoys. In the Morning Edition structure, for example, you could open in a scene, then introduce two people with other views (like the lines on the right of Bradley’s napkin only on the left). Then the “V.” Then a return to the first character and the lines again. Or, maybe you start with the “V” then meet a character…. See what I mean?
Fantastic. See also: Vonnegut’s story shapes and John McPhee on structure.
Filed under: structure, storytelling
(Source: wnycradiolab)
Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club
Fun read. Tobolowsky talked about the collection on NPR:
Where there’s truth, there’s life. … Aristotle talked about something called techne. … There is a little jolt that we get when we recognize the truth, and it gives us a little burst of pleasure. Aristotle said it is the basis of comedy and it is the basis of all drama, is trying to find techne. I think that’s helped me in my comedic acting, and it’s certainly helped me in writing my book, in that I have to have faith in what really happened, and I hope that techne is created in people’s brains as either they read or if they watch me on screen. … When we see truth in someone else’s story, we recognize it as part of a universal story.
Filed under: my reading year 2013
“The light is green, the trap is clean.”
My wife talked me into buying one of those capsule espresso machines, and every time I use the fucking thing I feel like I’m down in the Ghostbusters’ basement learning how to use the containment system. Before we bought it, I could just imagine my coffee snob friends ridiculing me, but since I’m not really patient or interested enough to figure out how to make a “proper” espresso, I figured I’d give this a shot.
Funny thing is, I actually really like the coffee.
Come to find out, more than 100 Michelin restaurants in France use a Nespresso machine to make their coffee. Here Julian Baggini writes about what it means when machines can do things better than people, using coffee capsule systems as an example.
The conclusion he comes to is that it really does, or should, matter to us humans, how our stuff was made: “We are knowing as well as sensing creatures, and knowing where things come from, and how their makers are treated, does and should affect how we feel about them.”
The only way truly to defend the artisans against all that technology might put up against them is to give up the entire premise of my blind tasting, that is, the idea that it does not matter how the coffee came to be, all that counts is its final taste.
Surely we appreciate the handmade in part because it is handmade. An object or a meal has different meaning and significance if we know it to be the product of a human being working skilfully with tools rather than a machine stamping out another clone. Even if in some ways a mass-produced object is superior in its physical properties, we have good reasons for preferring a less perfect, handcrafted one.
Of course, marketing departments already know this, and so do some savvy artists.
And this isn’t to say that machine-made things can’t be given meaning: the moves I make to produce my wife’s lattes are pretty mechanical: press a button on the espresso and milk frothing machines, pour in the milk to the top of the cup, stir with a spoon. But when I hand it to her while she’s feeding our kiddo, there’s still that, “Here you go, baby” that makes it human…
(Thx @mattthomas)
How Rebecca Skloot built The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
I started watching a lot of movies structured like that and eventually found my way to “Hurricane,” about Hurricane Carter, the boxer. As I was watching it, I just freaked out because after the first few scenes I realized, Oh my God, this is the structure of my book. Three narratives braided together, a journey, etc. So I storyboarded that whole movie frame-by-frame on color-coded index cards (one color per narrative thread). I’d already mapped my own book out using the same three-colored index card scheme, and I’d mapped out a structure, but it wasn’t working. After I mapped out “Hurricane” I spread the cards out on a bed and put my book’s index cards on top of them, lining up the colors, to see how the film was braiding differently than I was. I immediately realized the problem with my structure was that it didn’t move around in time fast enough.
Above: her color-coded index cards. Filed under: index cards, storytelling
