story and other storys

Similarly a high-concept genre series might use the Logline to present the unique dramatic problem of the storyworld. The logline for Cleverman for example; “In the very near future, creatures from ancient mythology must live among humans and battle for survival in a world that wants to silence, exploit and destroy them.” In all these examples we can see that the common denominator is a ‘dramatic problem’ - Journalist with a Conspiracy, Police with a Jurisdiction dilemma, Detective who is Haunted, Mythological creatures being Exploited. Distilling and articulating that driving problem of your story is crucial to a good Logline. It should be specific, clear and engaging - not abstract. In a feature film project with, commonly, a single contained story, the Logline will most often articulate a more definable and singular goal. For example, the feature film The Proposition: “A lawman apprehends a notorious outlaw and gives him nine days to kill his older brother, or else they’ll execute his younger brother.” This example encapsulates the problem that is the heart of the drama and embodies a single specific playable action for a protagonist - something the character has to do to solve a problem with high stakes. With stories that have lower physical stakes but deal directly with emotional stakes the Logline can appear quiet different and yet still embody the same principles. For example, the Logline for the feature film Somersault puts emphasis on the conflict of an internal character journey: “A teenage girl runs away from home, hoping to find herself through love, but the people she meets are as lost as she is…” Or in the case of an ensemble story with multiple character points of view the Logline might seek to express what sets all the character stories in motion. A good example can be seen in the feature film Lantana: “The relationships of four couples unravel after the discovery of a young woman’s body in Lantana bush in suburban Sydney.” Here a very short and simple sentence manages to land together the theme (tangled relationships), the problem (relationships unravelling), the place (Sydney suburbs) and the inciting incident (discovery of a dead body). The same principles also extend to short form and online series. The 6x15min ABC series F*!#ing Adelaide has a Logline synopsis that clearly connects Place, Problem and Stakes; “Close but disparate siblings reunite in Adelaide but when they discover their mother is selling their childhood home, their middle class freedoms and sense of security is rocked and they are forced to confront a past that none of them can let go of.” For a more long-running episodic series such as a Sitcom (situational comedy), the Logline might need to focus on the repeatable and returnable scenario and characters Screen Australia: Story Documents – Drama 4 - the sustainable engine of the storyworld rather than an individual plot line. Australian series Please Like Me puts focus on the thematic engine of the show and one that can potentially spawn numerous storylines connected to a binding idea (in this case ‘growing up’): “Josh has had it up to here with things ending but as he faces an empty house, coupled-up friends and a flagging love life that even a threesome can’t seem to fix, he may have to face the idea that it’s time to grow up.” There’s no true one-size-fits-all approach with Loglines, and many resources for learning how to write them tend to be very feature-film centric, which is often problematic for episodic series projects that have different objectives and structures. But in all these examples the principle of embodying the ‘problem’ of the story in the clearest sense is a good place to start. In any medium, the aim is to encapsulate the shortest most succinct version of your story, one that frames what an audience will be compelled to care about, but which is also evocative enough to drive interest to want to read more. Ultimately the Logline is a creative tool that is used to both focus your idea and spark interest in others. One-Paragraph Synopsis The One-Para Synopsis extends on the Logline to give more specifics of Who, What, and How, whilst still being short and to the point. Where the Logline can be somewhat a tease, the one-para synopsis needs to embody some specific detail. Like the Logline, the One-Para can vary greatly in expression depending on whether it is for a feature, episodic, or an interactive project, but there are general rules of thumb to help shape them. In principle the One-Para should encompass: • Genre and theme (how it feels and what it’s really about) • The forces in opposition (conflict of who’s against who?) • The goals and stakes of the drama and its characters, (what they want and what’s at risk) • What sets the story in motion (the inciting incident and potential escalations). This is not to say the One-Para Synopsis attempts to tell the story as a plot, and different projects might place the emphasis in different areas. For example, the one paragraph for the feature-film The Boys emphasises the story’s thematic concerns: “Brett Sprague is released from jail and returns home to a family he feels has disintegrated in his absence. His attempts to dominate his brothers, his brothers’ girlfriends, his own girlfriend and his mother by violence and the assertion of masculine solidarity result in the alienation and escape of the women. Finally, Brett leads his brothers in an act of revenge on one anonymous female, the scapegoat for their failures as men.” The One-Paragraph Synopsis of the feature film Rain Man outlines the premise from the protagonist’s point-of-view and gives a sense of the film’s structure. Even in online series where episodes are typically shorter, or in high-concept genre shows predicated on a big ‘what if’ scenario, we can see the same mechanics to distill the story experience. For example Wastelander Panda, which is both a high-concept sci-fi story and a short form web-series: Screen Australia: Story Documents – Drama 5 “One of the last pandas in the Wasteland, Isaac has grown up fighting alongside his family in the militaristic Tribe of Legion. After an inexcusable crime sees him banished, along with his mother and brother, Isaac sets out to find a young girl – his only chance of reinstating his family to the safety of the Tribe. In the desperate and savage world of the Wasteland, Isaac loses himself to violence, treachery and deceit. Betrayed during a disastrous raid, he flees with the child named Rose, hoping to reach his family before mercenaries track him down. But Rose, his prize, is not what he expects, and Legion may not be the right place for him after all.” In this paragraph we get a sense of the main story beats, the clear goal and stakes, and a hint of the thematic ideas of redemption and ’finding your place’. While a feature film One-Para Synopsis might aim to show the arc of the story, an ongoing series needs its One-Para to demonstrate the sustainability of the idea and its ability to be an ongoing engine of many stories, potentially over many seasons. The high school comedy series, Freaks and Geeks uses the One-Para Synopsis to connect to audience and themes more than plot whilst still embedding the core source of dramatic and comedic tension. Once again, there’s no set formula for a good One-Paragraph Synopsis and different genres and formats will demand different emphasis. But the principles of including these four main elements tend to be useful as a skeleton that allows for a lot of custom variation: • Genre and themes • Forces in opposition • Goals and stakes • Inciting incident You should be prepared to write your One-Para Synopsis many times over, each time refining and clarifying. Write different versions with different emphasis and test them on people to see which one is the most compelling. The important thing is to use these documents as tools to develop an idea, not just an end result of a development process. One-Page Synopsis The One-Page Synopsis, or One-Pager, is both a document to present a confident sense of your project’s form and substance, while at the time being the primary ‘pitch’ document aiming to encourage readers to want to see more. The One-Pager can differ widely in style even more than other synopses depending on the medium - feature, series, online, or interactive. But the heart of any One-Pager goes beyond the 'problem' of the story and into the specifics of a particular Dramatic Question and how it evolves the story. This Dramatic Question is fundamentally what the audience are asking as they watch, active in their mind as the reason for them to keep watching, and embedded in plot, character and thematic elements. As such, the One-Page Synopsis seeks to flesh out that Dramatic Question into characters, escalation, dilemmas, and stakes. In a feature film project where the storyline is largely singular and contained the OnePage Synopsis should convey a clear sense of structure - the major steps of the story from beginning to end that specify the turning points in a cause-and-effect chain, which reveals the ending. A typical form of this would include: Screen Australia: Story Documents – Drama 6 • the setup and thematic idea of the story • the inciting incident • the actions the characters have to take • the major obstacles in their way • the climax • the ending – both in terms of plot and emotional character journey. However, in a serial drama where story is more complex and plays out over 6-10 episodes (or more) the One-Pager likely can’t contain plot detail and it’s often not helpful to try and cram it in. Instead of illustrating structure a TV series One-Pager might focus on how the character narratives play out against the main thematic idea of the story - the setup, the major choices the characters will have to make, the ongoing and escalating stakes, and the themes that will be explored within that storyworld. Genre too can also have a big impact on the shape of the One-Pager. A high-concept genre such as a sci-fi or supernatural series might put emphasis on the concept and the unique storyworld, where as a crime drama might focus the major revelations of the procedural investigation. A good example can be seen in the One-Page introduction of Stranger Things (which was originally entitled Montauk). We get a main focus on genre and tone whilst adding intros to the main characters, their goal, and a sense of the escalations that will stand against them as the story progresses. Alternatively, if the project is a series with self-contained episode stories, like a sitcom or children’s series, then the One-Pager might start with the series’ inciting incident – defining the storyworld and the setup from which the show will extend from. For example, the British teen-drama series, Press Gang, deals with a school newspaper and its One-Pager focuses almost solely on the backstory that sets up the premise of the show - how the newspaper came to be and how the misfit characters are forced to take the job of running it. If the project is an interactive narrative, such as VR, then as well as working with the above ideas, the One-Pager should identify the active role of the audience (what they must do in the story and how they do it) and articulate the audience’s agency. Different formats, mediums and genres - as well as the unique properties of the creative idea - will shape the One-Page Synopsis differently. But the common element for all is the clarity of the dramatic question that will compel the audience, and the unique circumstances that will engage them. Screen Australia: Story Documents – Drama 7 Outline An Outline takes the longer narrative storylines of your project and fleshes them out to encompass the major plot and character turning points. Self-contained episodic series like sitcoms generally don’t have need of a dedicated Outline document as it would only serve to show the story of a single episode rather than the series. Such projects are better survived by a Synopsis and Bible with episode summaries. But projects with long-arc stories that develop over time (feature films and serialised drama) often require a more detailed outline document (generally 4-12 pages) that expand the One-Page Synopsis. The Outline incorporates motives, demonstrates cause and effect, and shows the design of the narrative as it unfolds on screen. As such, the Outline places a greater demand on the writer’s storytelling skills as it needs to demonstrate how the core concept plays out through the structure and how the character’s trajectory dramatises the theme. In writing the Outline, it may be helpful to break down the story into sequences. Writing a list of key scenes, for example, may make it easier to bracket scenes together into blocks to see how they build. To this end there are fundamental components an Outline should be structured around to frame a story. The first is the Dramatic Question - establishing for the reader a clear sense of what the audience are asking? Drama and Comedy is fundamentally based on Characters in Action to solve Problems so a good outline will establish from the start (in cinematic and dramatic terms) what the Dramatic Questions of the story are - which is to say, give the reader a clear sense of anticipation and a desire to know what happens next. From there, the Outline’s job is to show how that Dramatic Question is progressed and ultimately resolved. In a broad sense this is driven by three things - Escalations, Revelations, and Reversals. • Escalations are added problems, events or situations that make the character’s actions more difficult or that raise the stakes. • Revelations are new pieces of information that shift a character’s goal and/or change the audience’s perspective, or are milestones of emotional character development and transformation. • Reversals are major surprises and abrupt changes of direction. They are often connected to story climaxes, dramatic darkest-hours, or major plot twists. Fundamentally they represent significant power-shifts within a story or a substantial change in the power balance between characters; the way they see the world or the audience sees them. What this all means is that when we talk about outlining the major Turning Points of a story, what we’re really referring to are these elements of Escalations, Revelations and Reversals. The plot for any story is often more complex than what can be fit into an outline, so the skill is knowing what is crucial to include and what can be left out. A good Outline is in many ways a very practical document, aiming to break down the story into its building blocks of cause-and-effect and defining sequences that build through Escalations, Revelations, and Reversals. Screen Australia: Story Documents – Drama 8 Treatment Treatments are a type of development document that is mostly used for featur