There are few organizations in the world that can claim more expertise when it comes to storytelling than Pixar. The Disney-owned animation studio is known for its ability to consistently create…
Pixar has released lessons on the technical sides of movie making before, but these lessons are an emphasis on storytelling itself. This reminds me of The 22 rules of storytelling, according to Pixar written by a storyboard artist for Pixar. Some great insight into what makes a great story.
#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
I’m guilty of this… A lot.
#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
I wish more of Hollywood would follow this rule.
#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
Both of these are a nicer way of paraphrasing Kurt Vonnegut, “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”
Fans of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy treasure the bit where a group of hyper-dimensional beings demand that a supercomputer tells them the secret to life, the universe and everything. The machine, which has been constructed specifically for this purpose, takes 7.5m years to compute the answer, which famously comes out as 42….
Multitasking is a big part of the modern world. People are constantly doing two things at once; they send emails when they are spending time with their loved ones, they work out while texting a friend and they cook while they check Facebook. However, all of this multi-tasking is bad for your brain. Recent studies…
Veolia Water Technologies, a transnational water treatment specialist firm, is partnering with a company called Fieldbit to bring Augmented Reality to the plant floor. Source: Augmented Reality is making industrial work more productive | Ars Technica Augment reality is the act of laying computer graphics onto the viewable world in realtime. If you’ve played Pokemon…
Few saw the Chromebook coming. When it launched half a decade ago, the category was broadly maligned for its limited feature set, middling hardware specs and operation that required an always-on internet connection to work properly. But things change in five years. In 2015, the category overtook MacBooks in the U.S. for the first time ever, selling…
When my son started middle school last month, he brought home a slew of consent forms for this that and the other. Most weren’t problematic, but one was deeply troubling to me — the consent form for the Google Education App. In accordance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the form…
As she neared 24 straight hours of playing Dead Space, Kaitlyn Richelle watched in shock as a $250 donation flashed across her screen. “That’s the goal,” she shouted. “That’s the tuition.” She paused her Twitch stream, struggling to get a full sentence out. She had just raised $5,000 to help pay for medical school. Source: Meet the streamers using…
