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.”
An appeals court has agreed with an Ohio woman who said her parking citation should be tossed because the village law was missing a comma. Source: Missing comma gets Ohio woman out of parking ticket – CBS News I, for one, welcome our new English overlords. This is the second article I’ve shared about a missing…
Different video games use failure in different ways. Some use it to shock players and teach them what not to do, while others use death as a punishment for carelessness, recklessness, or some other mistake. Super Gridland, the new mobile RPG-puzzle hybrid from Canadian developer Michael Townsend, treats failure as a journey. With each mistake, you…
As I dove deeper into UX design, I began to question my approach to classroom systems and course architecture. One of the key ideas in UX is to build systems that people will intuitively understand rather than trying to get people to fit into a system. Yet, in classrooms, I had spent hours teaching procedures….
Today’s leading organizations are using machine learning–based tools to automate decision processes, and they’re starting to experiment with more-advanced uses of artificial intelligence (AI) for digital transformation. Corporate investment in artificial intelligence is predicted to triple in 2017, becoming a $100 billion market by 2025. Last year alone saw $5 billion in machine learning venture investment. In a recent survey, 30%…
The water bottle flipping craze, in which a partially filled bottle of water is flipped and magically lands upright, swept the globe a couple of years ago. Now a group of Dutch scientists has designed a classroom demo version of the feat, described in a recent paper in the American Journal of Physics. It is…
“I would mainly say it’s not about learning.” “We think we are an art school.” “Knowledge is un-useful, dangerous, and removes your freedom.” All of this must be put in the context of programming, and how information technology has changed. École 42 is not about learning because learning has traditionally been about mastering a body…
