What We Can Do For You

We tell stories with our commercials, trailers, videos, and publishing. We create them. We produce them. With our Peabody Award-winning talent. Kids stuff. And some cool grown-up stuff, too! Let us add video to your exhibit, talk, or ipad presentation. Think industrials, viral web, B2B…And see how affordable and invaluable broadcast can be. And don’t forget to check out our page tabs above!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

22 Rules of Storytelling..(and they’re pretty good!)

Wanted to share these 22 rules of storytelling by a former Pixar Storyboard artist, Emma Coats. (Apparently it was originally shared at the NY Film Academy) Came across the list and it’s certainly worth kicking around. And it might even be a help! Wouldn’t that be cool? Let us know if you agree!

The List:

  • You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
  • You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.
  • Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
  • Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
  • Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
  • What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
  • Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
  • Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
  • When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
  • Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
  • 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.
  • Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
  • Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
  • Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
  • If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
  • What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
  • No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
  • You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
  • Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
  • Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
  • You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
  • What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

 

Kids (always) suck at history

Someone (some thing?) once said, “sharing is caring,” so I share a great article by Nick Paumgarten in last week’s New Yorker. Everyone’s up in arms that kids today don’t know history. But apparently kids NEVER knew history. A Stanford professor shared: “...the first large-scale proficiency study—of Texas students, in 1915-16—demonstrated that many couldn’t tell Thomas Jefferson from Jefferson Davis or 1492 from 1776. A 1943 survey of seven thousand college freshmen found that, among other things, only six per cent of them could name the original thirteen colonies. “Appallingly ignorant,” the Times harrumphed, as it would again in the face of another dismal showing, in 1976. It’s our “amnesia of past ignorance.” Maybe we’re hopeless, though I hope not. And aren’t you proud of me for not just bashing Texas for this?

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/06/27/110627ta_talk_paumgarten#ixzz1QWVYgxX0

We Talk to Grown-Ups, too

Take a look at a Corporate Video we did for Radica, USA. We loved melding their design ideas with their amazing toy history into something they could use over many platforms. Let’s talk…

 

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