Video 4: Story and Plot

This week’s video will focus on Story and Plot. One of the most common mistakes we see is people working and working on the story and making their character a servant to it. The problem with leading with plot is that you often get characters that feel like they’re being pushed around by events.

What you want is a story that feels like it’s being pushed forward by a lead character who is generating events around them. All that said, we do need to know what is going on and what happens in the plot. So, how do we achieve this? 

Format: 

It’s a good idea to think about what form you want to tell your story in. Is it episodic or serialised? 

Episodic: These are episodes that offer stand-alone stories that have their own beginning, middle and end within the confines of the episode time limit. Usually an episodic show will present a familiar cast of characters and put them into a new situation. Once the episode is done, all is resolved and you ‘reset’. As a viewer, you’re able to ‘drop in’ to watch an episode out of order in the series. Some examples of episodic series are “Friends”, “New Girl”, “The Simpsons”, and “Arrested Development”.

Serialised: These are stories that play out across multiple episodes, so you can’t ‘drop in’ to any episode, but rather need to watch them in order. Examples are “The Flight Attendant”, “Sweet Tooth”, and “Russian Doll”. 

Once you have decided whether your show is episodic or serialised, you may want to consider what your story arc would be (what happens across the course of the entire series), or what a typical stand alone episode might be like in a way that showcases the character dynamics and tone well. 

Don’t feel that you need to “break” every episode. “Breaking” an episode means figuring out what basic plot points and narrative events should occur in each episode and in what order. When you “break a story’, you come up with each individual scene for that episode and arrange these scenes in their proper order as they will appear in the script. 

Instead of hashing out these specific details at this stage of the process, what’s important now is to think about the headline events to help you flesh out your story.