Now! Where do I begin? I wasn’t particularly into movies or films. But during one summer back when I was 15, I decided to go to the nearby rental video store and get a dvd. This was to avoid reading any books. Why read a book when you can watch a movie right?

 

Well that decision led me into the world of movies. I remember renting Rocky I and falling in love with it. Soon i found that there are few other sequels to it and within a week I finished the series. I saw it once and I saw it again till I got tired of it. This would lead to be the early seeds to be sowed in, in my conscious about character development. Rocky Series was followed by Rambo series and all the classics there are, you name it and I saw it, saw ‘em all (in reality I must have hardly seen ‘all’ which I’ll realise later). 

Then came Pulp Fiction and everything changed. As i was watching the film, I realised “Wow this is good, I like it but I’m not really sure where the story is going.” I’ll be honest when I first saw it in that summer, I loved it, but i did not understand it. I was mesmerised with it and the director of course but I did not get it. This is not how a typical film should be! I researched everything on the film and the director and how he was inspired to make this film from pulp magazines which used to sell during the 1930s. They don’t make ’em anymore!

    This was also the first time I found that stories can be non-linear. I always assumed stories to be linear, don’t know why but just thought. This was a new door I found. More than movies, I was fascinated by stories. 

For my class this semester, I was clueless as to what I would be studying. We were asked to do a few readings and watch the video by Andrew Stanton on The Clues of a Great Story. I remember watching the video earlier while watching countless other TEDTalk videos. I found it interesting at that time and had saved the link. I was amazed when my course asked me to watch the very same video. This made me excited about the course.

In the video, he sheds light on different concepts of storytelling. the 2+2 theory is one interesting way to explain storytelling. He also says that story telling is joke telling (well to each story its own). But I get the idea behind it – The audience has to be made interested in watching any film. As he says ahead, The audience actually wants to work for their meal, they just don’t want to know that they are doing it.

But the point that I really like and think is the best of them all, is at the end when he says, “Use what you know, draw from it,  doesn’t really matter if its a fact or not – Expressing values that you feel deep down in your core.” I can definitely argue against it but I will leave you with it to wonder upon – “to capture a truth from your experience”