Storytelling for Film and Television

From First Word to Last Frame

Ken Dancyger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351245968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Storytelling for Film and Television is a theory and practice book which offers a definitive introduction to the art of storytelling through writing, directing, and editing. Author Ken Dancyger provides a comprehensive explanation of the tools that underpin successful narrative filmmaking and television production.

The book takes a unique approach by connecting the different phases of the creative process of film and television production. It shows how writing, directing, and editing all contribute to the process of storytelling and function together to advance the narrative goals of a screenplay, to tell the best story. A case study approach provides numerous examples of effectiveness and brings together the core areas of aesthetics and production to make these concepts more accessible. Case studies include classic and modern films, foreign films, limited and series television, with examples including Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Revenant, and Son of Saul.

This is the ideal text for film and television production students at all levels. It is written in a style which makes it accessible to anybody interested in learning more about the storytelling process and is written for a global audience addressing a global industry.

I
Narrative

1
Introduction

The singular purpose of this book is to prepare future film-makers to see each phase of production as storytelling. The key goal of preproduction, the writing of a screenplay or teleplay, displays narrative tools to best tell the story. The production phase, focusing on the director deploying directing tools, is to tell the story as he or she interprets that story. The post-production phase, focusing on the editor, is to deploy the tools of editing, shots, and sounds to clearly and dramatically tell the story.

Of course there are other craftspeople and artists helping all along the way. But in order to focus on story, we will focus on the work of the writer, the director, and the editor to tell our story. Each of these key creators tries to add value to the story based on their goals. When the process works optimally, the final outcome can be more than the sum of its parts. When the process works less well, it should reach what I will call technical effectiveness. Do you, the storyteller, wish for technical competence or do you strive for more – creative surprise? These options and the effort at each phase for the optimal outcome are the subject of this book.

The purpose of story

Stories serve multiple purposes for their audience. At a general level stories have always been used to convey lessons – how to conduct yourself in a community, a society, a group. Stories very often are used to promote cohesion. The Bible is a series of stories, a cautionary tale about the dos and don’ts of behavior over time. How does a community survive or thrive or die? These lessons deal with personal and group morality and immorality. The stories that resonate most powerfully are simply the road to take going forward and the road(s) that have led to destruction.

The next level of stories is the Fable, essentially told to children. Their goal is again the issue of behavior. In this case, Fables tended to be cautionary tales to prepare the child for decisions needed to proceed safely in the larger world. The idea that not all adults are benevolent, that adults might have an agenda that portends harm, even doom, seems at the heart of Fables. In addition, there also are stories whose messages are more benign, that appearances can be deceiving and that the real self beneath one’s appearance might promise a better, even loving outcome.

Fables’ intentions can be positive or negative, but their purpose is to imaginatively pictorialize the road forward for the child. Good and bad exist in the world. A way to frame the purpose of Fables is to move the child into a more complex world ahead. On one level their purpose is to make the child less innocent, less vulnerable to the world.

Stories then are imaginative tales to help acclimatize the individual to the world and to transmit values that would aid the child going forward.

Adults find stories purposeful as well. The full range of human behavior is on display in stories. Looking to William Shakespeare for examples, Romeo and Juliet captures the twin feelings of love and hate and how the presence of one within a family can destroy the other. Macbeth is about ambition extremis and its consequences. Othello is a tale of envy and its consequences. King Lear is about sibling rivalry, ageing, and judgment.

The tone of Shakespeare’s voyages into human behavior ranges from humorous to tragic. For an audience, you can choose your favorite playwright, novelist, or poet, and those choices will tell you how you feel about the behaviors addressed in those authors’ stories. Stories tell us a great deal about ourselves.

Stories also tell us about individuals who have affected our lives. Biographies tell stories of power and powerlessness, of coping and overcoming adversities, of success and failure, and all states of being in between. In short, stories true and imagined set the landscape for individuals, families, communities, and nations. Stories tell us of lives lived and lost. They are measuring aids for the self, for families, and for groups who come together through geography, belief, or other values. Stories are nourishment, as critical to internal life as food is for external life.

Education

Education presents itself in many forms – family, school, church, books, and media. Education can be intellectual, technical, or emotional. Presumably the filter of education is an end goal – to prepare the young to be useful citizens, not just for the economy, but also as members of society.

The role the media play in education has grown immensely in the past 100 years. For most of our history, family and church played the greatest role in education. In the past 200 years, schools have grown in their importance in education. As technology’s pace has changed with increasing rapidity, the media, the outcome of technological change, has itself grown in importance in education, to a point where its influence today is growing exponentially. Today, the media leaders, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Reid, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates, have replaced the heads of film and television who in turn replaced the heads of studios in the golden age of film and television as the gatekeepers of media influence. Technology rules content, and today content is king. So what education goals do these gatekeepers purvey to today’s audiences? Are good economic and civic members of society still the larger goal of education?

If we look at the content of the most successful television shows of the last decade, we can extrapolate the values underlying these media events. The shows I reference are as follows: The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Deadwood, Boardwalk Empire, The Americans, Homeland, and The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Sopranos focuses on a family head – Tony Soprano, a Mafia family leader and a family man. Often the personal and the professional clash, leaving Tony in need of help to reconcile the moral behavior gap he inhabits.

In Mad Men, Don Draper is the creative director of a significant advertising agency in the late 1950s to the mid-’60s. He has lied about his identity, he is addicted to lying to his wife about having other sexual partners, and his family life keeps growing more complicated. Lying and deception and manipulation are at the heart of Don’s success in advertising and his failure in relationships.

Walter White, in Breaking Bad, is a brilliant high-school chemistry teacher. When he discovers he has incurable cancer of the brain he turns to meth production to make money for his family. He survives cancer but cannot survive a new disease – he likes making money. Power becomes the dominant factor for Walter, and he becomes a killer to hold on to power.

Set in an imagined land called Westeros in the Middle Ages, Games of Thrones is essentially the struggles of four leading families – the Starks, the Lannisters, the Targaryens, and the Baratheons – for the throne of Westeros. The death or murder of Robert Baratheon sets off the struggle. Dragons and witches are factors in this world where the worst of enemies are the undead and where an assassinated dead man, Jon Snow, a Stark, can be brought back from the dead by a witch. Sexual violence, physical violence, and torture co-mingle with patricide, fratricide, and every variant to win the throne. Bodies pile up faster than snow falling. The through line of Game of Thrones is to examine how much bad behavior exists in this world and to pose the question – is there enough good to offset death, incest, and torture in this world? The answer seems to be, barely.

Francis Underwood, a member of the House of Representatives from South Carolina, is an ambitious man and he has an extremely ambitious wife in House of Cards. He will rise to the presidency through manipulation and murder. Consider his wife Lady Macbeth. In this series, bad behavior knows no punishment, only rewards.

The Western town Deadwood is presented as a nineteenth-century version of murder, mayhem, and madness, a far cry from depictions of the West as a pastoral challenge to civilization. The town and its occupants represent commerce run amok. Capitalism is the brothel and its agents are either whores or pimps. Murder is the law of Deadwood.

Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk Empire is an Atlantic City crime boss whose illicit empire is constantly under threat from local and national gangster rivals. He is an Irish family man who is often on the edge of ruin. He is not beyond killing off rivals, even friends. As in the gangster genre itself, he will get his come-uppance from the son of one of his own gang members who he killed.

Elizabeth and Philip Jennings appear to be the everyday American couple. They have two children; they run a travel agency. But, they have a secret life. They are actually Soviet agents, deep plants meant to carry out the spying and killing of the decaying Soviet Union of the 1980s. How to juggle their surface life with their true agenda is the challenge for them and for their children in The Americans.

Carrie Mathison works for the CIA in Pakistan, in the Middle East, and in Washington. She’s brilliant and bi-polar. Consequently, doing her job and living her life often collide. Her paranoia and her instincts guide her, and often she will save herself but lose the people (lovers) closest to her. Is she a danger or a savior? This question is the through line for the series Homeland.

June Osborne/Offred is a young woman living in a futuristic United States, where women such as herself have been chosen to have children by the leaders of the male-dominated quasi-religious new authoritarian state. The wives of these men cannot conceive but are integral to the process of controlling the handmaid assigned to them. For Offred, she has lost her freedom and yearns for the husband and daughter taken from her. She obeys externally and resists internally. The state is all powerful and uses coercion and violence to maintain its power in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Each of these series has had a powerful impact on its viewers. If we look to what they convey about adult life, whether modern or medieval, whether focused on a politician, a King, or a high-school chemistry teacher, whether male or female, bad behavior is on full display. Looking at the educational lesson communicated, the first observation is the difficulty in reconciling the private and the professional lives of the main characters. A second lesson is that there is no shortage of cruelty, violence, and transgression in the adult world. A third lesson is that civility and its larger reach, civilization, are a veneer. What lies beneath is desire run amok; a primal struggle between good and evil is ongoing and it appears, if we take these series literally, that evil is winning.

To be more specific, there is a pliability to character that moves the perception of adults as not being fixed in their behavior. Walter White starts out being decent, caring, concerned about his family’s future. By the end of the series, the family and its fate matters less and he is a full blown narcissist whose lust for power seems bottomless; in short he started good and ended totally evil. Don Draper, on the other hand, began untruthful and manipulative at the outset and by series end has joined the confused ’60s generation looking for alternative values.

Perhaps the most complex of these characters are Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings. Torn between idealized duty and belief as opposed to what is best for their children, these two characters seem to struggle between being practical and being believers. They disagree with one another about whether they are parents or patriots, citizens or sinners. Both are complex, have rich inner lives and fluctuate between doubt and duty. In their complexity, Elizabeth and Phillip seem exceedingly human and they know less at the end than they believed they knew at the beginning of the series.

At a meta-level, these series point out that story forms come with a particular set of expectations. A series such as Game of Thrones is in the end a morality tale about the ongoing struggle between good and evil. A series such as Boardwalk Empire is about the rise and fall arc of the gangster. He will have success, but in the end, will die in good part because of his deeds undertaken to affect his rise. These series occupy one of three spaces – our wishes, our lives, or our dreads. Audiences seek out and stay with particular series for one of these three reasons. On one level, such series interact, stimulate, inform, and indeed educate those areas of our minds and emotions.

Escapism

Whether one considers entertainment a distraction or a necessity, its value to viewers is indisputable. The popular arts have always included film and television. Often referred to as mass media, film and television could not have grown into national and international industries on the basis of their entertainment capacities. No brand encapsulates these values more than the Disney Company. It has grown on the basis of these values to a point that today, the company has secured Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar, all associated with positive, wish-fulfillment storytelling. Walt Disney would be proud that the values his small company represented 90 years ago has grown into the world’s largest and possibly greatest producer of escapist content.

Escapism comes in various forms. Homeland represents escapism that is closer to its audience’s real life. The main character is bi-polar and on medication, and the stories are ripped from today’s headlines. From the war on terror that has marked the time since 9/11 to an authoritarian President who poses a danger to the country, Homeland steers close to our lives. The fact that the main character and the President are women pushes gender issues into the principal subtext of the series.

Escapism also can be comfortably distant from our everyday lives. Game of Thrones, set in medieval times, where swords displace more lethal weaponry and where Kings and Queens are absolute in their power, displaces a modern era which flirts with absolution and clings to democracy. Sex, violence, and power connect us to modern times; however, Game of Thrones is distant enough for imagined enemies and powerful dragons to allow for easy identification and pleasurable conflicts. Escapism is in full flower in this series.

Catharsis

Together with escapism, story offers its viewers the opportunity for catharsis or remission of the anxieties and stresses in their lives. Walter White in Breaking Bad has financial issues, a young baby, and a disabled adolescent son. He also has, as the series begins, a cancer that is a serious threat to his life. He is easy to identify with and to care about. His real life stresses are reminiscent of the problems many face. As the series progresses and particularly in the early phase of his success in producing an illicit drug, life improves for him. His sense of relief brings a sense of relief to his viewers. This is what catharsis looks like.

Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings have a teenage daughter who finds solace in religion. Their struggle with this issue is deep because both are atheists by choice and political persuasion. They tell their daughter the truth about themselves, and she tells her minister. Suddenly the daughter’s honesty poses a threat to her parents’ life. For the Jenningses, their teenager is a source of threat, posing even greater anxiety for them. As they bring the minister into their confidence, the threat diminishes but never goes away. This represents a degree of catharsis for the two main characters in The Americans.

Engaging an audience

Escapism and catharsis depend upon the success of the audience’s relationship with the main character(s). There are multiple strategies the writer or director can use to engage us with the main character.

The easiest path to the audience connection is the likeability factor; however, not all main characters are likeable. In Game of Thrones, the writers position the weakest person within each family to be the most lik...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• SECTION I NARRATIVE
• SECTION II DIRECTING
• SECTION III EDITING
• SECTION IV THE STORYTELLING EXPERIENCE FROM BEGINNING TO END
• Glossary
• Index