Story Design Process

As with any film or television show, the story design process for an educational experience starts with an idea. That “idea” might be a longstanding 15 week course that you’re looking to rework or a it may be a new one-day workshop on digital literacy. The idea might also be a single class session that is one “episode” in a 22 session course. Whatever the idea of the learning experience is, the writer is often best served by doing some thinking and research into the who, what, where, when, why and how of the story of this learning experience.

The Board

In Save the Cat, Blake Snyder discusses the indispensability of “the board” for screenwriters:
“The Board is a way for you to “see” your movie before you start writing. It is a way to easily test different scenes, story arcs, ideas, bits of dialogue and story rhythms, and decide whether they work — or if they just plain suck. And though it is not really writing, and though your perfect plan may be totally abandoned in the white heat of actually executing your screenplay, it is on The Board where you can work out the kinks of the story before you start. It is your way to visualize a well-plotted movie, the one tool I know of that can help you build the perfect beast” (p. 100, 2005).
Snyder goes on to describe how you can use index cards (40, to be precise) to represent scenes of your film and arrange them in rows according to acts.

In Story Design, this notion of the board can be a useful place to start in developing the “idea” and elucidating the backstory of the educational experience. Whether using a board with index cards, a whiteboard with colored markers, a spreadsheet or word document, consider creating a board of your own for the educational experience you’re developing, and working through the following steps (and not necessarily in this order):

List all educational objectives/goals/learning outcomes – this may start with the overall course learning objectives and narrow down to specific tasks. For example, for an editing course, this could include “Understand shot relationships-Spatial, Rhythmic, Graphic, Associative, Temporal” to “Demonstrate ability to use the trimming tools in Adobe Premiere”.

List known background characteristics of the students/participants in the educational experience – what relevant knowledge can you be reasonably sure they’re entering with (as in the case of a course prerequisite, for example)? What demographic information do you have? Just as a writer will seek to “know” their characters by giving them as much shape and backstory as she can, an educator can similarly attempt to round out his understanding of who the “characters” will be in his class.

List ideas for projects, assignments and activities, from the largest multi-week project to the smallest in-class activity – some of these may be pre-determined, others could be kernels of ideas you heard from a peer or read in an article somewhere. At this point, your ideas needn’t have much shape or definition – it’s about getting them all down to see as a whole of possibility.

List support materials needed to effectively teach this – consider everything from books or online publications to a piece of software or technology. What videos or media will help? Is a subscription to a service like Netflix, Zoom or lynda.com valuable?

Is there existing curriculum? If so, is this predetermined or can you tweak it? If so, what other ideas do you have for subject matter? If the curriculum is a blank slate, start listing all the various relevant approaches you might take. For example, if I had free reign to teach a newly created Advanced Film Editing course, I would start by listing what I would consider advanced editing techniques that would not have been acquired or fully developed in previous courses, along with illustrative material, books, films, documentaries, regional experts, or national experts that could be brought in via video conference, project ideas (group and individual), weekly “themes”, and so on.

Looking at your lists, start to sort – what activity lends itself to which learning objective? What are some things you may need to offer as optional activities for some students due to a discrepancy in background knowledge? Is there a progression or structure that is starting to emerge in terms of assignments and when to introduce content? What activities require which materials? Is there a story coming through?

Obviously this process assumes a luxury of preparation time, which may or may not be the case for most, but it’s still a worthwhile starting point, even if only done in part to get some ideas down and help give shape to the next step, the logline.

“A log line or logline is a brief (usually one-sentence) summary of a television program, film, or book that states the central conflict of the story, often providing both a synopsis of the story’s plot, and an emotional “hook” to stimulate interest” (Brewer, 2014, retrieved on Wikipedia).

The logline is what you read in a newspaper or on IMDB.com next to the movie’s title. As the definition above describes. the logline does a lot of heavy lifting by conveying plot, conflict, characters and enough of each to stimulate interest. A few examples:

After his son is captured in the Great Barrier Reef and taken to Sydney, a timid clownfish sets out on a journey to bring him home. – Finding Nemo

Following the death of a publishing tycoon, news reporters scramble to discover the meaning of his final utterance. – Citizen Kane

When a criminal mastermind uses a trio of orphan girls as pawns for a grand scheme, he finds their love is profoundly changing him for the better. – Despicable Me

A struggling screenwriter inadvertently becomes entangled in the Los Angeles criminal underworld after his oddball friends kidnap a gangster’s beloved Shih Tzu. – Seven Psychopaths

A family is forced to live in silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound. – A Quiet Place

Blake Snyder gives the logline a lot of attention in Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. For him, the logline is about efficiency and tighter storytelling. He claims that “if you can learn how to tell me “What is it?” better, faster, and with more creativity, you’ll keep me interested. And incidentally, by doing so before you start writing your script, you’ll make the story better, too” (p.4, 2005). As the above examples illustrate, containing the story in one sentence is a formidable challenge, but all the more so for problematic stories. Movie execs (and many others) are firm believers that if you can’t condense the film into one engaging line, it’s a story not worth telling. Snyder goes on to describe four critical components of a well-crafted logline:

1. Irony – Irony is the hook. For example, A cop comes to L.A. to visit his estranged wife and her office building is taken over by terrorists – Die Hard. “Insisting on irony in your logline is a good place to find out what’s missing. Maybe you don’t have a good movie yet”(p.7, 2005)
2. A compelling mental picture – “You see the movie, or at least the potential for it, and the mental images it creates offer the promise of more”.
3. Audience and Cost – “a sense of who is it for and how much is it going to cost”
4. A killer title – “it must be the headline of the story” and, like the logline, contain irony.

Again, that’s a lot to ride on one sentence (well, a sentence and a title), and number three may not be as relevant at least in terms of cost, but certainly in the consideration of the audience. Having attempted to write loglines for both film/tv projects and educational experiences, I know that both can be equally challenging. I’ve also heard complaints from students about this being a reductive exercise (how could I possibly constrain the genius of my story to just one sentence?). But, like Snyder, I am a strong believer in the power of the logline, and perhaps more so in the process of creating the logline, to help you firm up the drama and structure of your story – whether that story plays out in a script or a classroom. This is why step two in the Story Design process is to draft a compelling logline by looking at the material from the Idea in step one. While the idea will inform the logline, once written, the logline will continue to give shape to the idea as it is fashioned into a structure.

The beat sheet, sometimes referred to as a step outline in screenwriting parlance, refers to the writing out of the main beats of a story, from beginning to end. This becomes the blueprint for the script. In Story Design, the beat sheet is essentially the outline of your educational experience, written as points in a narrative arc. Considering the beats of your story and the work you did in the idea stage, lay out the structure according to the following beats, as described in the Story Design structure page:

1. Opening Hook (+Recap)
2. Inciting Incident
3. Taking Action
4. Setbacks + Reflection
5. Synthesizing Action
6. Resolution
7. Final Image (+Preview)

Just as a film’s beat sheet doesn’t carry the detail of the film script, this Story Design beat sheet will not represent the play by play of an entire educational experience, but it provides the overview and framework necessary to hang the rest of your class content on. This is also another opportunity to fine-tune structure and the movement from beat to beat, which gets much more massaging in the narration stage.

Download a PDF Beat Sheet or Google Doc Beat Sheet worksheet.

With a beat sheet drafted, the narration stage is the opportunity to breathe a little more life and shape into your learning experience. This is the time to start drafting the specifics of the activities, to sketch out the details of the “plot development” segments that involve mini-lectures/presentations and to gather the materials needed for the finished lesson plan.

As the beats are given more shape, it’s important to continue to evaluate the arrangement of elements within them. This is where the techniques of film narration can be useful. Film scholar David Bordwell describes filmic narration as not a passive comprehending of story events on the part of the viewer, but a much more active process wherein the viewer co-constructs the story based on inferences made in response to material presented. He writes, “I take narration to be the process by which the film prompts the viewer to construct the ongoing fabula on the basis of syuzhet organization and stylistic patterning” (Bordwell, 2008).  In Bordwell’s use of the Russian formalists’ terms, “fabula, [is] the story’s state of affairs and events, and syuzhet, the arrangement of them in the narrative as we have it” (ibid). Another way to think of the distinction between the two is as plot and story, but the key part of this description is the active construction of meaning and comprehension on the part of the viewer, which is how a student in a story-designed class can become both character and co-author.

Plot and Story

A simple way to illustrate the difference between syuzhet (plot) and fabula (story) in a film’s narration is to consider that syuzhet is what we see while fabula is what we understand to have happened. For example, the fabula of Little Miss Sunshine includes Steve Carrell’s character Frank attempting suicide, but the film’s syuzhet begins after this event took place. In other words, it’s part of the story of the film and this character, but not part of the plot. So why distinguish between the two? Well, understanding narration in these terms allows for all sorts of creative storytelling applications. Choosing to omit some fabula elements in the syuzhet forces the audience to more actively construct the fabula based on the information given – it can be an engagement tool. In a classroom application, omitting some fabula information in your mini-lecture could then form the basis of a student activity. For example, if you describe two events that happened a week apart, where the first event directly caused the second event, but you don’t provide any of the fabula information that explains how event A led to event B, a student activity could be to do some research and try to posit how A caused B. And using cause and effect as an organizing principle, by the way, is a tried and true method of structuring narration in films (and all sorts of storytelling traditions).

Cause and Effect

Bordwell and Thompson have written at length about the tendency towards “tightly-woven” narration in Hollywood filmmaking. Tightly-woven films, they argue, have as a primary goal to achieve a “satisfying unity” (Bordwell, 2007). These narratives rely strongly on cause and effect relationships, where the selection of fabula (story) material to include in the syuzhet (plot) is driven by how indispensable that information or action is in terms of its causal connections. For example, if a scene could be lifted from a film without impacting our understanding of the story or of it’s characters, that is not a tightly-woven film (or sequence). Instead, every scene should be vital – scene 1 leads to scene 2 and so on. But it’s not always a direct cause and effect sequence. For example, as Bordwell states, “Hollywood script carpentry lays in conditions that will prove important later. But it’s not simply props that point forward: more common are what we call dangling causes. An unresolved action is presented near the end of one section that is picked up and pushed further in a later section. Every scene will tend to contain unresolved issues that demand settling further along” (2007). Likewise, one way to refine the story of an educational experience during the narration stage would be to scrutinize the beat sheet to see if all of the “beats” are vital and in an order that would prove most engaging. Or could some rearranging of these story elements allow for dangling causes? Could a little seed planted in the opening hook take root in another activity in the middle of the class, and bear fruit with a synthesizing activity nearer the end?

Consideration of an educational experience’s story as tightly-woven can also help you scope the content. For example, in the film history course I taught, I necessarily had to decide what films, historical events and elements of culture were appropriate to include – a difficult task when squeezing 120 years into 11 weeks. So, my choices were guided by a number of factors, including consideration of what should or should not be included in the “canon” of films to examine, but also what made sense given the plot-lines of technology driving film style, cycles of Hollywood influencing and being influenced by national cinemas, and key movements in the arts influencing film. Yes, this excludes some things, and yet still includes too much, but it also provides a path. It’s like a scriptwriter tasked with making a biographic film about a famous politician who has to consider what is “important” enough from this person’s life to include in the story? What even is the story of this person’s life? Hopefully those questions are answered during the Idea, Logline and Beat sheet stages, so that by the narration, you can decide the specifics. In an educational experience, this also includes the material content.

Gathering Materials

Part of determining what to include in the syuzhet (plot) of your educational experience involves determining what materials you’ll need. This can take the form of readings, books, media (film clips, infographics), assignments, guest speakers, and so on. The “stuff” that you’ll need to tell the story. Just as a film’s scenes are the plot choices that move a story forward, a class’ mini-lecture, or discussion activity, or survey can be crafted to do the same for your class’ story. And just as scenes and individual shots are constructed from all kinds of elements of mise-en-scene (the material “stuff” before the camera), so too are the elements of the course. The narration stage is where much time should be spent gathering, sorting and arranging all of these materials for greatest impact. Narration is about fixing these things in a structure for your educational experience.

The entrance into the third act of a film is what Blake Snyder refers to as the finale, “where we wrap it up. It’s where the lessons learned are applied. It’s where the character tics are mastered. It’s where A story and B story end in triumph for our hero. It’s the turning over of the old world and a creation of a new world order — all thanks to the hero, who leads the way based on what he experienced in the upside-down, antithetical world of Act Two” (p. 90). In the Story Design process, this is where, like our hero, the educator delivers the learning experience in some form, applying the lessons learned in the development of the story. This is the culminating moment where it all comes together.

The delivery could take a variety of forms. It may be the first time this particular workshop is offered to a community. It could be the teaching of the class session or the offering of a course. It could also be a “table read” or “test screening” of your learning experience where you offer it to a group of fellow educators or professionals so they can provide constructive criticism, where you have a chance to revise it before going wide to a larger audience. Regardless of what shape this takes, the critical part of the delivery stage is the presentation of the story, in its entirety, in whatever shape it exists. As with most things, we need practice and iterations of work to refine our material. Ask any teacher who’s taught the same subject or course a second, third or fourth time. We get better at it, and we feel like stronger storytellers with each telling. Likewise, ask any comedian who’s bombed the same joke repeatedly before getting the structure and timing just right to have it start getting laughs. And as much time as we can spend in the previous stages, we really don’t know the story of our educational experience until we have to tell it at least once.

A story’s third act typically involves the tying up of loose ends, where characters are often afforded the chance to reflect on their journey and how far they’ve come or how much they’ve grown and changed as a result of their achieving of goals. Likewise, Story Design’s third act builds this step in after the delivery as a means to reflect on the efficacy of the learning experience. This stage could include formal assessment through looking at test or assignment scores produced by students, or feedback submitted by the participants. This type of assessment is built in to many instructional design frameworks, but what isn’t always accounted for is the opportunity for the educator to assess their experience as storytellers. Because Story Design from the start is balancing a dual purpose of providing well-designed experiences for participants with satisfying experiences for the educators, so too should the assessment stage provide opportunity to reflect on both of these aspects.

Participant Assessments:

• Assignment rubric
• Evaluations/Surveys
• Artifact assessment
• Test scores

Educator Assessment:

• Reflective writing exercise (reflecting on what felt satisfying/dissatisfying, what felt like it worked/didn’t work)
• What do I need to learn more about in order to better guide students?
• What could I add to make this more satisfying for me?

Collecting this kind of assessment material from students or oneself as the educator is one step, considering what to do with it is the second key part of this.

• Where did I “lose” people in the story of this learning experience (lose interest, confuse, overwhelm)?
• Structurally speaking, are there elements that could be rearranged, omitted, or added to make this a more tightly-woven story?
• Did the chosen technology serve the story or muddy the waters?
• Did the story provide satisfying clarity where characters reached their goals? If not, why not?

Based on the evidence and material gathered during the assessment and reflection stage, the revision stage simply asks the educator to outline a plan to revise the learning experience as needed. For example, if the surveys and conversations revealed that participants just didn’t really grasp the main idea, it’s probably a good idea to revisit the idea and logline stage and start back from there, proceeding through the subsequent stages. If, instead, participants were mostly engaged but just felt like there were some moments where interest waned, plan on revisiting the beat sheet or narration stage to look at how to tighten the story and re-evaluate the connective threads of cause and effect.

While it’s tempting to go right from assessment/reflection to tinkering with the specific elements that students commented on, or that you just didn’t feel went well, it’s important to take the time to develop a more wholistic plan to revising the educational experience. As someone who’s spent a lot of time at the editing station cutting together documentaries, I’ve seen many cases where shots or scenes have felt awkward and the quick fix might have been to simply remove the offending shots, but sometimes you remove important or interesting material along with it. Many times I’ve found the answer lied in rearranging the structure – changing where a shot fell, or swapping the order of a couple scenes – and suddenly things came into sharper focus and the story just flowed. Likewise, ineffective course content may not be the wrong content, it might just be in the wrong place. That’s why having a revision plan, even if that plan is simply “go back to the beat sheet”, is an important step to providing some perspective in your approach.