DIG!
Use the relationship between two bandleaders as the spine and let success create opposing pressure on each trajectory.
THE STORYTELLING PROBLEM
How do you shape years of chaotic access around subjects whose accounts and behavior continually shift?
THE STRUCTURAL SOLUTION
Use the relationship between two bandleaders as the spine and let success create opposing pressure on each trajectory.
STRUCTURAL MAP
Establish Parallel Careers and the central dramatic question
Teach the audience how to read the people, world and evidence
Expand the problem through vérité and archival
Let Ambition complicate the original premise
Change the meaning of information the audience already possesses
Resolve the emotional movement without overstating certainty
INFORMATION-RELEASE STRATEGY
The film establishes its central question early, then controls when each form of evidence can meaningfully answer or complicate it.
Information is valuable only when it changes the viewer's understanding of character, causality or consequence.
The ending resolves the film's emotional movement while preserving any uncertainty essential to the subject.
CHARACTER SYSTEM
The person or collective carrying the central dramatic movement
The force, institution, geography or internal condition restricting change
People who translate context and consequence
The character through whom the audience most clearly feels the stakes
EVIDENCE SYSTEM
Primary evidence carrying action and presence
Context and interpretation that changes meaning
A supporting form used for proof, texture or transition
METHODS IN THE FIELD
Use relationship as longitudinal spine
Years of footage cohere when a relationship provides the measuring line.
Let success divide trajectories
Success and failure reveal character most clearly when they arrive unequally.
Preserve contradictory self-mythology
Years of footage cohere when a relationship provides the measuring line.
Build chaos around recurring choices
Success and failure reveal character most clearly when they arrive unequally.
WHAT AN EDITOR CAN STEAL
01Years of footage cohere when a relationship provides the measuring line.
02Success and failure reveal character most clearly when they arrive unequally.
APPLY IT TO YOUR FILM
- What is the hardest storytelling problem in your material?
- Which structural form turns that limitation into an advantage?
- Does every kind of evidence have a distinct narrative job?
- Where does the audience's central question change?
- What uncertainty should the ending preserve?