The Story Spectrum: Poets and Engineers

‘The Story Spectrum’ narrative development framework is based on years of experience teaching practical filmmaking at some of the top film schools in the world and supervising hundreds of short films and narrative exercises.’

INTRODUCTION (excerpt from the book)

I have been asked - or provoked - to write this – so here you go. Please feel free to completely disagree. As we are being inundated with bland horrors, thrillers and other (mostly) illiterate nonsense maybe someone somewhere will find this useful...

So, let’s start with the basics...

Anything that you will find in the books by Alexander Mackendrick, Robert McKee or Lajos Egri is true. They are truly great books. They explain how to extract emotion, how to structure your text, and how not to be boring!

This book will try to answer a number of questions: How do I find a short fi lm in me? And once I have found it, how do I get it ready for the scrutiny of a film camera?

But the fundamental question is: What kind of filmmaker am I today and what kind of filmmaker do I want to be tomorrow?

So I suppose more than anything this is a coaching manual, which targets young filmmakers whose primary purpose is to become a new kind of filmmaker: An engineer with a heart.

Someone who is strong technically and better at engineering stories than anyone else. Someone who at the same time is sensitive and loves telling stories for the sake of telling them.

I am not going to offer useful physical exercises, neither am I going to advocate meditation (useful!) as others have done before me.

Instead, I would like to take you on a brief journey of discovering a short film inside of YOU.

I will try to keep it colloquial and simple, avoiding the usual screenwriting jargon as you can find it everywhere else.

1But one more thing, before you buckle up and push off: you really must love telling stories.

I mean that in the most sincere way possible. You must feel like you were born to tell stories and you must know deep down that there is nothing in your life that will fulfil you until you tell a really successful story on the big screen.

That is the goal of everything that is said throughout this book.