Part one

Part one is a synthesis of all the research I did to support this project. There are sections on film studies, the history of storytelling, plot structure, theme and character analysis, cinematography and framing, and a host of other fascinating topics. Each section provides a useful lens through which to explore a film, as well as tips on how to apply it to the film in part 2. If you’d like to view a sample of part 1 in full-screen and read it for yourself, please click this button.

part two example

Developing part 2 was a rigorous exercise in “show, don’t tell,” as I had to select freeze frames of each scene that adequately explained what was happening, without the advantage of audio or text.

Pictured to the left is a scene from War for the Planet of the Apes, in which a new character, Bad Ape, is introduced.

At the bottom of some pages, whenever a major scene or setting change takes place, there’s a “movie bar code” with an arrow to show the reader where they are in the film. There is also a time code in the bottom right of every spread.

Dialogue Inserts

Dialog-heavy scenes, especially when there are only two characters, rely on what characters are saying more than what they are doing. Converting these scenes to this format would have resulted in a dozen pages of identical views and wouldn’t have conveyed any useful information to the reader. To solve this problem, I included half-page inserts with excerpts of the original script. I did this only for scenes where dialog was essential to understanding the plot.

Film analysis

A major component of the Long Story Short publication is the ability to gain a deeper understanding of a film through data analysis, infographics, and various types of inserts and overlays.

Being in the printed form gives readers access to the entire story all at once, with the freedom to jump around, instead of having to watch the entire thing. Various kinds of infographics, like the ones pictured here, can take advantage of this anachronistic point of view to reveal patterns and symmetry in the film’s structure.

The Story Clock

Of all the infographics I used in the book, the story clock is the most important. By plotting the events of a film on a circular axis, with the beginning and end at 12 o’clock, story clocks show plot structure and character development in a completely unique way. As mentioned above, being able to visualize a story all at once offers huge advantages in understanding, comparing, and even writing stories. Pictured here are three different stories analyzed through the story clock lens. A pdf version can be viewed by clicking this button.

repeatability

I envisioned Long Story Short as a series of books, with each issue diving into a different popular film. For this project, I explored three films of different genres to test the viability of the concept. Pictured to the right are the opening sequence of The Goonies.

Printing, prototyping, and fabrication

Early versions of the publication were envisioned as a “kit,” with each film as a separate booklet and part one as a companion book that can be referred to while flipping through a film.

In this scenario, several films are included in the publication, placing more emphasis on the comparison between stories.

Later versions were more about experiencing a single film, so the format was reduced to a single book. Part one became a chapter in the beginning, and the infographics were incorporated into and spread throughout part 2.