Story Fanatic is now Narrative First
To mark the new year and a change in direction I’ve re-branded this special and unique story structure blog to Narrative First. The same old articles from the previous incarnation Story Fanatic are here. So are the same old movie reviews (now under the heading “analysis”). All the interesting discoveries and insights into the model of story as human psychology can still be found within these virtual pages…
…only now they exist under a banner of greater purpose.
Films come at too high a cost (both financially and personally) to allow for dysfunctional stories. Get the story working first. Craft a solid blueprint—making allowances for serendipity and creativity—and then start production.
No use wasting everyone’s time on a shoddy foundation.
Slight change in format
I’ve dropped the Concepts and Notes sections from before because the central Dramatica site (which I spent the last half of 2012 completely redesigning and recoding) scratches that itch for me. I’ve also dumped most, if not all, of the images (except those needed to explain a concept). The reason? Faster mobile access and a greater focus on the actual words. In addition, when it came time to do my yearly archiving of these articles into PDFs, I would spend hours and hours stripping those images away (for copyright reasons). Lastly, the process of actually preparing an article for publication involved so much work that often I would skip writing all-together.
Now, I have little excuse.
About the Author
I’ve spent the better half of two decades exploring and communicating to others all things Dramatica (or Narrative Science, whichever you prefer). This publication, Narrative First, provides hundreds of insightful articles while my class on Narrative Science at the California Institute of the Arts offers an introduction to the theory.
The first two decades of my professional career was spent animating for several different companies—Disney and Dreamworks to name a few—and I even had a chance to work with legendary Warner Bros. director Chuck Jones. I directed a couple episodes of Dilbert the TV show (that no one saw) and even managed to sell a treatment to Dreamworks (that probably will never see the light of day). The animation industry and the people working in it are awesome…I just wished some of the films had better stories.
And that’s why I write here.
I can be found @jameshull on Twitter or @jimhull on ADN (a much cooler and hipper version of Twitter). I’m also on Google +, but I can’t convince anyone to use it.
Colophon
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