Pixar’s Rules of Storytelling (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Pixar’s Rules of Storytelling (2013)

aerogrammestudio.com

117 pointsjoubert25 comments

--Brian McDonald added that in the original story spine tweet a step was actually left out. The final step should be "And ever since that day…" As Brian says, the list ‘keeps getting copied with this missing step and it’s an important step.’

http://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2013/03/22/the-story-spine-p...

Holy shit, tip number 5, "Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.", is so absolutely true here in the world of software development (replace characters with features / bugs). They never taught me this in school, but from real life experience the best bugs / fix / solution you can come up with when you're trying to solve the problem is almost always inferior to the one you just sort of stumble across in the wild much later on.

I am confused by your reference to bugs in the form of storytelling? Or characters in relation to Software Engineering.

It does sound a bit like the KISS principle[0] and the UNIX design philosophy[1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

Maybe it makes more sense with "user stories"?

> Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

This one made me laugh. I hate it when stories violate this one

and it's why I wasn't a fan of Toy Story 3. They get saved at the climax by coincidence

50 million Tolkien fans can't be wrong

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucatastrophe

Which is how Stephen King ends almost every book. He writes characters better than almost everyone I know but almost every one of his books ends with some weird coincidence that saves the day.

Pixar is miraculous.

Their incredible technology is integrated into beautiful storytelling so that what matters is not the ray tracing, global illumination, server farms, petabytes and GHz:

It's the characters.

The same applies to Games, and pretty much everything with technology as well. People are generally too focused on Ghz, SuperHigh Pixel Density, memory speed or what so ever.

What's important is the soul of the product, the story, the character, the user experience. After all these years I am still amazed that so few people failed understand this.

> People are generally too focused on Ghz, SuperHigh Pixel Density, memory speed or what so ever.

There are different people. Most of those who are interested in gaming from those whom I know are interested in the story first. Naturally such people usually like RPG and adventure genres where story is the key element of the game.

Ed Catmull, Co-Founder of Pixar, wrote a great book about building and running creative businesses in general, and Pixar in particular[1]. Well worth a read.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspi...

I wish I had this before I started on my novel:

Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

You're missing the final step: "And ever since then, ____." Read his other posts.

Adding on this.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone's rule for story telling : "Every new plot point should be connected to the last with either a "but" or a "therefore"."

Eg:

Cartman wanted to go to Casa Bonita BUT he was dick to Kyle and wasn't invited. THEREFORE Cartman fakes kindess to win him over, BUT Kyle sees through it. THEREFORE...

Amazing how many of these points are good advice for new founders too.

#14 (why must YOU found this business?) is one I use a lot to reality-check

These are great rules. I was thinking they are also quite nice for game design/story rules.

Wow, this is VERY helpful. Thank you for sharing!

The only rule of story telling: Don't tell other people the rules of storytelling.

Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.

She's right. We've been wasting out lives. Aw, To hell with cartoons. I'm going to do what I always dreamed of -- I'm going to write that sitcom about the sassy tropical fish.

Seriously, guys. They're well-crafted kids movies with predictably intervaled adult jokes inserted as a sop to the parents. The advice ranges from the sophomoric to the nattily aphoristic, but I can't see much that can be applied in a practical sense. "Make it better" sums it up just as usefully.

There are plenty of deeper adult themes in Pixar movies, not just sops; classifying them as 'kids movies' is a mistake.

I found this particular point a bit strange as well. We have the same kind of rule in startup land (e.g. "only work on a problem you are truly passionate about") but there are plenty of just fine and successful startups which solve relatively boring/uninspiring problems.

That really spends on the movie. I don't feel like Ratatouille is really a kids movie nor is The Incredibles. I'd even argue Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are pretty adult. I could certainly relate to Woody's feeling scared of the shiny new hire (TS1) or his being lured to probably the wrong job (TS2). Up seems like an adult movie with stuff added for kids vs the opposite. So did Wall.E IMO. Lots of parents found Saving Nemo very close to their hearts (not a parent so not one of my favs).

Cars, on the other hand ......

I'm not a huge fan of Pixar either, they're always so by-the-book -- just like these storytelling rules here. Even Disney in the '60s was taking much larger risks in feature animation.

The weird thing about some of Pixar's better movies is that there seems to be a lovely short film at the core, and then it's wrapped into a forgettable Saturday-morning plot to pad out the feature length. Wall-E and Up come to mind as particular examples.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com