Captivate Your Audience: A Guide to Classic Storytelling for Everyone

1. Introduction: Why become a better storyteller? Well, storytelling is one of humanity's most powerful essential tools, a deeply ingrained way of making meaning and sharing our lives. So learning to become a better storyteller will empower you to engage more deeply with people in any field and your personal life. One piece of advice I received early on in my career was that as a filmmaker, the main thing I should pursue is having a story to tell and I've taken that advice to heart ever since. And it has changed and continues to change my life for the better. Being able to tell a great story will be more valuable than the most expensive camera or the most advanced editing technique. So in this course, you'll be introduced to fundamental and broadly applicable storytelling principles and techniques that can empower you to elevate your content, brand, or business by creating authentic, engaging and meaningful stories. Great storytelling will strengthen your connection with your audience and make them keep coming back for more. We'll do this first by learning classic storytelling fundamentals that have stood the test of time. And then armed with that, we'll talk about how to apply them to our personal stories. By applying and practicing what you learn here, you'll be able to tell your own life and business stories in a way that hopefully will captivate your audience. This course is designed to be easily consumed casually yet still full of ideas to inspire you to take action. So it's ideal for a broad range of creatives, entrepreneurs, and hobbyists at any skill level. I've paired it with an easily doable, refinable and expandable class project that you can tailor to your specific skill set. Ultimately, it's my hope that this simple course will help give you a voice that matters in today's social media landscape. So with that, I hope you're excited to get into it. Let your story begin. 2. Class Project: Class project will be to apply the principles and techniques you've learned to create any one or more of the following a written story outline following the guide questions given in the lessons of a personal story, a written story in prose or video script of the same story, a long or short form video telling that story, an Instagram carousel or photo essay telling the story with a short caption to give context, or even a series of illustrations that tell the story. The written outline will serve as the base for any medium you wish to apply it to even beyond those mentioned earlier. But you may opt to simply submit the written outline, and then we can work through it to refine it, and you may translate this to any medium, whether now or in the future. Given the easy nature of this class project, I highly encourage you to submit one so that we can really drill down on your understanding of what you've learned. So with that, let's dive into the main course. See you there. 3. Why Stories Matter: Hello again. I'm Erin Pala Bab, filmmaker and content creator, and welcome to captivate your audience, Evergreen storytelling principles and techniques for everyone. So why does storytelling matter? Why does it matter more than using the best camera or having the flashiest visual effects? We know this instinctively, but maybe we don't really think about how and why it works. To start off, think of the difference between your typical piece of content like on YouTube and your typical high quality TV or streaming series. Do you notice how often we skim or fast forward YouTube videos until we get to the relevant parts or drop out altogether in the middle, or, you know, just have them playing in the background? While, for a good TV show, we're usually hooked from the beginning and don't feel an entire hour go by and can't resist afterwards binge watching every episode until we reach the end. Now, is that just because TV shows and movies have a big budget? But you can name tons of movies and shows that had huge budgets and were boring. The secret really lies in how these TV shows and movies have mastered the art of storytelling, luring you in with an enticing premise, and then keeping you hooked with satisfying but unpredictable events that build on one another until reaching a satisfying conclusion. A mistake many of us make when making content is failing to create any sort of hook to lure the audience in to watch and then make them stay until the end. And with the infinite amount of content out there, how can we engage with the viewer so that those who discover us stay and come back for more? Of course, I think the answer is we need to tell a story if we want to reach people's hearts. And good storytelling can be learned. Artful storytelling is taking the raw unprocessed events in your life and weaving them together into a compelling narrative that not only excites and entertains, but also in the process teaches profound truths about life. Now, this is something we're deeply wired for. Stories are equipment for living, as critic Kenneth Burke says. Screenwriting Guru Robert McKee says that story is humanity's prime source of inspiration as it seeks to order chaos and gain insight into life. Our appetite for story is a reflection of the profound need to grasp the patterns of living. Story is our primary mode of entertainment and education. Textbooks and instructional videos, except this one, are boring and dry. But when someone tells you a story, you stay because you have to know what happens next. You want to know how it ends up because instinctively, you need to learn how a human being like you got through that. Or if they didn't, you can learn from their mistakes. We hunger for stories of people just like us, who overcame the odds to reach their goals so that we can learn how to do the same. Now, all the technical skills you can learn can be employed to make a visually beautiful film or video. But without some kind of story, it can end up feeling hollow and uninteresting. Now, this at heart isn't complicated. It's the most natural thing to us. We tell stories all the time every day. We process the events of our daily lives in the form of stories consciously and subconsciously. Our minds are basically wired to make stories out of what happens to us because through stories, we create our identities and ultimately the meaning that makes life worth living. So when you think of the old saying that everything happens for a reason, what it's actually saying is that this unfortunate or painful event will not be the end of my story. I'm going to make it mean something else by making it part of another more positive story. In short, to tell stories really is to give order, meaning and purpose to our lives and life in general. Of course, it takes study and practice to get good at doing it in the medium of film and books and other art forms. But don't worry. We're not trying to write the Godfather or any kind of complicated narrative here. We just want to make our stories interesting and relevant so that our audience and we ourselves can come away with something worthwhile. So I hope you're convinced it's a worthwhile journey to become a good storyteller. And yes, I'm still learning to do this better every day. In this lesson, you learn the importance and impact of great storytelling. In the next lesson, I'll give you the fundamental macro level secrets to knowing you've got a good story. 4. Picking Your Subject: In the previous lesson, you learned the importance of great storytelling. In this lesson, I'll talk about how to choose a good story to tell, one that will most likely generate the interest of an audience. Think about this. When someone tells you there's been an accident, you need to know what happened, or you hear gossip about some bad behavior at work. You need to know the rest, and if this person got punished for it or your friend met a new guy the other day, then what? Each of these seemingly mundane stories represents some deep belief we need confirmed or if not, then we need to know why it went wrong and learn from it. In the example of the accident story, I think we want to believe that bad things shouldn't happen to us. And our need to know comes from, of course, caring for other people, but we also want to know what to avoid and how the people survived, for example. The bad behavior story at work speaks to our sense of justice. We need it to be served. We need the good guys to win because that's the world we want to believe we live in. The budding love story speaks to our belief in true love, and seeing our friend get it is a way of affirming to the universe that this is what we all deserve. So, in other words, the power of a story doesn't lie in what we think of the storyteller or even of the characters in the story. It lies in how we think of ourselves and in the invisible beliefs and laws of nature that govern our lives. In other words, a good story is not about you. It's about them. It's about all of us. So when thinking of how to tell a good story, start with this question. How do I make it matter to the audience? Even if it's not obvious on the surface. We are naturally curious creatures. We can't help it. So setting up a story in a way that makes the audience feel that it's about them will make them need to know how it turns out. For film professionals, finding the core relevance of the story, answering why this story has to be told and why now determines whether or not someone like Netflix or Big Studio will produce or buy the film. And now this isn't simply about choosing the right topic, but finding the essential quality that will make that story idea matter to its intended audience. That's why, for example, one reliable way to make a Netflix documentary is to make it about someone very famous or who was once very famous. It couldn't be simpler. There is already so much interest and curiosity about this person to begin with, that there's guaranteed viewership. And even better, no one really gets to that level of fame without a good deal of drama along the way. And yet this drama will usually have been suppressed or completely hidden during the height of their fame. So this combination of existing interest, high drama, and learning what really happened is dynamite, nearly a sure buy for a studio like Netflix, and by extension, its audience. Conversely, this is why skilled filmmakers who want to fight for a cause choose to tell stories about people who don't have a voice, who nobody knows about. Telling their story well is a powerful way to get a large number of people to care about an issue that few people knew about before. That's the power of a great documentary. And one of my favorite recent examples of this is the Oscar nominated 2022 documentary All That Beaths a gorgeous film from India, about two brothers fighting to save Black kites, a type of bird of prey, as they regularly fall out of the sky due to the pollution in New Delhi in India. If you just told me randomly to care about a public health issue about birds I've never heard about in a distant country, I might say, Well, what's that got to do with me? But the way this story is told as a noble but losing battle for two brothers who are struggling to even make ends meet, paired with its beautiful cinematography, moved me deeply. You know, not all of us may care as much about birds as the next person, but we're all wired to root for the brave, noble underdog doing good because it's good, caring for the defenseless, even when it seems impossible. And again, it's because we want the world we live in to be one that rewards good people. So as you can see, it's not just about who or what a story is about, but about finding the universal core of truth that will make us care about it, whether it's about the most famous people on the biggest stages in the world or unseen people in the most faraway places. But just having the right subject isn't enough to make your story sing. In the next lesson, we'll talk about perhaps the most essential quality of a good story. 5. Setups and Payoffs: In the previous lesson, we talked about how to pick a good subject for a story. In this lesson, we'll talk about what makes a story captivating. Accurately recounting an event is not a story. It's a report. A story is taking this raw story stuff, the event that objectively happens in real life, and then reorganizing it to hold an audience's interest and create some meaning from those events. The goal of this reorganization is to build anticipation and curiosity and then reward it in the end in an emotionally satisfying way that implies some kind of lesson. Applied to real life events, this should ideally be done without sacrificing the truth or for contentious controversial events while representing various viewpoints. You'll know a story is working when you just need to know what happens next. Notice this the next time you watch, for example, a typical vlog, which is usually just a raw ish documentation of someone's day compared to a good TV series. Which one is more likely to hold your attention effortlessly for an hour? And why is that? Again, it's not because of production value. A storyteller captures your attention by setting up a conflict in the beginning of the story that cannot be resolved easily. And the story then consists of the hero called the protagonist trying to resolve this conflict and grow as a person in the process. But at every stage, they will encounter obstacles in their way that will test their abilities and moral character. Basically, protagonists are constantly getting out of the frying pan and into the fire, and then into a bigger fire until they figure out how to put out those fires for good. But it's not just about throwing a bunch of random obstacles in their way. It's about making each of these feel like they lead from one to the next. We have to feel like the protagonist has deserved to progress to the next level at every stage. And this is why the element of personal growth is central to a traditional heroic story. Conversely, when we watch something that loses our interest, it's usually because events follow one another in a way that feels undeserved, random, or downright illogical. Tocot picks's own story rules. Coincidence to get characters into trouble are great. Coincidences to get them out of it are cheating. In these cases, we feel like the writer has decided a plot point should occur because they wanted it to or needed it to get to the next plot point so that they can get to their action set piece, for example. Tons of shows are guilty of this underscoring just how much talent, work, and time it takes to do well. The brilliant YouTube series pitch meeting by Ryan George is one of the funniest places to get critiques of movies and shows that run afoul of this. His most famous catchphrase, actually, it was super easy, barely an inconvenience is really about this undeserved progression through the plot, about obstacles that end up being meaningless, a setup with no payoff. The art of storytelling in this sense, is a topic that spans several books and subtopics. But this gem from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone sums it up well enough. You don't want to connect two story beats, as we call them with and then where one event just follows another because I say so. Two beats should be linked by therefore or but and that, my friends, is all you need to know about storytelling at a macro level. Now, go ahead and write one. I'm half joking. We'll get into how that works, but we'll leave it off there for now. In this lesson, you learn that a good story makes you need to know what happens next, and it does this by placing a series of obstacles in a protagonist's way that feel like they progressively lead from one to another. In the next lesson, we'll dig into just how well this works by looking at a textbook example of classic storytelling, the movie Star Wars Episode four A New Hope. 6. Setups and Payoffs Case Study: In the previous lesson, we learned on a macro level how writers make a story captivating. In this lesson, we'll break it down with the textbook example of Star Wars Episode four A New Hope. Remember from the last lesson from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the two story beats should be connected by therefore or but. Now, let's see how this applies to Star Wars, which I hope you've watched. So the story begins with the protagonist farm boy Luke Skywalker, who's an orphan living with his uncle and aunt basically in the middle of nowhere. But then Ben Kenobi, a wise old space wizard, through a series of prior events unknown to Luke, finds him, and he tries to convince Luke that he's meant for greater things, revealing that he's the son of a Jedi, aforementioned space wizard, who went astray. Ben invites him to fulfill his potential by learning the ways of the force, kind of a mysterious space power. And then leaving this planet to help the Princess Lea fight the evil empire, the antagonists, by delivering an important message to her home planet of Alderan. But Luke, understandably, doesn't want any part of this big galactic drama. And he says, No. But as he drives Ben out to go on this mission alone, the Empire's storm troopers murder his uncle and aunt, and nothing is left for him now. Therefore, he joins Ben and leaves for Alderan. But before they get there, the Empire's Death Star battle station blows up Alderan. Therefore, when they exit hyperspace, they find not a planet, but a perilous asteroid field that they must weave their way through. They survived, but they're captured on board the Death Star. But they don't know it yet. In the Death Star are both the Princess and the main bad guy, Darth Vader. And even worse, Princess Lea is about to be executed. So I hope you pardon my verbal retelling of the story. I can't actually show you the movie in the course. But basically, at this point, we know that stuff's about to go down, and there's no turning back. The stakes are high, and something has to give. And, okay, I know I'm missing a lot of details like Han Solo. But the point is, see how things have snowballed for our main character in a believable, logical way. Even though sci fi and fantasy don't play by the rules of the real world, they must still have an internal coherence, basically unspoken constraints on what can and can't happen. And the original Star Wars trilogy manages this really well. The characters actions seem justified, and when things do just happen to them, like the asteroid field, it feels believable, not random. In fact, the plot points have a feeling almost of inevitability due to the actions and desires of the various characters on both sides. And that is why we say that we weave a story because it's all about taking all of those elements of actions, motivations and the occasional coincidence and making them all fit together believably in the original Star Wars and basically all great stories, what the writers have done is set up several intertwined questions and conflicts that must now be paid off later in the story. Like, will Ben Kenobi confront Darth Vader, and what will happen? Who is Darth Vader? Will Luke and Han be able to rescue Princess Lea? Can they ultimately prevent the seemingly invincible death star from crushing the rebellion, destroying all of these planets? Basically, it's the deft use of setups and payoffs that separates great from average storytelling. And as the old saying goes, a good storyteller gives the people what they want, but not what they expect. Keep disappointing audiences with predictable or lame or no payoffs, and they will stop watching. Netflix are masters of this style of storytelling, and their consistency is proof that this is a replicable skill. They know that at the end of every episode, fiction or documentary, you will need to watch the next one. They always use the classic cliffhanger, setting up a tension that can only be paid off by the next episode. Keep in mind, though, that the more you set up, the more pressure there is to have a satisfying payoff that can tie all of these loose ends together. The show lost, for example, pioneered this mystery box approach, hooking you in with a bevy of bewildering set ups and crazy mysteries. But in the end, it turned out to be more than they could properly pay off. In fact, there is a name for when a story sets up a seemingly hopeless situation and then suddenly solves it with an unexpected power or event that fixes everything without intervention from the protagonist. It's a Duce ex machina. It comes out of nowhere with no setup, and you hate this because it's lazy and a waste of all of this built up tension. Like, imagine if at the end of Star Wars, instead of Luke learning to trust the force to destroy the death star, super powerful Jedi we'd never heard of prior to all of this just shows up out of nowhere and blows up the death Star with his powers. That would have been terrible. On another note, Game of Thrones was this phenomenon because its source material, the Song of Ice and Fire Books by George R. Martin subverted the use of payoffs. You were set up to expect the good guys winning despite the odds, as they do in pretty much all heroic medieval fantasy. But instead, they rug pulled you with brutal, medieval realism, which was especially at the time, shocking. Yet all of this still felt deserved in the context of the story. And they did give you moments every now and then when the payoffs were what you hoped for, but it only set you up for more pain later on. But then when the show runners ran out of source material, guess what happened. They tried to pay off years and several books worth of setup in one rushed season. And the result was so bad that the show went from cultural phenomenon to complete irrelevance overnight. That's how important good payoffs are. In this lesson, you learn that a captivating story is constructed to progressively build tension and hold an audience's curiosity, then pay it off in a satisfying way. In the next lesson, we'll go classical as we begin to learn the classic three act story structure that Hollywood loves, known as the Hero's Journey. 7. The Hero's Journey 1: The Ordinary World: The previous lesson, you learned the fundamental qualities of good storytelling. In this lesson, we'll frame that with the classic three act structure of many of our great movies, books, and myths called The Hero's Journey, beginning with Act one. Pretty much every Hollywood screenwriter learns the hero's journey. By employing this structure, we have kind of a guide to tell inspiring stories of personal growth and triumph over adversity. This structure, also called the monomyth was popularized by comparative mythology professor Joseph Campbell in his book, A Hero with Thousand Faces. Inspired by the commonalities between the heroes of myth across many cultures, the hero's journey distills the progression of a classic adventure. Many of our classic movies and books like, again, Star Wars, Harry Potter, the Matrix, the Lord of the Rings, they follow it in part or in full. You'll see it in comic book movies, Disney and Pixar, Inception, Interstellar, Top Gun, and even something crazy on the surface, like everything everywhere all at once. Now, for this lesson, I'm going to be showing you the 12 stage writers journey by Christopher Vogler, adapted from Cambo'sOiginal 17 stages. These are the ordinary world, the refusal of the call, meeting the mentor, crossing the threshold, tests, allies and enemies, the approach, the ordeal, the reward, the road back, the resurrection, and finally, the return. Now, we don't actually need to, like, break down and dive deep into every stage for this course, because what we need to understand is the overall flow. This is basically how it goes. You have your protagonist living their ordinary life, but they need something, even if they might not be aware of it yet. They're living below their potential. So something or someone finds them and calls them to an adventure that they resist at first, like how Luke Skywalker refused to join OB one. They don't want to leave behind the familiar ordinary world, even if they're not really happy in it. Think of Harry Potter in the cupboard under the stairs, not knowing his true power. Think of Mr. Anderson in the Matrix, a computer hacker being pursued by mysterious forces, not knowing his ordinary world is all a lie. There is someone they need to become so that they can be happy and free. Harry, we know now, is a wizard. And Mr. Anderson is the one Neo. The call to adventure is the gateway to achieving that change. Now, the objective of this quest should be something essential. On it could depend their happiness, their very lives, and all the way to the fate of the world or the whole multiverse. The point is the stakes must be high or else there is no dramatic tension. In a well written story, the hero's journey to saving the universe is tightly intertwined with their transformation into their better selves. Now, the event that disrupts the routine of their daily life and pushes them into the adventure is called the Inciting Incident. For Luke Skywalker, it's the murder of his aunt and uncle. For Neo, it's his first run in with the agents, which pushes him eventually to take the red pill from Morpheus. And so the hero crosses the threshold out of their ordinary world into the special world of the adventure, as Luke Skywalker did when he left Tatooine with Obi, when Harry Potter board in the Hogwarts Express, and when Mr. Anderson wakes up from the matrix into the actual real world. And that is the end of Act one. In this lesson, you were introduced to the hero's journey, the three act structure, underpinning our classic heroic stories. In the next lesson, we'll get into Act two, where the real adventure happens. 8. The Hero's Journey 2: The Adventure: In the previous lesson, you were introduced to the hero's journey, the three act structure of classic heroic stories and myths. In this lesson, we'll continue our discussion as we dive into Act to the main Adventure. So, in between our hero, and the fulfillment of their quest and their ultimate transformation, there is a lot standing in their way, a set of obstacles or tests. Usually, it's another person or group of people, but it could also be a natural phenomenon, an animal or all of the above and their own selves on top of all that. Now, remember, it's this element of needing to complete a quest and not knowing whether it can be done that really keeps view invested. Can Frodo travel the vast distance and overcome overwhelming odds to destroy the one ring in Mordor? Can Luke Skywalker, simple farm boy, fulfill his destiny, embrace his power, and thwart the empire's plans to use the seemingly indestructible death star? Let's try a different genre in the comedy the hangover. Can the boys retrace their steps despite their total memory loss and be able to piece together what the heck happened the night before so that they can find their friend Doug in time for his own wedding? We don't have to be dealing with big sci fire fantasy plot devices. It could be as simple as you, trying to figure out how to continue your travels after missing your train, making you flustered enough to then lose your wallet. And now you need to make your way with no money and without speaking the local language. You'll start off a nervous wreck, not knowing what to do. But to save your trip, you'll need to call on your courage, equanimity, and resourcefulness to a degree that maybe you didn't even know you had. Whenever something doesn't go according to plan, you have the seeds of a story. And I have a great example of a real life adventure that follows the hero's journey later on in the course. But going back to the hero's journey, our hero isn't equipped to win yet at this point, or else there would be no tension. In video game terms, they need XP, experience points that they can get only by passing the tests that make up Act two. But in facing these tests, they won't be alone. They'll get help from friends and mentors along the way. So you have Obi Wan and the Droids, Han Solo. You have Gandalf and Samoas Gamji and other hobbits. You have Hagrid Dumbledore, Hermione, and Ron and so forth. And then you have Morpheus, Trinity, the Oracle. These are all examples of allies and mentors. Act two is really where all the fun and games happen in your story. But in a well written story, this isn't just all empty spectacle. Every challenge should also advance the hero's growth, drive the story forward logically, and plant the seeds for a satisfying climax or twist in Act three. A great example of this is the role Golum plays in the second act of the Lord of the Rings. He goes from foe to friend, and then spoiler alert, betrays Frodo and Sam as we transition to Act three, making us wish they had never given him a chance in the first place. And yet, at the very end, he has a pivotal role to play in saving the day. And this wasn't just a twist for its own sake, as it showed Frodo's and Sam's true character, their true heroism and taught a lesson about compassion. But anyway, soon enough, our hero and his or her allies will have gained the strength, knowledge, and powers they needed to finally face off against the final foe, the big bad. And this usually involves a final approach to the bad guys lair. And that brings us in the next lesson to the finish in Act three. 9. The Hero's Journey 3: The Climax: In the previous lesson, we covered Act two of the Hero's Journey, where all the fun and games took place. In this lesson, we'll wrap it up with Act three. So by now, our hero has gained enough XP to get close to their goal, approaching the final cave or lair or warehouse to face one final showdown the last boss, a final ordeal to overcome. Welcome to Act three. It's time for the confrontation between our hero and what they feared the most. The tension should build up to a crescendo at this moment, leading to an overwhelming sense of anticipation mixed with dread. For the tension to remain high, we must still have reason to doubt whether our hero can actually pull it off. Say, Frodo is ready to fling the wandering into Mount Doom, but he's exhausted and vulnerable to its power, and the audience knows that Glum is lurking. Luke Skywalker takes his wing to the death star in what appears to be a suicide mission with little chance of success. Neo and his friends are betrayed by cipher, putting them at a serious disadvantage in the final confrontation. Now, the important thing is that the hero should win not because the writer said so, but because they've made it so that the hero's worthiness and ensuing victory feel deserved. They've overcome the obstacles, learn from their mistakes, and gained the powers, weapons, allies, and knowledge that they need to win. And not just that, but they'll usually have shown a measure of compassion, wisdom or faith, as well. Luke Skywalker learning to trust in the force and succeed in blowing up the Death Star had to be earned, and it even took the sacrifice of Obi one Kenobi. In other words, the hero is transformed not merely by this ultimate victory, but by everything that came before it. But we're not yet done. When the enemy is vanquished, the hero must embark on the road back. This is the classic Indiana Jones escaping from the crumbling temple moment. They may even appear to die in the process sacrificing themselves for the goal, but they earn a resurrection for their efforts, which is exactly what happens to Neo at the climax of the matrix. And so, finally, they return to life in their ordinary world, but enriched by their adventure and changed for good. In this part, the epilogue will glimpse how they're a new person in a renewed world. Harry Potter, now a great wizard. Luke Skywalker, by the end of the trilogy, has gone from Farm Boy to the Galaxy's greatest Jedi. And Neo has literally cracked the coat to the Matrix, becoming a savior where he was once a victim. Now that we've gone through the hero's journey, doesn't this sound familiar from all the stories you've read and the movies you've watched? But now you might ask, I so many stories follow this structure, won't they all seem the same? Isn't this a formula, and as such, something we want to avoid? But I would say no. The reason stories follow this isn't because all stories are the same. This pattern exists because it's a mirror for how we process life experiences, triumph over adversity, and hard won personal growth. And that's why it can be found across many different cultures dating back to ancient times. And moreover, you don't even need to stick to every stage to the letter in your own stories which play out more randomly and hopefully with less drama than a movie. But keeping this in the back of your mind, you'll be aware of the necessity for conflict, uncertainty, buildup, and earned victory that make a story both satisfying and illuminating. Furthermore, you have to know the rules before you break them if you want to subvert expectations like Game of Thrones did. What Game of Thrones did so well was to make us expect a heroic victory against the odds, only to turn it on its head in the most shocking but still logical way. This was completely against the rules of heroic high fantasy, leaving us to pick up the pieces in a senseless, cruel world. Anyway, that's it for your introduction to the hero's journey. And now it's time for a bit of homework. I'm going to ask you to watch a classic heroic movie like Star Wars, a comic book movie, the Lord of the Rings, the Matrix, Inception, Disney and Pixar films, et cetera, et cetera. Now, pick something you already know well to make this easy. And what I want you to do is analyze how it follows the hero's journey. Now, you don't need to do a step by step breakdown because every movie does this a little differently. Instead, I've borrowed the Art of documentaries story Canvas structure, which is derived from the hero's journey, which is basically a series of questions that roughly outline the steps of the hero's journey. So all you have to do is copy these questions and then write down your answers. Now, you can just answer this on your own. No need to show me, but please also feel free to share your answers in the discussion below, making sure to mention what movie you picked. It'll help me respond to you and we can analyze it and also help your fellow students in the course. In the previous three lessons, you got an introduction to the hero's journey, the classic three act structure. In the next lesson, I'll show you how this mythic structure can apply not just to big epic fantasies and Hollywood movies, but to real life adventures. 10. The Hero's Journey in Real Life: Previous lessons we learned about the hero's journey. In this lesson, we'll look at how even a real life adventure can follow it. So the film that made my name here recently is a docu log about my participation in the Philippines biggest annual motorcycle adventure event called the FJ Moto Mountain Cross Adventure. It's basically a three day amazing race style ride where we're given a set of coordinates and then instructions to reach successive checkpoints. But to get from one checkpoint to the next required navigating challenging terrain on our heavy adventure bikes. I'll link to it in the class resources below, but it is almost an hour long. So if you don't have that kind of time, no problem. I'll summarize it. But I do suggest you watch it because it's a good story, and you'll get a lot more from my analysis if you do. You can pause the lesson now if you want to, but either way, let's proceed. To set the stage, I had only recently started riding motorcycles off road. A friend invited me to join the event for free, so I did, dimly knowing I'd kind of be in over my head. But I was going through stuff at the time. I was kind of heartbroken and often anxious. So I needed a big adventure to get my head on straight. So this was my ordinary world, and I needed an adventure to get away from myself and dispel myself doubt. At the start, I say outright on camera that I doubt my ability, and I was so intimidated. But, luckily, I was part of a great team that I had ridden with in the Himalayas the previous year. And so they serve as both my mentors and allies. And so, of course, we crossed the starting line crossing the threshold, and the adventure begins. It started off easy but progressively got harder until by just the middle of day one, I was ready to quit. I have to tell you the truth. I think I think I'm not gonna go. Exhausted and discouraged, I wanted to abandon the quest so as not to hold back my teammates. But after some rest, encouragement from my teammates, and some food, I managed to get through the rest of the ride that day. And that evening, re energized, I tell my teammates, I'm staying, I'm staying. Y. And we promised to take care of each other. So the quest continued. Over the next two days, we ran into many unexpected problems, testing our patience, resourcefulness and teamwork. But we make it past all these obstacles. Finally, we approach the event's last big obstacle, a big river crossing. The rain falls as we arrive on the shore, setting the tone for an Act three ordeal. There's no room for error here because dropping the bike in the river could result in a long repair at best and complete failure at worst. The stakes were high because all our earlier obstacles meant we had no more time to spare to finish the event. So we banded together to get across the river safely one by one. And I fully expected my teammates to ride my bike across for me as they had done in the previous big obstacles to make sure there would be no more drama. But to my surprise, they insisted that this was a test I had to overcome myself. Even in the moment it felt like a movie. So buoyed by their encouragement, I gathered myself and plunged into the river, navigating through it with their help. And though I was scared the whole way, I made it safely across. So by now, note that from the beginning of the adventure, feeling way over my head to nearly quitting, in that moment, my character symbolically proves himself worthy of finishing the event, but not just by crossing the river, but also in the events leading up to that in the refusal to quit at his lowest point. And that's the hero's journey to a T. And honestly, there is nothing like experiencing that kind of moment in real life. Now, from there, despite the distance and the unknown checkpoints ahead, we were confident we could make it. Eventually, we ended up in a storm at the top of a mountain pass, on the other side of which was easy roads and the eventual finish line. And ultimately, we experienced a wildly cinematic moment of release when we emerged from that storm across the mountain to see the most beautiful sunset. It brings us to tears and the story to a close. This sequence from the river crossing to the sunset had all the tension, visual drama, and ultimate relief of a classic Act three. And I also make sure to follow it up with a reflection on the lessons we'd learned, showing the promised transformation before taking the viewer to the finish line. Now, to be honest, in real life, there was more drama and hours of riding left after the river crossing and the sunset, but I decided not to dwell on it. In the film, the tension had already been released, so I didn't want to draw it out further. Ending it at the sunset preserved the impact of that climactic moment, but without diluting the truth of what we went through. So even though I omitted some details, I didn't embellish nor change the inherent meaning of the story one bit. I didn't resort to adding drama as many screen adaptations of real life events do, use the core of a story is a universal truth. And I think fake drama is antithetical to that. So we've seen that you can have the hero's journey in real life. Can you look back at a similar time when you experienced this? If you want, you can take a few minutes to pause the video and write it down, even just a few sentences. Now, I admit life isn't always this dramatic. At least it shouldn't be. So in the next lesson, we'll talk about how you can still apply the structure and the thinking behind it to more everyday stories of personal growth. 11. The Hero's Journey - Stories of Personal Growth: The previous lesson, we looked at how to apply the hero's journey to a real life adventure. In this lesson, we'll examine how it can still be used for more everyday stories of personal growth. To find story in the course of your normal life is to seek, even in the most seemingly mundane of experiences that element of challenge or novelty that can lead to change and growth. So, ask yourself, how can I gain some Life XP from, for example, going to the beach? That's not an adventure. Strictly speaking, it's just a normal trip. Well, you can give yourself some kind of quest. Is it learning to surf? Is it exploring off the beaten path in that area? Is it finding someone interesting with their own story to tell? How can you come home with a cool story for your friends? One thing's for sure. It's not by staying in your comfort zone. You won't have a story without the elements of risk and reward. Let's take another example. Let's say you want to tell a story about your business to help get the word out there. Every business is different, but we can tease out some common threads in stories like this. You know, it usually starts with, like, a plucky underdog driven by necessity or passion to solve a specific problem. Starting a new business is always hard and risky. Statistically speaking, the odds are really against you. But you're driven to do it. And so start the business crossing the threshold, and you will 100% for sure encounter many obstacles and make tons of mistakes, testing your abilities and resolve. You'll turn to friends and mentors to help you along the way. For many business founders, their own hubris is the main obstacle to their success. And that's a cautionary tale we all know. Some challenges might put the whole future of the business in jeopardy. The whole business may fail forcing you to start over, but the story doesn't end there unless you say so. So you try again and over time with persistence, help, and some luck, the business takes off. And now it's become a story of how the hardworking entrepreneur didn't give up until they made it. Of course, I'm simplifying to illustrate the broad concepts, but don't oversimplify your story just so it perfectly fits the hero's journey. Ignoring the messy parts will deprive the audience of some of the most important and nuanced lessons therein. I can just say, like, don't try to tell a perfect story, but rather tell an honest story well. Now, let me give a totally different example to show you don't even need to undergo a big struggle to tell a story. This will illustrate the meaning making power of a story in a series of events with little to no actual drama. A couple of years ago, I had a four day weekend up in a popular mountain town, and it just so happened, I was lent an expensive camera right before it. So I was excited to shoot great landscapes and outdoor portraits with it. Unfortunately, inciting incident, there ended up being a big storm the whole weekend. Now, we were safe. The storm wasn't the drama, but all we could do was stay indoors. So like, the quiet call to adventure for me wasn't the trip or surviving the storm. It was how to adapt to the ruined plans and still take good pictures. I resisted, as you'll see at the start of my vlog, with me complaining about the conditions, but because I had no choice but to make the best of it, I had to challenge myself to open my eyes to beauty in places where it wasn't obvious. Though it contained no significant rising action or climax, there was still a little story here, namely of me making an effort not to come home empty handed by rediscovering my passion for shooting after becoming jaded over the years. And I can definitely say I came out of it a better creator and a happier person. So stories can be quiet and internal, too. In fact, telling a story without the epic showdowns and action set pieces is what can really show your ability as an intelligent storyteller. In the end, approaching every day with story in mind isn't just a way to make great films or books or whatever. It's a way to pursue the best of what life has to offer by taking risks to pursue personal growth. To pursue a story means embracing challenges, especially unexpected ones, and growing in confidence and ability from overcoming them. Without that, life in your story would just be flat. In this lesson, we learned how to use what we learned to tell stories of personal growth. Now finally, it's time to start working on your story. I hope you're excited and reasonably confident now that you can tackle it. And the next lesson will begin laying out your story. 12. Your Story - Logline: Previous lesson, we looked at how to apply the hero's journey to stories of personal growth. Now it's finally time to start telling your story. What I want you to do is think of any important story to tell from your life. It could be any of the following to get you started. A big adventure you had your journey to a specific pivotal piece of personal growth, the story of your business, your love story, a mission you had to fulfill, or any of the above about someone close to you who's open to letting you tell their story. Now, you can pick any one or more of these and reflect a little bit on what kernel of truth it centers on that will make it matter universally. Now, what I want you to do is to sum it up in a single sentence, what we call in the film industry as a log line. A log line is a brief summary of a story, usually a single sentence that highlights the central conflict and main characters. Its purpose is to capture interest and sell the concept with just a few words. Now, let's look at some examples of log lines from famous films and try to guess them. Two Star Crossed lovers fall in love aboard a famous ship and struggle to keep their relationship afloat as the doomed ship sinks into the Atlantic. A spirited farm boy joins a rebellion to save a princess from a sinister imperial enforcer and the galaxy from a planet destroying weapon. A young man uses a time machine to go to the past where he must reunite his parents before he and his future cease to exist. When his son is swept out to sea, an anxious clownfish embarks on a perilous journey across the ocean to bring him back. Okay, let me give you one that isn't so easy. After a tragic accident, two magicians engage in a battle to create the ultimate illusion while sacrificing everything they have to outwit each other. So how many did you guess? Did you get the last one? So in order, that was Titanic, Star Wars Episode four and Hope. Back to the future, Finding Nemo and Christopher Nolan's the Prestige. Now, okay, I'll admit, these are all what we call high concept films, meaning what makes the story unique and worth producing is easy to sum up and sell to, like, a studio. But the appeal of the stories we will tell are probably more subtle. So the purpose of this exercise is to force clarity in your thinking about the central elements of your story, because if it's not clear to you, it's not going to be clear to someone else. The story will evolve once you write it, but knowing its central premise and appeal from the beginning gives you a better chance at crafting a tight, compelling story. So let's try to write log lines about the stories that we might tell Remember, it must highlight the main characters and central conflict. So for example, for my moto adventure in the previous chapter, it could be a heartbroken anxious 30 something embarks on a wild motorcycle adventure in an unknowing bid to find the courage he didn't know he had. I could take another example from the news and say, two sisters defy government collusion with greedy landowners to create an international conservation success story amidst a corrupt system. Now, that's the story of MasuiGeoRserve here in the Philippines. Another example I can give would be a farmer's son grows up to be his town's first and only medical doctor, not knowing he must soon survive losing his family in a war and being kidnapped by rebels. That's basically my grandpa. Now, how about two childhood sweethearts unexpectedly find each other after decades, uncertain whether to rekindle their romance after years of separation? That's close, but not quite the story of the movie Past Lives. Or it could be mission based, like 28 years after his first motorcycle journey around the world, a 69-year-old writer retraces his original journey and discovers that the world and he himself have changed dramatically. That is Ted Simon's real life memoir called Dreaming of Jupiter. Now, you can also talk about a life transformation like an ex rock star starts over as a chef, enduring false starts before discovering his calling as a master of open fire Cooking. Now, that's the true story of my friend, and I love all the layers of drama implied in that short description. On that note, what I want you to notice in all of these examples is how so much drama is implied in just a few words. You, as the audience, without needing further explanation or probably thinking like, Whoa, there's a story there that I want to hear. So I hope these examples provide sufficient guidance for you to craft your own log lines. Don't just write one. Try three to five, at least. Work on that now, and then we can proceed to the next lesson. Well, we'll put together the outline of your story by employing, again, the story Canvas framework derived from the hero's journey. 13. Your Story - The Outline: In the previous lesson, we wrote the core idea of your story in the form of a log line. In this lesson, we'll work on your full story outline using the Art of documentary story Canvas framework, which is derived from the hero's journey. So once again, here's an overview of the guide questions. So I'll work on this with you using a new log line of a story from my own life about that time I traveled to South America. For my log line, I'll write a 30-year-old filmmaker leaves everything behind to fulfill his dream of traveling to South America only to realize what he is running from is inside him. Drama. Okay, so let's answer the guide questions. Who is the main character, the 30-year-old filmmaker, me, basically. And what do they want and why can't they have it? Well, he wants to be happy, but he feels lonely, powerless, and alienated in his chaotic home city. What forces the character to act? What's at stake? Well, when he makes some money from selling his stake in a company, he realizes that there's no more reason to put off pursuing his dream of going to South America to see Machu Pihu. At stake is his happiness and the trajectory of the rest of his life. What is the first obstacle that pops up, and what are the next obstacles? Okay, so now Act two is where real life usually gets messier than fiction. As such, this is where our storytelling lessons come in. In real life, I had a great time in South America with no notable misadventures, not so much as a misplaced bag. So I need to look elsewhere for my obstacles, and I will find them inside me. Okay, 'cause if this were a memoir, so this whole middle part would consist, of course, of vivid descriptions of the places I've seen and the people I've met to give context, and, of course, to add needed color to the travel story. But then I'd sprinkle that with reflections on the experience. So that would be the basic content. But what I need to establish here is a consistent source of tension. And I think I would focus on anecdotes that revealed the shyness and lack of confidence that were really holding me back, you know, being hesitant to explore more or to pursue a potential romance that was right in front of me, and then I'd engage in a cycle of self recrimination for so I would write about the times that I also did overcome this and how it rewarded me. You know, so we kind of have this cycle of trying to overcome these tendencies. I might even tie this back to my childhood, you know, growing up sheltered, following the rules instead of testing the limits. And so the effect of that is basically the journey develops into an internal one of developing greater self awareness, trying to get past my shortcomings, you could call them, and then learning to forgive myself for it. And you'll see in this example, it's reflecting on these things after the fact that has given the events meaning. That's storytelling. Moving on, who or what equips the character to do what they couldn't do before? Well, by being forced to do things on his own, his I mean, my character, by being forced to do things on his own in uncomfortable situations, along with experiencing the joy of seeing great wonders of the world, my character comes to discover a measure of both happiness and self confidence. And not only that, so it's not just developing abilities through actions, not only that, but his travels prove to him that the world is full of possibilities because of seeing his fellow travelers pursuing their dreams. And so these fellow travelers effectively serve as his mentors and allies. Next question, at what point does the character face the ultimate obstacle and how is the ultimate obstacle overcome? Again, stories from real life, you know, rarely have one big external crisis to overcome or, like, one big antagonist enemy to defeat. I mean, they might, and that would be awesome material. But in my case, I think the closest thing to a crisis moment was my post trip depression. You know, I was feeling really sad, and then I had to reckon then with the significance of my journey, because if I didn't come home happier after all of that, then what was it all for? So towards the end of this hypothetical book, I might write about how I am forced to finally accept that what I'm running from isn't my home city, my home country. It was actually my feeling of not being good enough. And I want to write this in a way that this pivotal realization lands in a really solid way or even a dramatic way. So what I could do is, like, write lyrically on the greatest highs and lows of the journey. And that leads me to see that the best moments were in the company of friends who allowed me to see myself in a fresh new light. And I might center this moment of epiphany on a dramatic image of me standing with my friends right after sunrise as we watch the legendary ruins of Machu Picchu emerge from the mist. And that's when it hits me. You are a fellow travelers amazing story as they are yours. And so how is the character transformed as a result? Well, my character now enters a period of renewed confidence and hope in the future. He decides to permanently leave behind his career doing TV commercials for a more adventurous life as a traveling filmmaker. True story, bro. You know, in doing this exercise, I experienced firsthand how to take a disjointed set of events and turn it into a story by making it mean something that it didn't necessarily mean at the moment or even right after, not because it's not true, but because storytelling is a literal act of making sense of things. And this is why many stories aren't told until sometime afterwards, because one needs time to reckon with, to process the hidden patterns and lessons contained in a season of life. One couldn't perceive in the moment, particularly after some time has passed. Enough time has passed to really show the impact of that journey of that story you're trying to tell. So, you know, to be honest, I didn't know I would work on this story when I thought of this course and this exercise, but I can tell you now that the process of doing it has been deeply satisfying, allowing me to refresh and take to heart the lessons and ultimate value of that adventure from ten years ago. Alright, I've shown you mine, and now it's your turn. Take your time, enjoy it because this will be a valuable period of reflection as you parse the meanings from the mess of life. In the next lessons, we'll address a question that I'm sure has been in the back of your mind. What about those stories that don't seem to fit into this three act structure? Talk about that next. 14. Micro and Unresolved Stories: In the previous lesson, we laid down a story outline guided by the three act structure of the hero's journey. In this lesson, we'll talk about stories that don't conform to this structure, at least on the surface, starting with very short stories and incomplete stories. So, you know, what do we make of a very short story of a few sentences like a lot of what we read on threads or on Twitter? Are they not real stories? Of course, the answer is, they could very well be good stories. Think about the example I gave at the beginning of the course, a hypothetical story of someone's bad behavior in the workplace that makes us want to know if they were punished for it. If you look at posts on threads, a lot of posts garner engagement by teasing you with a story like this where someone's looking for sympathy. Real examples I often see are stories of annoying Karens at the grocery store and other places, rude behavior on film sets, and bad experiences with customers and clients. Conversely, there are also many posts about unexpectedly good behavior in similar situations. Either way, the appeal of this type of story, I think, is the same. There are anecdotes that represent either a desire for a just world or proof of it. There's no rising action usually or succession of obstacles. You know, it's just a few sentences. One hook, the setup. Someone did this and one resolution, the payoff What happened? That's the simplest form of a story, either therefore or but, remember? They were rude. Therefore, they got punished or at least embarrassed. Or I expected them to behave badly, but they were so kind. These stories work at the most fundamental level that I discussed in the beginning, enticing curiosity at the beginning of the story and then satisfying it with an affirmation of a core belief, specifically that we live in a world where bad behavior gets punished and good behavior is rewarded. Another basic example of the simple story, someone needs a thing, but they can't get it because of obstacles. The car won't start, the trains are on strike. They got lost. Therefore, they do this, but it results in that and so on until they win or they learn. Either way, we learn from their example. I'm actually contradicting myself, because that is already a mini hero's journey. But basically, this is useful to know because it gives you a back to basics formula to create stories for social media like tweets, Instagram reels, and Instagram stories, TikTok, YouTube, all of it. Now, what about when stories are told without a resolution, basically ending before Act three. Often, we see these stories on social media, and they're essentially rants you know, that are implicit calls for help or at least sympathy. When shared by, you know, sympathetic sources, meaning, you know, people that we think are worthy of being liked and being helped, these unresolved stories kind of leave a hole in us, a burning desire to give that story the ending it deserves, as simple as, say, Hey, guys, my camera gear was stolen from my car today. This is what happened, and then the story ends there. On social media, we respond to posts like that by collectively demanding accountability and resolution from the powers that be or directly intervening when we can. On a bigger scale, this is how issue driven documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth or the social dilemma work. They trace the rise up to the current reality of a complex problem that we must contend with. It drives home what's at stake and gives us some hope or direction about how it may be addressed. But it leaves the actual resolution, the society as a whole. What will we do now to save ourselves from climate change, social media addiction, misinformation, et cetera, whatever. Basically, its protagonist throws the ball into our court, and by the end, we must be the protagonists that will resolve the conflict. When the resolution of an incomplete story like this is out of reach for now or forever, that's what we might call a tragedy, which also has a lot to teach about life. In this lesson, we learned how and why short and incomplete stories also still work as well as any stories. In the next lesson, we'll talk about narratives that seem to be flat or have a negative progression, unlike the hero's journey. 15. Flat and Descending Stories: In the previous lesson, we learned how short and what I called incomplete stories work. In this lesson, we look at stories that don't portray growth, but instead give more of a flat look at life as it is, or portray a downward negative progression. In real life, the good guys don't always win. And not just that, people often just don't change. And sometimes they become even worse. So the flow isn't the gradually rising up, down, up, down up of the hero's journey, but rather flat or descending. These are stories that portray, say, the daily life of a character or set of people without much change or growth. You might consider them more akin to poetry than traditional stories. The power of this flat kind of narrative is in its honest, simple, and often aesthetic and thoughtful portrayals of a person's life. They could be very different from us or ordinary, but the way they're presented hints at some core tenet of life, again, thus giving it the illuminative power of a story. The difference is all those connections must now happen in our heads or just be felt on a gut level instead of being fed directly to us in the form of various events. Furthermore, stories like this, which are usually films, both fiction and documentary, usually contain an undertone of an unresolved issue with the main character or even an entire community. So even if there appears to be no conflict on the surface, we can feel somehow on a gut level that there is some tension there that isn't spelled out. A recent example of this that's pretty popular is Vim Vender's 2023 film Perfect Days, which follows the daily routine of a Japanese public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. He loves music on cassette tapes, books, and taking pictures, and through unexpected encounters, he reflects on finding beauty in the world. Now, if you presented that as a log line, someone might say, Well, where's the drama in that? But it's a movie loved by many for its embrace of beauty in the Mundane and its message of humble acceptance of life as it is. It speaks through its elegant visuals and gentle tone. I think the useful takeaway for us is that the movie is this way, not because its writer and director failed to tell a story, but rather the lack of drama is the whole point of the film. It's saying, Hey, this is life. It may be small and not much to talk about. But darn, it's still beautiful. On the opposite end of the spectrum is a movie that isn't flat, but rather a downward spiral for its main character. My favorite example of this is the Oscar winning film The Will be Blood written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day Lewis in an absolutely incredible performance. The movie centers on the rise of ruthless oil man Daniel Plainview at the turn of the 20th century. But instead of showing us the usual journey of a businessman's triumph via perseverance, like we talked about previously, the movie shows Daniel Plainview's rise in greed and ambition as he finds success, simultaneous to his descent into a kind of lonely madness. This culminates in the movie's wild and bloody climax, which you would call senseless if the story hadn't so credibly set it up. Coupled with stark images of the oil fields of the American West in this era, it becomes a parable about the destructive, unstoppable forces of human greed and modern capitalism. There's still a rhyme and reason to this style of storytelling, but again, delivered indirectly. Having no redemption or positive growth for the protagonist underscores the themes. And in my opinion, when it comes to big topics like this, you know, like capitalism, this indirect approach is more haunting and effective. Finally, I want to mention stories like novels whose sheer complexity may obscure the fact that they are still at heart about a protagonist's deep need for something and everything they do to get it. An example, I think would be Donna Tart'sPulitzer Prize winning novel, The Goldfinch, about a young boy named Theo, who loses his mother in a Museum terrorist attack, but simultaneously comes into the possession of a priceless Dutch Golden Age painting in the process called The Goldfinch. So like many novels, it's long, almost 1,000 pages, spanning many years of the protagonist's life loaded with subplots, symbolism, characters, and jumps between time periods. There's no one clear antagonist, but rather various people, forces and psychological hangups standing between the main character and his desires. To quote a critic, it's a crime novel, an art history thesis, an LGBTQ coming of age story, and the meditation on toxic masculinity all wrapped into one. But despite all that, it still has an overarching, unifying thread of being a quest, though not heroic to come to terms with the deepest of grief and with the impermanence of joy and beauty as symbolized by the titular painting. I suggest you give it a read to see what I mean. With that, we come to the end of our lessons on storytelling. In the next chapter, I'll leave you with some ideas about where to take your story next. 16. Where to take Your Story Next: In the previous lessons, we wrapped up our discussion on storytelling with seeming exceptions to the hero's journey concept. In this final lesson, I'll give some ideas on what to do with your budding story as written in your outline. So by now, I hope you've completed at least the first draft of the outline that we worked on a couple of lessons ago. I encourage you to keep refining this based on what you've learned in the last few lessons, which were also meant to give you permission to deviate a bit from the rules. Once you're ready, I strongly encourage you to submit this as your class project so that I can give thoughtful, constructive feedback on it. And then if you like, I can keep working with you through revising it. From there, you can live with it as is at first, or you have a few options to take it further. You could type it out into a full short story in prose. That would be the most straightforward option, like writing a short memoir. Or if you have the knowledge and available material like photos and videos, you could adapt it into a video. Video is our most powerful storytelling medium today. And you could say shoot a short documentary using interviews or voice over to provide the backbone of the story, and then shoot or collect the necessary footage to illustrate the story. Or you could adapt the simpler form of the video essay where you or some other narrator relay the events on camera, you know, just like telling a story with a few photos and videos to support it. So it's kind of like a mini docu but not as strict when it comes to the form. The easiest way to do this is basically to make a short Instagram reel or Tik Tok video with you narrating the core setup or hook of your story right away to grab the viewers attention. And then, of course, narrating the payoff. It could be just you on camera, but bonus points for including visuals to help. And as an aside, if you're looking for guidance on making videos, you can check out any of my three previous courses on content creation and filmmaking here on Skillshare. Now, if you're more into still photography and the story is something you can photograph, then you can do on Instagram carousel or photo essay with a short caption to give context to the story. I love this form of storytelling because it's inherently more subtle and thus more layered than a simple written essay. Now, if you can draw, then Wow. What an opportunity to make something beautiful. You could just make a series of drawings telling the story. That would already be amazing, or if you have the time and attention span, develop it into your own little graphic novel. Whichever medium you choose, I highly encourage you to share your story in the class projects because what good is a story? If you're only going to keep it to yourself? They are meant to be shared. And that's it. In the next video, I'll give you some of my parting thoughts. 17. Conclusion: Thank you so much for taking this course on storytelling. I'm grateful for the significant time and effort you've invested with me here, and I hope you got a lot out of it in return. It is my sincere wish that it empowers you to use your voice to tell better stories because the world needs that. Our need for stories to hear and for our stories to be told well will never run out. My parting advice would simply be to keep working at it. Storytelling is a skill that takes a lifetime to master. But more important to live life seeking to tell stories is to live a life of perpetual curiosity, learning and growth of regularly choosing to leave your comfort zone to make yourself and the world better. So once again, my name is Erin Pala Bab. This is Where to find me online, and I wish you a lifetime of great stories to tell. Until the next one, be present and live your story. Peace.