Road Trip 1 - Autumn Updates

Adam: Hello, welcome to StoryOsophy, the road trip. This is Adam Jones.

Devin: And Devin Halden.

Adam: Devin and I are having a conversation in vehicles as we’re driving. We talk oftentimes on the phone with each other while we’re driving.

Well, since we haven’t been able to pop an episode out, maybe we’ll do a lo-fi version for you guys, just so we can touch base and see what’s going on, I guess. Write us, tell us, talk to us, say what’s happening. Are you working on your stories? Let us know what’s happening.

Devin: Yeah, I kind of like this, actually. The road trip? Yeah, I mean, I kind of like kind of moving and being mobile, and I’m not in a booth, and I don’t have a headset. Yeah, there is something that’s kind of interesting about that.

Adam: And I think… I’ll probably miss my exit. Yeah, it’s like some lady on the GPS is going to be screaming at me in a minute. You turn in 50 feet. I think the idea of road trip, because it’s sort of like taking a trip down into like a philosophy, because we don’t have prepared notes. We’re literally just chit-chat. It’s more of an ossophy in the story-osophy department. Yeah. We’ve been a little… Busy. There’s been the pandemic, as we all have experienced, which is sort of a strange thing. We were doing some writing during that time. I hope you guys took some time to work on your stories.

Devin: Yes. We probably… I mean, I still think we should do a more structured episode around that whole crap show that was… Well, really, 2020 as a whole was kind of a shit show. But I think it’d be good to… See some people being unemployed and stuck at home with children.

Adam: Yeah, talk about the story we’ve been working on for a while. It’s serious. And we spent a lot of time working on that during the pandemic, Devin and I. So we apologize that we didn’t turn out more episodes. We could have been busy doing that. In fact, we have failed you. But be cryptic with our project until we can release it.

Devin: Here’s my little… I’ll give you my… My update is less detailed as your update is, as what you’ve been doing the last… At least the last sprint is really, really… [unclear] little bugs that actually is causing some of the buggy issues with the software, but it is close. So what I’ve been doing is preparing…

Adam: And for those of you who don’t, who haven’t heard in previous episodes, Story Blueprint is the software that Devin and I, Devin has been doing a lot of the legwork in it, developing the software that corresponds with our structural walkthrough of Season 2. It starts around episode 40 in the podcast. For those of you who don’t know, Story Blueprint is the proprietary software that’s attached to… It’s going to be awesome.

Devin: So I’m just doing, like basically I’m cleaning up the, what the final, the actual front end content is, like is what the genres are and archetypes and things like that. And then also the front end of the actual, what that looks and how it’s organized, stuff like that. So there’s some kind of exciting stuff. Conversations I’ve been having with some screenwriting competitions and some other potential partners that we can either be involved with what they’re doing as a sponsor or partner on that level. Also some writing groups, open it up to and let them…

Adam: It will be exciting when we, when we can get a version out so that we, like you’re saying, we can get storytellers in there to use it and try it. And see if they can break it. And then we can improve it and improve it. So we’re counting on you story authors out there who are listening, once we get this software up and running, to just test it out and see. It’s non-linear structuring software. So it’s going to keep you structured, but it’s going to allow you when you, like the way we’ve been talking throughout this whole podcast. When you come up with an idea, you don’t come up with it necessarily sequentially in your story.

You experience a story linearly. Right. Linearly for the most part. And as you do life for the most part, but the way you build it is not that way. And so if you come up with your ending first, you have a structuring system that allows you to place that ending and card it in a certain way. And then, oh, you know what? Well, it’s got to build up to that part for the ending to work. And so, you know, possibly your, your center crisis or something that you’re setting up in movement one, act one. And you can place it non-linearly. That’s the benefit of this. Hopefully you can test it out and see how it works for you.

And if there are suggestions or improvements, we’d love to hear them.

Devin: And, and not only, not only place things where you want them. I think the key benefit to the software is going to be just the full personalization and cut your own Story Blueprint templates in a way where you’ll start out with our, our default. Yeah. So we talk about season two and things that have worked for us. Even, even we don’t look at that as gospel, like our default temp, our default Story Blueprint events. We have for every story, they’re all going to be different. And so the really cool thing that’s different than some other writing softwares out there that stick to a very kind of what he came up with.

And they’re like, you should do it this way. And then you just fill in the blanks. And this is literally once you start getting the hang of, of using the software and strengthening it. And strengthening your, your storytelling muscles, you can basically come up with your, whether you’re writing a novel or a screenplay, a song, a poem and short story, whatever it is, you can kind of structure your own Story Blueprint. And then you can go back to that and you can use it for, you know, in the future, or you can even at some point, we’re going to create more of a community with this and you can actually share, share that in your thoughts.

And they can kind of explain like. This is why I like to put this after the deciding event rather than this. And, and so it’ll be, it’s meant to be a, a, a collaborative.

Adam: So, you know, what’s interesting, too, is like, if you want to paint by numbers, those are the default events that we have in place to begin with, sort of based loosely on many of the traditional storytelling structures and Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces and things like that, that, you know, most people are familiar with. So if you want, if you’re a beginner and you want to know how it’s done traditionally, we have that paper. When I approach a story, there are some milestones that I sort of climax, kind of stuff. In general, I kind of leave cards blank and then place them to see if I can come up with something different outside of that traditional, structural, linear structure.

Story Blueprint allows you to do that should you want to. And if you’re a beginner and you don’t know, you know, which direction to go, it’s got guidance, it’s got default events.

Devin: I’m excited. I’m excited as well. I’ve been trying to, I’ve been kind of using it and over the last six months, just as I’ve been trying to weed out the bugs myself, I’ve been playing around with it and building stories from scratch and kind of using random copy. But I’m getting it, it makes me excited to actually sit down and use it for a real, for a real project because it’s fun to focus on an event or if you, like you’re saying before, if you know the ending of a, of your story. It’s fun to go to that event, and there’s a bit of a gamification with the software, too, where you can, you can figure out or you can estimate how many pages it is, so it’ll keep your page counts numbered and accumulated, and then you can also decide when that event is complete.

You come up with a short description, a long description. You can put in your own setups and payoffs within an event, and you can, and you get the. You can just write in, bump over to setups and payoffs, and any setup you click on, if it’s attached to a payoff, whether it’s a setup that’s going to be paid off a little bit in one event and later on in the story, or there’s two payoffs for it, if you click on it, it’ll show that those events are. Those events within an event are attached to each other. So you can kind of keep track of a setup that you decided to put into an event early in the story.

You can bump over to your setups and payoffs and weave that into your story. Okay. So, so there’s a lot of fun things for version one, and we already have a laundry list of things we want to do for version two, but we thought, let’s get it out there in the wild. Let’s let our StoryOsophers jump on it, stay around with it, give us feedback. We want as much feedback as possible. It’s possible because we want to make this software as versatile and usable and beneficial to storytellers and writers, so feedback is imperative.

Adam: So just to be clear, too, at the time of traveling and recording this, it is not yet posted, but maybe by the time you even hear this, it might be up and writing. So just so you know, if you take a look right now and it’s on its way, and so stick with it and check back. And we’ll most certainly in an episode.

Fully launched, we’ll have a celebratory episode. And I’ll tell you, but I’m very excited, Devin, about the set up payoff component of… Devin and I really love set up payoffs in general. It’s like one of our big things. And what’s great is if you can track not only whether you set it up and then maybe like a second set up where you remind your audience of the thing and then the payoff, like you can have different beats or things like that, whether you’ve actually matched your set up with a payoff, but also being able to track how much time you’ve left in between those so that you can, if you want your audience…

To forget about something. You can see if you have enough time for them to legitimately forget about it. Like if you introduce something in act one, chances are by the end of the movie, if it’s a movie, they’ve forgotten about that thing. Or until you remind them with the payoff and they’re like, oh, that’s good. And so they get very excited because you’ve planted the right setup and paid it off properly. But measurement between those things is key to making them successful and not being too heavy-handed with them either. But I’m very excited that we have a tool for measuring them out and tracking them. That’s exciting to me.

Devin: Yeah, I think I agree that’s one of the features of version one that is kind of my favorite. And it’s funny because it was like one of the very first features that the wireframing and the model for what Story Blueprint was going to be.

So I’m glad that that worked for the software. There’s a couple other goodies in there too. Another really fun feature, and we’ll have an episode specifically for the software when it does come out, but it’s the stitching together of your synopsis and the stitching together of a treatment. So you don’t even realize that you’re writing your treatment or you’re writing a really tight synopsis when you’re going through the stages….of creating your Story Blueprint. And then you just go and you click on this button that says view your story, your treatment, and it’s literally stitched together based on all of the information that you were able to put into your Story Blueprint.

If you want to massage it and polish it and edit it a little bit, of course, that’s probably a good thing to do, but it’s got all of the key elements and key events that someone, especially like a Hollywood executive or someone that’s looking at potential… Greenlighting a script, they’re looking for some of that juicy bit for you. So that’s a fun feature.

Adam: Run me through the beats kind of jazz. You know, what’s interesting about it is I’ll give you an example too of what Devin’s talking about with the cards and the way you do them. When you’re taking an event, you know, we have an event like known world routine or something like that or inciting incident. So what you’re going to do is that’s the title of the event. That’s your default card. Let’s say in a lot, like for instance, in a lot of movies, let’s call character Mike. Mike gets fired from his job. Getting fired from your job is sometimes a big catalyst for a journey in a movie.

So, you know, you have a card that says Mike gets fired from his job. Now, if you, that’s pretty generic, but it says what happens in the, in the scene. And then you would probably write a couple of paragraphs about what happens. So Mike’s doing this and his boss yells at him for this. And then Mike does something later on the evening and that’s the last straw. And Mike gets canned. Have to leave immediately. So those two paragraphs of the detail of that description is what your treatment would be built from. And that single line that says, Mike gets fired from his job, would be what your synopsis gets built from.

So if each event in Story Blueprint has that slug line, sort of, Mike gets fired from his job, and then within that, the more descriptive parts so that you remember what you’re writing about in prose form, then Story Blueprint takes all those slug lines, as Devin’s saying, and glues them together in a rough document that is your synopsis. And then it takes all of those paragraphs that are the more detailed, descriptive version of that, and glues all those together, and makes you a treatment. So while you’re outlining and figuring your stuff out, you’re also writing your pitch materials. Which, it took Devin and I so many years to do.

To realize, like, okay, you finish writing a script, because that’s really what you want to be doing. That’s generally the most exciting part of it. Although structuring has become much more fascinating and interesting to both of us. What you’re doing with that is, you know, you’re following that inspiration and instinct. You’re getting excited, you’re writing a script. And then you get done with the script and you go, ah, man, now I gotta write a log line. Now I gotta write a synopsis. Now I gotta write a treatment. Now you’ve got extra stuff to write. That sort of, you know. It’s not nearly as enticing as the script itself, generally speaking.

But if you’re sort of conscious of the fact that you will need those materials in order to pitch to executives, share with other co-creators in the mix, whether it’s a director or a producer or somebody. Because oftentimes they’ll get scripts and they don’t have time to read a 90, 120 page script. But they do have time to go through 10 pages. And if your treatment is, you know, 10 pages, 15 pages. Something short. And your synopsis just runs on a page. You’ve got their attention. And if you’ve tracked your beats diligently, like when you come up with something, just write the prose about it. Write a description of the scene you just wrote.

Just quickly. It doesn’t even have to be in-depth. Quick enough so that by the end of writing and outlining, you can sort of accordion down or collapse down or glue together all those slug lines into a synopsis. And all those paragraphs into a treatment. It’s like… I was going to say it’s like… It’s the opposite of double duty. You’re not doing it twice.

Devin: What’s the opposite of double duty? Nothing. I got nothing, kid.

[Sponsor message]

Devin: The first little snafu in this new series we call [unclear], whatever. I just forgot I have an appointment I’m supposed to be at. I’m about 10 minutes and I’m a half hour away. I pulled into my house and I’m like, This is great. I’m gonna be at the place, I’m gonna be there in about 10 minutes. I’m like, oh, great. I’m a half hour away.

Adam: So the first half of this episode is going to be very short. [unclear] because we’re figuring it out. Second half will be Devin feeding. You probably hear me talking with a cop.

It’s all good. So, so as we’ve been a little busy, we do want to conclude season two. I know we’ve been sort of promising those last two episodes, which are wordsmithing and polishing. And then the last one is going to be pitch materials. What to sort of do with your, like what you need in your arsenal. What’s the most useful stuff to have. And I mean, as we were talking about the Story Blueprint, try how to create it. Well, that’s why we’re doing the Story Blueprint, sort of accordion glue together stuff, because it makes it easier as you’re building the thing. But if you haven’t done that, there are things to think about.

Conciseness. Brevity is the soul of wit. That’s always the thing. Keep it simple, keep it short, keep it soulful or engaging. You want to engage your reader and you want to be clever. If it’s a comedy, it should be in the tone of the writing of the prose describing the piece. And if it’s a drama, it should be captivating, poignant.

Devin: Poignant.

Adam: Word score.

Devin: Yeah, so the word score is going to be fun, I think. But, Adam, how about you tell all the people what you’ve been up to over the last, well, I’ve been slightly sleep-deprived.

Adam: No, I think we talked, I will preface this with saying I can’t talk too much about it. And it’s not to be cryptic. It’s because I’ve signed like non-disclosures with companies I’m working with. But I can tell you what I’m working on technically. There’s a lot of it’s out in the ether anyway.

I was working on a… Sitcom for Netflix, which was a live studio audience kind of sitcom with Kevin James. It’s soon to air. I want to say it’s going to air the end of this year, beginning of next year. We were in the midst of it when the pandemic hit. We were in the midst of production. And so it went on pause. And then we came back a little bit ago to finish up the shooting of it. So shooting for that has concluded. And… Right before that was fading out, we heard that, when I say we, I’m working with one of my good friends, scenic charge, Cortland Green. We used to work together years ago, and then we started working together doing some scenic work in the scenic department. For those of you who don’t know, that’s within the art department. We’re the folks who do painting of the scenery. And… Texturing and, you know, making a piece of wood look like a slab of marble for like an office or marble pillars that are out of foam. It’s… It’s… It’s the art army of the art department. And so… We’ve been doing that. And just before this one ended, we were offered the SNL film unit, which is the… Anytime they do pre-recorded… Commercials and digital shorts and things like that.

They have a separate unit that does that. Used to be a little more mobile, but in the time of the pandemic, it’s become a little more stationary. Most of you have seen that SNL has started up again. They’re starting new shows again, and there is a live component to the show. It is Saturday Night Live still. But they’re doing a bit more pre-recorded just for the sake of time and things like that. As they’re adjusting to the pandemic, like everyone else. Both… [unclear] NBCUniversal and Netflix were both great. It’s interesting. I think I can comment on this. This is not a non-disclosing. I’m impressed with the speed with which Saturday Night Live happens, and I don’t think people really kind of understand how fast it happens. It’s obvious that they do it week to week, but that’s insane. Just so you know. It’s really insane because Monday they have a meeting with the new host or whatever about what content they’re going to do, this and that. We work on the sets, and we get the sets like mid to late week, which means for those of you filmmakers out there who’ve done 48-hour film festivals, imagine that on an enormous scale.

Yeah. Like all of a sudden. Yeah. All of a sudden you’ve got drawings in a set. People are putting up sets. You’re seaming it, painting it, dressing it all in one night. Yeah. So they’re crazy.

Devin: It’s crazy amazing. So I’m assuming they have a list ahead of time for that season, who the guest hosts are going to be. So it gives the people a little bit of time to kind of come up with a concept that they pitch.

Adam: Oh, you mean writer’s room? Yeah.

Devin: And I’m just wondering. Yeah, yeah. And then they decide, I guess, from there, like, yeah, let’s do that and that one. And then when… So you, so then, when they decide on whatever the concept’s going to be, and they, some of the, I guess some of the sets they already, like if they do the Jeopardy thing, they already have that kind of put together, but if they do these new shit, so it’s a Saturday night, do you, are you able to get in there, like, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or are you there literally the night before putting together the crap that they need, like that?

Adam: It’s, it’s, well, it’s the pre-recorded stuff, so we’re not the live stuff that happens on 30 Rock. We’re a different unit. We’re, and, and, I think a good bit of the show is getting, like I said, there’s only, I can’t really talk too much about it, but I can sort of talk about what you’re saying, speculating the writer’s room, I don’t, I know nothing about that, what you’re talking about. They have a list of ideas that they’ve pre-thought, so they hit the ground running at the beginning of the week. I just know that from my experience, which is after they’ve decided what the sketches are going to be and stuff, they’re going to change it and stuff, and they’ll do, you know, two or three different ones in the same spot, so there’s like, like I said, it’s, it’s a crew at the top of their game.

The interesting thing about it is, it’s kind of this beautiful creature that’s halfway between cinema and live theater.

Devin: Right.

Adam: It’s strange like that, and, and, but yeah, it’s kind of interesting. We’re, I’m, I’m, we’re just starting out on that one, you know, the season’s just a pretty fascinating event. I, I, it just blows my mind. I mean, I, I’m part of the machine that puts that together, but it still blows my mind, seeing all those professionals just do a 48-hour film fest, you know what I mean?

Devin: That’s cool. Two days, yeah, it’s pretty impressive. Yeah, people, yeah, you’re right, and I don’t think, you know, it’s, I think it’s, they give you a little, for the live part, they give you a little taste of the behind the scenes when they’re going, when they’re cutting the commercial, and you see the busy ants just running in and tearing stuff down and putting stuff. Which is interesting enough, but I don’t think anybody can grasp.

Adam: Well, you take it for granted, I think. Yeah, which is good. I mean, that’s… You sort of see it, and you’re like, oh, I’m using the values of, like, they’ve been working on building this thing for a while. And Saturday Night Live, they’re building it in like a week, and it’s like, wow. They really are, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s nuts. That’s cool. And I think you watch it, and you don’t, you know, like I said, you take it for granted because you see it, and it looks good. So, you don’t think, this is put together overnight, you know?

Devin: Well, it’s also interesting, like, what’s elements that I think people take for granted, but they also, it’s by design, is what you just said, where you’re taking a piece of wood. And you make it look like granite. Are you, anything like in a, in a film that, Marvel, whatever it is. You know, you don’t really, the illusion, like, that’s, that’s a piece of wood.

Adam: And, and you know what’s also even great, you know, like, strange, like, sculptures you see in pieces, where it’s like some big winged angel that’s the headstone of a, in a cemetery. Like, that’s, that’s all that is. Yeah. That’s all that is. Like, all that is is blue foam, carved, and coated, and made to look like concrete, or granite, or whatever it’s supposed to be. Like, all that stuff looks so very real. Like, you think of Tim Burton’s Batman, way back when, when, and it’s Gotham, and it’s exaggerated, and there’s gargoyles. Oh, that’s blue foam gargoyles. You know what I mean? Like. Yeah, right. Like, the reality of the, that’s created, the illusion of that reality within this, the, the cinematic space of that piece.

You do. You take it for granted that it’s like, yeah, some really talented, and I’m not that really talented artist in the paint world, by the way. I’m, I’m more administrative in terms of that department. But there are really talented, fine artists who have, and by the way, this is a, we were discussing this at lunch the other day. This is a really amazing career trajectory for fine artists that some fine artists don’t, don’t even know exists, because it’s, this is not the, the union that I’m a part of for the scenic artists. It’s not one where you, in order to be a scenic artist, you have to take a test, which is one of the few unions you have to test into, in order to be able to paint scenery.

You have to be able to do all kinds of stuff, like whether it’s textured, like. Stonework, like marble, different kinds of marbles, with veining and wood graining, portrait painting, landscape painting, different things that you’re supposed to bring an artistic arsenal with you. And some of these folks are just mind-blowingly talented. The artists. Because they’re fine artists. You know? And they’re applying their skills to scenery. And it looks like fine art. I mean, the illusion of, like you’re saying, like, some gold-plated thing, some marble countertop, granite tile.

Devin: And the other thing that… The other element to that fine art history is understanding how it… Oh, man. But no, what I was going to say is, like, it’s understanding… The color… How it looks on camera, right? So something that’s… Like Dorothy’s ruby slippers. Well, they wanted them to look like red ruby slippers, but they had to… Because of how the camera translated the colors, the actual colors, they had to paint them like… I forgot what color it was. Or, like… So it was a different color. They looked really dull when she was actually wearing them, but they were able to… Like, through the Technicolor process, they had to figure out what the camera… How the camera would translate the coloring of everything. I mean, that’s just the cinematography part of the cinematography, too, but it’s…

Adam: Understanding… And even with that example in particular, they… Because they were playing with the switch from black and white to color, they switched the… In the original L. Frank Baum novel, it’s silver slippers. Yeah, right. And they changed it to ruby so that it would play on… And then they enhanced the color just to make it look even better. You know, that book is amazing. I don’t… A lot of people know it more nowadays, but it was an allegorical tale about finance in the United States. Right. That’s why it’s the city of Oz or…

Devin: We talked about it a little bit in the podcast, but I think it’s… That’s one of those books that were made into movies that you really should read the book, too, because it’s… It is different, and there’s different… There’s different symbolism. I guess, in what they made for film and what they actually… What Baum actually had in his story, as a storyteller. So I think… We’re starting in Kansas, the Dust Bowl and all that, like the Great Depression. All of that stuff is… It’s very symbolic and allegorical. And very quick read.

Adam: And also, yeah, the other Oz books are fun, too. The other returns and visits to Oz. I’ve read a handful of the books, and they’re fun. But I love any sort of adventure into a fantastic land. I love that stuff. Yep, I agree. But Wizard of Oz also, as a film… It’s celebrated as one of the great classics because structurally, it’s gotcha. Brilliantly structured movie because every time… When we talk about thresholds, of course, it’s filled with thresholds because you’re traveling to a fantasy land. So even the gates to the… City of Oz where the wizard is, the doorway, and then the doorway to the wizard, and then the witch’s castle’s got a threshold. Even Munchkin Land, when you’re leaving… That’s a threshold from… You know? It’s…

Just as soon as you get the Scarecrow, and then once you’re used to him a little bit, then you got the Tin Man, right? And then once you’re used to him a little bit, then you got the Cowardly Lion. And meanwhile, the antagonist is surveying and sending reconnaissance figures and even appearing herself to test the hero. So, I mean, it’s just a super well-structured piece.

Devin: [unclear] dude. I’m at this appointment.

Adam: StoryOsophers, that’s the end of this episode. That’s how they’re going to end. It’s going to be like, and Devin, out. Please subscribe and rate us on iTunes. Follow us on social media, share with your friends, and send us your questions and comments. For additional resources and links to films, series, and books we talk about here, visit our website. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter for updates on StoryOsophy, story building tools and special offers at StoryOsophy.com.