Long Way Up

Harley and Rivian prototypes

Bingewatching a road trip

Aaron: The middle episodes were the most memorable for me. Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru.

Isaac: The scenery?

Aaron: Huge vistas, yes. South American towns. Local people. All that. Two best friends on a bike trip. Hints of family back stories.

Isaac: But also the technical problems with electric bikes; the backup crew, the photography with helmet cams capturing the riders’ view, Rivian truck shots, drone footage, diary cams at night before sleeping.

Aaron: Not a trip that could have been done or documented without serious sponsorship and vehicle backup. Makes you rethink solo documenting a road trip.

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Voice-over

An 11-episode Apple TV+ television series. Thirteen countries in a hundred days. Environmental and charity themes. Travellers encountered many challenges, the story had many unexpected twists and turns, the telling of it had many voices and viewpoints. Complexities of a modern picaresque narrative. Worth a watch.

Richard III as Hamlet?

In a writers workshop…
Gerard: I want to write a story, about vengeance, using the Hamlet premise, you know, a character who has to take revenge on his uncle for killing his father and marrying his mother.

Instructor: A lot of people died in that play.
Gerard: Exactly. Too many deaths. Too melodramatic. All caused by Hamlet being too indecisive.
Instructor: You want to make him more decisive?
Gerard: Yeah. Have him get in there. Take out Claudius without all the fussing about.
Instructor: Like Richard III? A killer from the get-go?
Gerard: That’s it.
Instructor: No “To be, or not to be”? The play would be finished in five minutes. No Hamlet.
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Voice-over
Over in five minutes. What would happen if you replaced Hamlet with Richard III? Vengeance is Hamlet’s superwant. But the story is also driven by his internal conflict of thinking deeply, seen by some as indecisiveness. Richard III? A decisive psychopath. Without Hamlet, there is no inner conflict, no character-driven plot, no universal themes, no story. Hamlet: therein lies the genius of Shakespeare, lasting so far 400 years.

Storyboarding on Whiteboard and PowerPoint

A documentary film director explains story generation…

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Intern: How do you draft your story?

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tabula rasa beginning

Documentarian: Two ways: first I scribble the plan on a big white board using words and arrows in different colors.

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Intern: Brainstorming?

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Documentarian: Stream of consciousness more like. I like to stand, walk around, I like the space of the white board to write on. A strong coffee, like Nespresso’s Kazaar, helps.

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Intern: It’s then refined?

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Documentarian: Here’s where I go from to analog to digital. When I’ve got the flow, I open PowerPoint and start pulling in pictures. One slide, one picture. Photos, sketches, diagrams.

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Intern: No words?

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Documentarian: The narrative goes in the comments window at the bottom of each slide.

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Voice-over

A visual conceptualizer evidently. The process has merit. A PowerPoint plan can be saved as a movie to be played as a pitch for the project. It could even be used to base the film trailer on.

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Structures of Narrative: News stories, Magazine stories, Novels

News, magazine articles, novels…

Neo: They’re all just stories, right?

News Story Structure

Skelley: The structures are different.

Neo: Not just beginning, middle, end?

Skelley: Not at all. News stories put all the important facts at the front, magazine articles maybe start with a human interest story or a question to pique your curiosity, and novels usually build up to the important facts at the end.

Novel Structure

Neo: This is always so?

Skelley: Well, there are journalists who write magazine style, just as there are novelists who write like journalists.

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Voice-over

The inverted pyramid defines the news story structure. A triangle on a graph simplifies the timeline of a novel.

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Collaborative Narrative: Yavari Ship Story

Yavari on Lake Titicaca

Two travelers discuss ships…

Graham: Just as travelers have stories, ships have even bigger stories.

Somerset: Titanic was a huge story. Grandeur. Romance. Adventure. Irony. Tragedy. And all the passengers had their own stories.

Graham: Even smaller ships have their own stories. When I was traveling with my aunt last year, I sailed on a short voyage on quiet waters.

Somerset: No drama there. Or was it that you were traveling with your aunt?

Graham: It was on Lake Titicaca. No storms, no. No shipwreck, no. My aunt was not in the least bit outrageous.  The story lay in how the ship, the Yavari, a hundred-foot lake ship, got to Titicaca.

Somerset: Wasn’t that the one that was carried up the Andes on a mule?

Graham:  Simply put, yes. Built in 1862, in London, then disassembled into 2,766 pieces. Shipped to Peru, then mules carried the ship pieces 220 miles up the Andes to Puno on Titicaca. Reassembled there by riveting the bits together.

Somerset: Riveting account! A hundred-foot boat built of a kit of parts.

Graham: And get this for a bit more local adaptation. The ship's steam engine burned dried llama dung.

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Voice-over
Storytelling construct: Somerset knows something about the Yavari but Graham knows more. A collaborative narrative.

The Yavari has been restored and is now docked at Puno Bay.

The Primavera as Classical Narrative

C  -----------  B  ------------- A

In a Medici courtyard…

Sandro: The picture is classical and the plot is likewise classical.

Lorenzo: How say you?

Sandro: It is a right to left narration.

Lorenzo: We read from left to right.

Sandro: Direction does not matter. Harken to the story. At right, there is Zephyrus, the March wind. He captures Chloris and she becomes the goddess of spring, Flora. See, she scatters roses thus.

Lorenzo: And the woman at the center of the story?

Sandro: It is no earthly woman. That is Venus, attended by the Three Graces.

Lorenzo: They seem to spurn Chloris.

Sandro: Nay, they turn their backs on Zephyrus with his earthy love. Instead, they lean towards Mercury who loves knowledge.

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Voice-over

The Primavera is a depiction of one part of Ovid’s Fasti, a poem explaining the earlier Roman (not Julian) calendar. It is linear, and thus classical, beginning in January and ending in June. But critics say in places it is so allegorical as to border on erroneous. As such, Ovid’s narrative is also said to be fragmentary and difficult. He left it unfinished. Post-classical narrative?

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