Recent Reading: The Flowers of Evil Volume 10

Posted on July 3, 2014 by Chris Biewer

July is here already and there is no better way to start the month off with a new volume of Shuzo Oshimi’s The Flowers of Evil series. I apologize for being wrong in my last post about the series, it looks like volume 10 was out sooner than I expected and it isn’t the final volume!

One of the biggest things that stood out to me with this book is the artwork. The cover of the book is absolutely gorgeous.

The cover really prepares you for some awesome artwork inside. In particular there is a 2 page spread towards the end of the book that maybe rivals some of the imagery in the earlier books where Nakamura and Kasuga are in the school at night.

At times I would get lost in the art, looking at the grittiness of the hatching in several shots. The environmental shots are amazing, it is one of the best parts of manga, they tend to focus more on settings. Several areas in the book have periods where you get to look at the artwork instead of reading word balloon after word balloon.

This series really hits on the storytelling notion “show not tell”. The facial expressions and more aid the lack of text. Seeing a characters reaction is more powerful than being told how the character is feeling. This might be one of the best volumes I have read.

Seriously though, I can’t get enough of the art in this series, my words don’t do it justice.

In terms of story, after volume 9 I felt a big plot twist was needed or some more conflict. While I think volume 10 may have wandered in one section a bit, the progression of the story was sufficient and didn’t leave me disappointed. Who knows, the area that I felt wandered a bit, could still have a role in the story in future volumes, it’s one of the downsides of reviewing volumes as they come out and not the story as a whole. So take that personal feeling about the story with a grain of salt.

I am very high on The Flowers of Evil, I haven’t had a series keep me this engaged for a while. Very excited for the next volume from Vertical.

Production Update 90

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Chris Biewer

It has been a couple weeks since I posted to the site. I took some time off to wrap up a quick turnaround freelance project and then I spent some time with family that traveled to South Dakota to visit and also started to show my girlfriend around the city since she recently moved across the country to South Dakota this past week as well. So all in all a pretty exciting last couple weeks.

In the previous post I mentioned that I applied for an artist alley table at a convention. Well, I heard back and I have been accepted 😉 you can check out the new page to the site, Con Appearances, for more information, but later this fall I will be making my artist alley debut at AnimeFargo. I am really excited for the opportunity to talk to other artists and share my artwork and get feedback from fans.

As for production this last week, I wrapped up a new shot. Check it out below.

I also imported more artwork into the animation program I use, After Effects, so there are a few other shots that have been lightly started.

As for this week’s agenda, I want to get several more shots done. Towards next weekend, I would like to start 3D modeling another environment. I also have a few side projects I want to get done this week as well, such as recording another animation tutorial for my other website and also our first animation group meet up in Sioux Falls is Thursday! Very exciting week ahead of me.

Production Update 84

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Chris Biewer

What a last week and a half it has been. I am feeling better and have been catching up on some things over the last few days. I’m not sure what I had, if it was the flu or if it was a really bad cold, not sure. What I do know, is I slept a lot and quarantined myself in my apartment just in case it was the start of the zombie apocalypse. I think we’re in the clear on that.

As I start to get back to full health, since senzu beans don’t actually exist, I was able to start working on Cosmic Rage again. I got some files for some new shots imported in and started to do the light compositing of image sequences and drawings. I have a scene of a few shots getting close to being finished up; hopefully this week I can get them wrapped up.

I do have another small freelance project to knock out this week. I have purchased a couple things recently for the project so I’ll continue to add to the funds to keep the project going.

I hope you are all feeling well and staying healthy as winter hopefully wraps up and spring can get here!

Production Update 77

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Chris Biewer

This year is starting off with some good progress being made towards episode one. I am very excited to be sharing more production art with you all. Below are a couple screenshots of the progress I made this past week.

This was the first screenshot I took when I was first starting in this scene. I was generating a crowd for the shot and began by duplicating a couple members in the crowd so I could get the proportions and scaling correct. I would later go back in and footage replace the crowd members with different ones so there would be more than 2 types of characters.

This is what a draft of the final shot looks like. I am quite happy with the results and how the 3D modeling of the environments is working out so far. I have more background renders down for more shots and I am setting another one up tonight. However, I am looking for some music from a rock band to include some of these shots so I am currently looking for some artists that are willing to contribute a track or two to the project. I need to create some animations to go with some audio so that is why I need to wait for the tracks before starting those shots.

The first part of the week I have a render going for another scene. After that I will work to set up another and start compositing. I also need to do some research on possible musicians and may work on some other things this week as well. Looking forward to another great and productive week.

Cosmic Rage Unplugged: A Year in Review (and a Glimpse into the Past)

Posted on January 2, 2014 by Chris Biewer

As the new year gets underway, I want to take some time to reflect on the past year of Cosmic Rage. I want to be up front with what I think worked, what didn’t work, and I’ll also discuss the direction in which we are headed for 2014.

The Origin of Cosmic Rage
Before I recap 2013, let’s take a look at how this whole thing got started. As some of you may know, I had the initial idea for Cosmic Rage almost 10 years ago, when I was still an aspiring art student in high school. Over the past decade, the story and characters have evolved and have taken their current form. Cosmic Rage didn’t really get started until after my college internship, when I became a freelance artist. Characters such as Zeth and Jani (whom you have only seen images of so far) spent some of my college years toiling in various stories that were inspired by other things I had seen and liked; no doubt they were cookie-cutter story lines, such as a space odyssey inspired by Outlaw Star or a world of teleporting to locations as in Dot Hack.

I began to realize that these were not stories I wanted to tell; rather, they were things that I liked—two vastly different concepts. One of the initial launching points for Cosmic Rage occurred when I was first unemployed. I had just completed a college internship and was in the real world without a job. The year 2010 was the first time I hadn’t been working since I was 14. The tanking of the economy had finally reached the Midwest as hiring froze and people were let go from work. I headed south to my sister’s, where I spent the days searching for opportunities to showcase my skills and talented people to work with. However, I spent my nights working on Cosmic Rage, getting years of ideas and characters out of my head and onto paper.

After three months, I landed a job and relocated to Minneapolis. This marked another major turning point in the evolution of Cosmic Rage. I started shaping the Cosmic Rage universe into a story of my own, completely scrapping the aforementioned plot lines and universe influences from other shows. I began to create original story lines and worlds, which was a goal I had committed to while I was at my sister’s, back when I was redesigning my character art and removing other obvious influences.

It wasn’t until some spirited conversations with a friend that I really decided to commit to finding a way to tell the story of Cosmic Rage. Over the years, I had tried to find the right medium, but from dabbling in just writing a text-only version of it to developing a graphic novel to navigating the logistics of animating it, nothing seemed to stick as a viable solution.

Production Influence
I tend to be a night owl, so one night while in Minneapolis, I stumbled across a show on FX called Archer. I had seen commercials for it, but never paid much attention to it. After a couple minutes, I was sucked in by the witty dialogue, interesting art style and the limited animation in the show’s early seasons. This lead to a late-night hunt for information about the show’s animation production, and eventually I stumbled across this gem.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZdJX1jDcYI&w=853&h=480]

I now had an idea of how to carry out the Cosmic Rage project, so I started researching motion comics in general to see how other limited animation stories were being made. After a few rough animation tests, I decided to roll with it.

Production Starts
In January 2012 I decided to start blogging to share my work and ideas with potential fans. I left the start-up company in Minneapolis where I had been working and returned to freelancing. All of the production work—the nights of storyboarding out the scenes, drawing the artwork, and coloring and shading everything— is a blur to me at this point. It seemed at times that I could never get into a groove. Since I was moving around a bit, traveling for freelance work and recruiting new clients; it felt like as soon as I gained momentum, I had to put Cosmic Rage production on hold for a while. Don’t get me wrong, I have great clients and enjoy working with their brands and helping solve their problems and needs. However, I felt that in both cases (client work and Cosmic Rage), I couldn’t get into a good routine because the work was inconsistent, which is the nature of the freelance business at times.

2013 in Review
The year 2013 was interesting. I started off by continuing freelance work. In terms of Cosmic Rage, I worked on the trailer and wrapped up drawings and shading for the first episode. I even started to spend some time writing anime reviews. Throughout the year, I posted a few entries sharing my advice on things like story structure, character design and storyboarding. I also had a great opportunity to work in a studio again, so I made that change and spent some of the transitional months finishing up freelance work and getting some funds for future Cosmic Rage assets. Things have mostly settled back into order in the last month or so.

Reflection
So, up to this point, that is the story in a nutshell of Cosmic Rage. The end of the year is a great time to reflect on what worked well in 2013 and what didn’t, what areas I grew in, and what changes I could make to have a smoother production in 2014. First off, I didn’t get the response I thought I would from the trailer that I spent most of 2013 working on, which I think can be attributed to a couple things. The first was my original idea to do character-based trailers leading up to the release of the first episode. However, after production began on the first trailer, I could tell that it would be a bigger time drain than I had anticipated, so the three or four planned trailers were scrapped in favor of just one, which would provide teasers for the Cosmic Rage universe and its potential fans. Although the trailer is a little abstract since there is no narrative context yet, I learned a lot solely from that project.

I didn’t storyboard out much of the trailer, which became a problem later when syncing things up to the VO. Wasting time on that was a mistake I don’t intend to repeat. But the effort wasn’t a total loss: During the time I spent working in 3-D, I learned more about modeling, lighting, texturing and so many other things. I am only going to get faster as production continues. I felt I grew quite a bit in 3-D too, and look forward to doing more and continuing to learn.

I also played around with the art style in terms of texturing the 3-D work. I decided whether it should look more CG, hand drawn or painted. It was a good thing to work out while creating the trailer because it ensured that the art style didn’t change during the series.

Moving Forward
With my feelings about the past year now explained, it is time to look forward to 2014 and things that I hope to accomplish. The first goal is of course to have episode 1 released and ready for viewers. I am not sure if it is possible, but having recently worked on the first scene, I am very pleased with the process of building environments and moving cameras around to get my shot. In December alone I have been able to render out work for three scenes, despite freelance work, the holidays and traveling. I hope January turns into a good month of production.

Additionally, I want to continue to develop my 3-D skills, and Cosmic Rage is a great platform for doing that. I have a few other scenes to work on that will give me a chance to do so. I have found some great help on forums and other online sites where I can connect with artists who are willing to share their knowledge.

As production of episode 1 continues in 2014, I aim to get more artwork done for episode 2 as well. There will be nights where my computer will be rendering out scenes I need, and I can be productive during those nights by working on the next episode, which is already storyboarded. I am also hoping to add additional animation and raise the production quality even more.

A different but related goal is deciding how Cosmic Rage will be viewed by users. Though I have a couple potential paths in mind so that users have viewing options, one idea is publishing an e-book. I have experimented a little bit with an e-book publishing platform to see if it can support video files or movies. Otherwise, I may have to put everything into one video, but the downside is that there is no user control over the reading portions, which would alienate some potential viewers. I definitely want to create the best user experience possible.

Some other skills I want to expand my knowledge on is being a better writer. While I intend on the production blogs to still be pretty loose and spontaneous, the Thursday posts I want to get better at through editing, word usage and making my ideas clearer. The next skill would be coding; which has become a valuable skill in the professional world. I have started learning html and CSS, but want to improve at using them in an actual working environment.

Finally, I need to do a better job of posting work-in-progress images for you all to check out. I love seeing behind-the-scenes work of productions that I like, so I need to offer more insights for you all too.

I also want to thank everyone that visits the blog and keeps up with the production! I love creating, and I am really looking forward to telling the story. In case you missed it, here is the trailer/prologue for Cosmic Rage. Let’s make 2014 great!

Rage Session #5 Timing > Possibly Part 1?

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Chris Biewer

This week I thought I would write about some more tips in storytelling, today’s topic is Timing. Timing might be a hard concept to grasp when you are first starting out with your writing. First off, timing is not only relatable in terms of writing but also animation. While I was in college learning about the 12 principles of animation, it was striking to me that each animation principle could be brought to the world of writing as well. I will refer to writing in a couple different ways in this post, and probably will need a follow up at some point because it is such an interesting and wide topic. However, the first being the literal meaning of actual time.

For instance, let’s revert back to our story of the child going to the store along with preparing for a test and dealing with a bully. If we time frame this story within one school year, we now know of an exact time frame the sequence of events operates in and when it starts and ends. Within this time frame, we can add many more layers to our story. For instance, if the bully and the kid become friends towards the end of the school year they could be disappointed that they won’t see each other until the start of the next school year. On the flipside, if the conflict between kid and bully is resolved early in the time frame, they have the entire school year to be friends. We could even change this time frame to cover an elementary school career or the high school years of the characters.

You can operate in a universe where time is a little looser. For instance look at a show like Dragonball Z, they never tell you how long the battles last, there is very little reference to the passing of days in certain periods. Other shows use time even looser than this, and that is perfectly fine. Let me explain why.

I occasionally will watch some reality TV, mostly Top Chef. Last year they had their season finale as a cook off between chefs and the winner was the first one to have the best 3 dishes out of 5. The show operated in a one hour TV time frame. So what happened, was Chef A won round one, Chef B won round 2, Chef A won round 3, still on the edge of your chair? I wasn’t, I knew who won round 3 was going to win in 4 rounds. The reason I could tell was the winner of the 3rd round was announced about 45 minutes into an hour long show. Unless they were going to cram 2 cooking rounds in the final 15 minutes plus commercials, time can work against you. By locking in a timeframe, your audience now has an idea of how long they can expect a resolution and the closer you get to that time the more the audience expects a resolution.

Timing can also be used to emphasize key points in the story, in the regards of how much time is spent on a certain event. If you get the chance to watch Flowers of Evil, as I reviewed last week, you can see the timing in that show is very methodical and calculating. By acting in a slower and more calculating manner, they can build up more emotion in areas. For instance, after the climatic scene in episode 7, episode 8 has very little dialogue and it revolves on 2 characters going home. Now some people thing that it was boring or arrogant for them to spend an entire episode on that, however, I look at it in a different regard. The 2 characters had a major turning point in their relationship and I felt that episode 8 was exactly how I would feel as a person in that moment as well, the characters seemed to live in that moment and it emphasized one of those nights that we never want to end. There are earlier episodes that had 2 or 3 school days in them, by using an episode for just one night, tells the audience the importance of that night for the characters.

Note, there will also be critics of your work no matter what you do. You just need to be able to separate the ones being haters and the ones actually trying to provide you with feedback and useful thoughts. “This sucks” is not valid feedback. If that person doesn’t explain why it sucks or why they would have done it a different way, I would generally rule that comment as garbage. Writing like everything else takes practice and you shouldn’t be writing to please an audience, you should be writing because you have an interesting story to tell and share with others.

Just like an epic battle in Dragonball Z wouldn’t be completed in 1 episode, by spending more time in certain areas, you can use it to build up the importance of the event. The reason for this is because viewers want that climatic moment to be worth it, they want the pay off of their time being invested in your story. Whether its a 26 episode series or a 100 page book, the payoff is what sticks with the audience. We have all seen a bad movie we didn’t like how it ended, we didn’t like the payoff of our investment in time of watching the film.

Have you ever seen a film or read a book where all hope was lost and the odds were stacked against the characters so much and then an event or something happens and the characters turn out ok? That is also based on timing, just like when you hear someone say that so and so has great comedic timing. This is timing in more of a sense or emotional way. This comes in a variety of ways and formats it is impossible to name them all here. In films it could be a character who you thought was dead showing up to save the day. In comic books and manga they actually set frames up so cliff hangers are at the end of the page, so that short amount of time it takes you to turn a page you are filled with suspense to see what happens next. This of course happens in books as well, hence why we have “page turners”. Even tv shows have this in the form of the timing of commercial breaks and how episodes end in a series, its to keep your audience coming back for more. The building of events creates this moments where we can turn the story one way or another or use it as a breaking point before another chapter, episode or film.

Through these turning points that timing creates, we can create a fast paced action story or a slow methodical story with one or two distinctive pay off points. The slow methodical approach is similar to when you go to a horror movie and are teased about being scared, but they drag it out to the point it gets to be unbearable, but in a good way. For instance a person enters a room and sees something run into another room and the character tries to track down what they saw, only to jump cut to something creepy and scare you. There are benefits to both ways and it usually is determined by the story you want to tell.

I think that’s quite a bit to digest for now. Next week we will tackle the topic of anticipation and how that can effect timing.

Rage Session #4 Character Development Decision Making

Posted on July 25, 2013 by Chris Biewer

Last week we went over some tips for character development and how we can use the triangle method or 3 act outline for helping our characters evolve. However, last week we didn’t talk about one of the most important things, and this is what makes our characters do what they do? Of course as the creators we write the stories, but how can we make our characters make decisions that aren’t out of character. I am sure you have seen a movie and at some point the character makes a decision that you questioned because it seemed out of character. Those are the kinds of things we are going to discuss today.

Let’s first start with some basics in building your characters. For a beginner I would recommend an exercise.Write out a character bio but write it as if you were creating your a character based on yourself. See what events played an important role in shaping your character. These backstories are important for what shapes your character’s current state and also their future decisions. One trap to keep an eye out for, is by putting too much detail and emphasis on events that your audience won’t know or see. For instance, I have seen some character bio’s online that have details such as the characters blood type. In my opinion, if you aren’t using that information, don’t even create it or spend time on it.

In some cases, you can start with a loose outline of your character and develop some backstory later, it just depends on how much history or past events your characters connect with. I also don’t think you need super detailed past events for at least starting a story. For instance, in Cosmic Rage, I have some loose outlines for characters backstories but since I haven’t written a good chunk of the middle portion of the story, I can add backstory events if needed and most importantly, as long as they make sense.

So now that our characters have some backstory to them, we can start to discuss how the characters can make logical choices in your world. In a well crafted world, your characters will write the story themselves. As cliche as this sounds, it’s true. It might not happen right away, but once your characters start to take on a life of their own, their choices and decisions will make perfect sense.

Take your basic story of good guy vs bad guy. The good guy always goes after the bad guy, no matter what and for a variety of reasons. If the good guy just decided to go home there wouldn’t be a story to tell unless you were potentially introducing a character who steps into that role in your world. Even anti-heroes get drug back into stories of saving the day. Whether it is a reluctant John McClain from the Die Hard series who is always in the wrong place at the wrong time, or if it is Vegeta from Dragonball Z who turns good from having a common enemy with Goku.

Let’s take a different approach, let’s say in a drama Guy X wants to date Girl X. That is his motivation for the story and he will do things that get him closer to that goal, unless he eventually quits, which makes more sense in a story when the world isn’t on the line. This kind of element may be why you visited this blog as well, you want to become a writer or storyteller and are working on advancing your skills. Your decision to read this post alone supports your own motivation.

Since we have been referring to the triangle method in terms of story outlines and character development, we can do the same with character motivations. A character has a motivation and we need an event or a series of events that get that character to their end game or something that breaks them and gets them to disengage their pursuit of their motivation. And just like we did with outlines and character development, we can give a character multiple motivations. For instance Guy X who likes Girl X may also want to be a rich successful businessman, or maybe a broadway performer or even a mechanic. We can start to now use these motivations to play off each other. Maybe Guy X brags to Girl X about his successful business or his rich lifestyle in an attempt to gain her attention. Perhaps he uses his popularity as a performer to gain her interest or perhaps he struggles to talk to her so he formulates a character in which he uses as a self confidence booster to talk to her. Maybe he fixes her car or attempts to fix her car causing more damage making a relationship a potentially larger obstacle. The opportunities are endless.

So we covered a lot of ground today, but what if you are a beginner or you struggle with all of your characters making the same decisions or being too close to the same person. There are a few exercises and techniques you can use to overcome this as well. One tip is to base your characters personalities of of people you know or know enough of that gives you enough information. So imagine modeling a characters personality after yourself and then another character after a sibling, best friend or maybe a person you don’t like. By doing this you can write based on actual relationships and behaviors.

If you are writing about 2 best friends, maybe use yourself and a friend. By doing this you will give them certain details and intricacies that will make them more believable. It will also make the decisions the characters need to make towards or around one another easier to decide. Or if you want your character to interact with their parents the same as you interact with yours or even a friend and their parents. By observing different type of people and their relationships with others, it will provide a potential outline or blue print for you to at least get started.

You could even borrow personalities from existing characters, just beware not to write the same story. This technique takes discipline to use so your not just copying another piece of work, unless you are writing a fanfic.

For instance if we base a good caring character after Rick from the Walking Dead or to a more extreme example Goku from Dragonball Z, it would be really out of character for either of these characters to hurt someone else. They would need some form of conflict to make them do that or for them to change their ways and do so. In the Walking Dead’s case, it took a confrontation between Rick and Shane to resolve their conflict. Rick tried to avoid the conflict on several occasions and only had to fight when necessary. After his battle with Shane, it didn’t effect his character in the long run (at least so far) in his attitudes towards being a good person. It may have helped push him into having a shorter tollerance for threatening people, as we see in the start of the prison arc with the inmates.

Goku is the same way, he only fought the bad guys to save the world and even in those fights tried to persuade the bad guys to give up their evil ways. He even decided to remain dead since bad guys were trying to harm the Earth because he was around. Neither of these characters would go out of character and launch a pre emptive strike on another character, unless it was triggered by an event, which is character development.

As always feel free to comment below to share your thoughts or contact me if you have questions or want to talk about the topic some more. Next week may bring another writing lesson or a review, I haven’t decided. Thanks for stopping by 🙂

Rage Session #3 Character Development

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Chris Biewer

In our previous sessions, we discussed our 3 act or triangle method of writing story outlines. One of the components in your story will be how do your characters evolve over the course of time and those events. When developing characters, I also use the 3 act outline or triangle for this method as well.

In character development, we have to evolve our character, they have to change in regards to the obstacles they face and how that shapes their character. For instance, you and I are not the same people we were a few years ago. Some people have a moment where they can change drastically over a short period; consider a broken relationship, a family tragedy, or even an environmental impact. But not all character development needs to be pushed by things on such a grand scale. Consider something another character says in a conversation or something a character hears other characters talking about. Each of these types of scenarios can change the development of a character.

Breaking this down in terms of our triangle, we would have…

Character initial state>>>>>trigger event>>>>>> Character post event.

If we look back at our previous sessions, we can use the above path to evolve our kid that is going to the store and losing his money. In terms of character development, the fact our kid is playing with his money on his way to the store shows his relaxed nature towards money. If the character was really protective of his money, he would have had it in his pocket, wallet or some how protecting it.

In the event of the character losing their money as a result from playing with it, the character can not buy what they were going to the store for. As a result from this triggering event (losing the money) the character needs to resolve how they will change, if at all. For instance the character could have a new found appreciation for money and it shows in his following actions. Or the character could not learn anything, which is also character development.

Depending on your character, not every event will teach them life lessons. Let me explain. Think of every day encounters we all have that doesn’t necessarily change our behaviors. For instance, we still have hunger and wars even though we see images, videos and news casts about these kinds of things. However, some people need to experience things to change instead of seeing images or videos, thats whats makes everyone different. You don’t want all of your characters behaving the same way.

When developing characters, we can treat their development like story arcs. Characters can be going through a couple developments at once. Again relating our story of the kid and the store, when we talked about multiple arcs, we included an arc with a bully. So within this story, the character could develop a stance on money but also develop their relationship with the bully; does their relationship get worse or do they come to understand one another.

The character’s development can take the form of several arcs, and like the story arcs we discussed previously, they can intermingle with one another, one arc can be completed within the development of another arc and so on. Now spread this across the board with multiple characters and not just your main character.

Not all character changes happen smoothly however. Sometimes characters experience a triggering event, and they can not cope with it. The event can be so devastating or unbelievable that the character fails to come to grips with the result. This event could conflict with what the character thought they knew or a strong belief they had. Characters can struggle with their new development for a variety of reasons, fear of change or they don’t like what they are becoming are some possible routes among many others.

Next week we will go over some more on character development and in finding ways to model the characters and to help them make decisions within the world you have created.

Rage Session #2 Working with Extended Stories

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Chris Biewer

Last week we discussed short form stories and some basics for story outlines. Our point of reference last week was the varying outlines for the scenario of the kid going to the store and losing their money. We discussed potential story routes if the character found their money and routes if they couldn’t, depending on the type of story you wanted to tell. Most importantly we discussed the triangle or acts of a story involving the beginning, climax and end. Many of these principles apply to telling a longer form story, let’s dig in.

When we talk about a long form story, we are essentially talking about all sorts of little stories that, when put together, make up a larger story. With each of these little scenarios, we can use our triangle to determine the start, climax and end of each of these.

So, let’s jump back to last week’s examples, (you can view the post here). Let’s take the base story premise, of the kid going to the store. Now let’s say we want to add a relationship or interaction with another character in the story, let’s go with a bully from school who wants to take the kids money. When you hear of the word “arc” in references to stories, they are referring to a certain triangle outline of the main conflict in the story. For instance a Batman vs Joker arc. While Batman will have obstacles to overcome, until the conflict is resolved with the Joker, it is considered to be in that arc.

One major component to keep in mind when writing a long from story with multiple arcs, is timing. Timing was a major lesson in animation, not only the timing of storytelling but even the timing of a character. In terms of timing, we can offset the story arcs so not everything is happening at once. Check this out.

So we can take our 2 arcs (the trip the store and the bully) and we can start to play with the timing of events to help progress our story. Both of our arcs need an introduction, a beginning. We could start our story with an altercation between both characters at school. Or we could start our story with the kid going to the store, and on the way to the store runs into another character, who turns out to be a bully. We could even introduce the bully later in the story and have our main character run into the bully after the trip to the store or even while at the store. So you can already start to see how many options we can get for even just a two arc story. By adjusting the gaps of the events in the story you can get drastically different stories.

For instance, if we start our story off with the interaction of the kid and bully and then have our kid go to the store (either later in the day or maybe the next day or even later), we then need to plot out our climaxes in each arc. We could have our climax between the bully and kid on the way to the store, at the store or after the store. With this flexibility, it gives you the most range on your story.

We could even decide to overlap the arcs or fit one complete arc within another. If the kid goes to the store and runs into a bully, we could fit the entire bully arc in between the beginning and end of the store arc.

If we added a third arc into the mix we could really start to play with the timing even more. For fun let’s throw in a third arc about the kid having to study for a test in school. Our points can be the introduction of the test, the characters struggle with the material and the conclusion would be taking the test. We know have 9 plot points (3 from each arc) in order to craft our story. So we could shell our store and bully arc within the test arc, or we could complete the test arc and have one or both remaining arcs conclude outside of the test arc.

We could do fit all of the arcs within the test arc for instance if the test is issued on a Monday and given on Friday, that would give us a week to complete the bully and the store arc. Another route would be if the test was sprung on our character in the morning and to be given later in the day. In the same day we could introduce the start of our bully arc as well.

The arcs will heavily depend on the type of story you want to tell and also your stories beginning and end points and even the theme or idea of your story. I hope this helped you with your story writing, if you have any questions feel free to comment below or contact me.

Rage Session #1- Writing Story Outlines

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Chris Biewer

I recently was having a discussion with a friend that wanted to get into writing, and since I have been too busy to really sit down and watch anything to review and enjoy… I thought I would start a little mini series on some things that I do to help me write, things I gathered from other artists and maybe some resources to help my friend and whoever may check this out and be interested in writing.

First off, the most important thing is to just write. It’s no different than drawing, and I had a professor in college that said we all had to make 10,000 bad drawings before we made one good one. Somedays that feels like the case.

So today I wanted to take some time to start with the basis of each story, and that is an outline, a path, a direction in which your characters go. Of course there are times when breaking the rules is ok and in some cases needed, but that will come with experience and will depend on the type of story you want to tell.

We are going to start with a basic story outline, which consists of 3 parts (such as a 3 act play). Which we will call the beginning, middle and end. However, there are 2 areas, one that lies in between the beginning and middle, which we call the rising action and the resolution, which lies between the middle and end. So our story path looks like…

Beginning>>>>>Rising Action>>>>>Middle (climax)>>>>>>Resolution>>>>>Ending

Every story needs that climax, we need a reason to care about the character or a way to connect with the character on their journey. For instance, if we have a short story about a kid waking up and going to the store, we have a beginning and an end but we have no climax, no meat to the story. The climax in most cases, will be a problem a character or your characters come across. So perhaps in our story on the way to the store, the kid loses their money so they can’t buy what they need. The problem our kid now faces, is the fact they don’t have money to get what they were going to buy.

So lets say that our story begins with an introduction to our character, the kid. We now have a middle point in the story where the kid loses their money on the way to the store. This is where the rising action comes into play. When you hear the word foreshadowing, that usually comes into play here. If you watch scary movies, music is a really good tool for foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is a technique used to prepare the audience for something. For instance, in scary movies they will use tense music to prepare the audience for a scary reveal. On the flip side, there are films that will use music as foreshadowing but it will lead to nothing, or after the reveal of nothing they get you.

The main thing to keep in mind of foreshadowing, is continuity. So lets say in our story we introduce our character getting up in the morning. They are getting dressed and we foreshadow a problem by the kid putting on a pair of shorts that have holes in the pocket. This way when the kid loses the money its not a shock to the audience, the money fell out of his pocket. Another route we could go, is on the way to the way to the store, the kid is flipping his coin in which they are going to buy something with and drops it in the sewer, this is still a route to get from Point A (the kid waking up) to Point B (the climax of the kid realizing they lost their money). And even another route we could go is by foreshadowing the character is forgetful. For instance as the kid is getting dressed, they forget to tie their shoes or forget their coat or something. That way the kid didn’t lose their money, they simply forgot it. But it still gets us from the kid waking up to realizing their money is gone.

So now that we have our character waking up, foreshadowing a way they lost their money and we have reached the climax of the character realizing their money is lost, we need to work towards resolving the issue and ending our story. The resolution will depend on how we actually want the story to end.

If we choose to end our story by the kid getting their money back, or go with the path of the kid not getting their money back, we will have different paths to go which will need to be addressed accordingly. If the character has money at the end of the story, then we could fill in our resolution (the way we resolve the conflict or climax) with an appropriate story. In this case, the kid could back track and find their money if they lost in through the hole in their shorts. In the event the kid forgot the money, they could return home and find it. Money lost in the drain while playing with it? The kid could find someone to reach the money or even someone who gives him money or buys his stuff at the store.

If we choose the alternate path of the kid losing their money, they could backtrack and not find the money that fell through their pocket. If the kid forgot the money, they could return home and not find it, or another family member could have mistaken it as their own. With the storyline of dropping the money in the sewer, the kid could simply not find it or try to recover it and fail, or no one will lend him some money.

There are no right or wrong paths you can create, as long as it makes sense in the overarching story your telling. This is a solid start to outlining short stories, but the same principles will apply to telling long form stories, which I will talk about next week. Feel free to comment below if you have any questions or have anything to add.