The beauty of this online live course is that by the time the nine weeks have drawn to an end, the process of building a story sneaks up on you and you can’t quite believe that you’ve developed a structurally sound outline which can serve as a springboard for a complete piece.
The class begins with a simple question: What if?
It’s a question that, at its very root, invites creativity in and stimulates the imagination. It’s the core of the Big Idea or the High Concept on which to build your narrative. Since the faculty of this course are mostly Pixar alums and artists, they often use Pixar films as points of reference. The What If? of Finding Nemo, for example, is What if a father lost his son and had to traverse the most dangerous part of the ocean to find him?
However, the instructors don’t expect you to start out with a question that’s quite so fully formed. You being with brainstorming methods like creating lists and combining opposites. Before you even get to themes or subtext, you are urged to have fun and play. This is the phase of story building where your mantra should be: only the waste basket knows for sure. Or, to paraphrase what Ben Affleck said to Matt Damon during the writing of Good Will Hunting, don’t judge yourself by your worst ideas, judge yourself by your best ones. Now is the time to keep ideas flowing and, just like with a faucet, if you shut off the bad ideas, it bottlenecks your good ones too.
At the end of the first week, you are required to have three what if? questions and drawings to match. Throughout each of the nine weeks of this course, you will be writing and drawing for every assignment.
What if every time a teenage girl felt intense emotion, she produced insects from her body?
What if a bullied boy opened up his broken umbrella in the schoolyard and was transported into an apocalyptic world where he was a superhero?
What if a girl’s parents turned into monsters and she was the only person in the family who could leave the house?
Each week builds upon the last as they take you through a series of exercises to flesh out the details of your character and your story.
Week two delves deeper into character where you are asked to consider: when faced with this conflict or situation, what would your character do? What are their internal and external features, their obstacles, and their overarching wants and needs. By the end of week 2, you have chosen one of your what if scenarios and created a character profile for your protagonist.
Week three focuses on world building. You are instructed to draw one or more of your characters in a setting and create elements of design that convey your story ideas. The goal is to start thinking like a camera and incorporate lights, darks, blocking, perspective, and shapes into the composition in a way that tells the story without words.
Week four gets you to think about theme and to brainstorm ideas for the moral of your story. This arises from the needs of your main character that you delineated in week two. By the end of week four, you also have all of your major story beats written out into a mini-outline that will become the basis for developing each of the acts more specifically in subsequent weeks.
One of the best aspects of this course is the templates the instructors provide for you to brainstorm and structure your story. Somehow, this is the most organic and fun anyone has made outlining. I’ve taken many writing courses from Second City to Save the Cat, but the simple step by step building block approach that the Pixar Experiential class took was hands down my favorite. I didn’t really even realize I was outlining until it was over. I’ve always gotten in my head about the midpoint, the break into three, and whether or not I’ve properly reached the Dark Night of the Soul or adequately Stormed the Castle. I had no such experience here.
By the end of week four you have a concise overall outline and for each of the following three weeks (five through seven), you break each of the major beats down into three minor beats. Deliverables (also known as homework) each week are roughly sketched images threaded together in story reels with voiceover and sound. (This is, after all, a class about storytelling for film so you do need to know how to edit. Simple software like iMovie works fine.)
A final class is dedicated to rewriting and understanding the difference between, as Michael Arndt eloquently calls, the bad, good, and insanely great endings. In a nutshell, this comes down to: what’s at stake. And in his great YouTube Tutorial, Michael Arndt boils it down to the fact that great endings always resolve the external, internal, AND philosophical stakes which each have their own inciting incident and arc within the greater narrative.
This class was enormously creatively stimulating, and for anyone who wants to build their storytelling skills, I highly recommend it. Be forewarned, it’s also a ton of work. One day, I spent from 11:00am to 11:00pm drawing frames to get the final piece finished on time. However, I was so thoroughly immersed in the process, I completely lost track of time. Immersive experiences have a high correlation with happiness, and this was definitely an absorbing and educational class.
Here is my final project:
Monsters in the House video from Story Xperiential class.