Invisible Ink again

He's all about a good story has a 3 act structure. The 3 acts are "tell them what you're going to tell them, act 2 tell them, tell them what you told them" or "proposal, arguement, conclusion". He feels like the fault of a lot of modern cinema is that it doesn't have a first act, it gets straight to the action, and his point is without the first act explaining why you care, then who cares about the action, he uses jokes and magic tricks as examples, a punchline without the setup (1st act) isn't funny, a magic trick where you weren't directed to expect the ball to be in the left hand isn't impressive when it's not. People notice what you tell them to notice, which is why you can introduce yourself say a few sentences and then say your name is something else and no one will notice.

Proposal: propose your point, which is the armature of your story. If you phrase it as a question, then you can argue both sides of it in act 2 and conclude with the answer you knew all along in 3. "The armature question should be answered by the drama that follows"

Strong emotion at the center of a story will capture interest. True emotion will create an empathetic response from the audience. (He was talking about the film he made where he almost broke down talking about his friend, and someone in the audience told him that made them cry, we respond and take on the emotions of those we see, if the emotions are true)

"A joke is just a story with a part missing. That missing piece is supplied by the listener; when they make the connection they laugh. In fact, kids will often exclaim, “I get it!” They have pieced the clues together and closed the gap. With a well-constructed joke we all close the same gap – everyone draws the same conclusion.
If the gap is too close, as in the case of a pun, people often don’t think much of it. The further the gap, the funnier the joke." It's not funny if you have to explain it. So give the audience the pieces it needs to come to the conclusion you want. Give them 2+2 and let them add =4

a hero is measured by the size of their struggle. Could be a villain, could be an internal struggle with a fatal flaw.

Stories are primarily a way of passing along information from one person to another. Good stories remain essentially the same after many retellings.Games are a way of practicing, physically or intellectually. A good game varies its scenario, and makes us change how we play it.


When I teach students to set things up in the first act that will pay off later, they complain that it is too predictable to do things that way. Like the simple magic trick they think that it will never work. They have all seen too many bad films where they could see how everything returns and works out. But this is like my poorly executed trick: it is only poor craftsmanship that is at fault, not the method itself.

Remember that dramatizing the armature is a way of getting an intellectual idea across emotionally. If you learn to do this you’ll move more people more often and more deeply. In Planet of the Apes theres a big flaw – the apes read and write English. This is a huge flaw. But no one cares because THEME BEATS LOGIC.