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Suzanne and Marian from our community created the subtitles. Thank you!
Have you watched both videos included below my video frame?
Have you finished watching them?
And did you enjoy them? Did you feel emotionally drawn
into the stories?
I say story when obviously both videos are documents of real life,
not fictional, pre-written stories a screenwriter has invented.
Yet they tell complete stories with a hook, a hold and a payoff
a beginning, a middle and an end.
First of all, both videos might seem very different and not connected at all
but let's have a closer look.
The hook, the emotional trigger, in both movies might be the cute protagonist, for example,
the main character of the videos, the dog or the little boy.
The hold, then, the element that makes us stick and go on watching
is directly tied to this character and us, the viewers, realising
that this character has a goal and is willing to reach it against all odds.
The boy and the dog equally struggle against outer forces
like the water and the huge distance to the goal, as well as against inner forces
like the tendency to give up when things get to exhausting, that everybody of us knows.
Both characters seem to fail at one point but in the end they make it,
the boy reaches the goal, and the dog its frisbee.
Here we can see a true happy ending, a real payoff for the viewer
that no screen writer might have created better.
In the case of "Josh Turnbull - Sign Him Up!", this payoff is even deepened by
the audience's cheers and the little boy's obvious and adult-like joy when he raises his arms in,
yeah, in total happiness. The 'sign him up chants' that follow only underline this payoff's impact
and its effect can be compared to moments of celebration after successful adventures in feature films,
like they are, for instance, typically included in the last act of the Star Wars movies by George Lucas
when in the end of the whole movie, a big parade celebrates the hero's successful journey.
But how can a writer achieve such emotional impact with his or her story?
What does even mean, creating an emotional impact, or creating immersive stories?
I think often people talk about immersion, about becoming immersed in a story
and for me that means being completely in the moment, so it's something that often,
if you go to any meditation classes people say I want you to be centred, I want you to be completely in the moment,
and that's to the exclusion of all else. And I think good stories have the ability to do that,
that when we read, or we sit back and watch or whatever, we... the storytelling is such that
they take us on an emotional journey, and they appeal both to this, kind of,
this mental ability we have to connect these dots, but also to our hearts,
to us wanting to see satisfactory outcomes, so I think storytelling has evolved to the point where
often storytellers know, ok, I need to set up a character, I need to get some empathy going
so that, you know, I'm sort of drawn in that way. And then they go through some challenges
and then, hopefully there's a nice resolution at the end.
There are many books on storytelling, writing and screen writing, dealing with the question of how to create an emotional impact with stories.
What all these works have in common, though, is stating the audience's or reader's need
of identifying with the characters, especially the protagonists, the main characters of the story,
by giving them a goal, an aim, something they want to achieve,
and, on the other side of this desire or goal, there's a conflict, a barrier
that they have to overcome, or maybe be defeated by.
If you look at both videos closely, you will see kind of like the structure of the arcplot
that I introduced before. The hero who fights for his object of desire, be it a frisbee,
or the soccer ball in the goal, or be it saving his or her girlfriend,
doesn't matter. If the dog had not caught the frisbee but fallen into the water
in the last second before reaching out far enough, and maybe if he had even drowned
there would still have been an emotional payoff, just of another kind, a tragic ending instead of a happy one.