The Seed of a Story: Your First Frame
Every movie starts with a good story.
But how are you supposed to come up with a story just like that, at the drop of a hat?
While there are many methodologies for story idea generation, and many frameworks to build Hollywood-worthy stories that I’ll be teaching really soon, today we’ll start from the very seed of a story: a single image or “frame”.
As a writer, I’ve used many times a simple but very effective exercise to instantly kill the blank-page syndrome:
I would simply think of 3 unrelated words.
It’s important that these words don’t fall on the same “plane”, as I like to imagine it.
For instance, if I say coffee, then I cannot say milk, or cup, or waiter, or even chair or table, since all these concepts are thematically related.
My next word has to live on a completely different “plane” of existence.
I like to visualize these planes as actual geometrical planes in space, where each word is akin to a dot that falls in one plane or another.
We need 3 words that are not thematically related, that live on 3 completely independent planes.
Like shoe, coffee, ship.
Once I have these 3 dots, I can start writing, with the intention to, somehow, connect them on a single thread.
This thread that you’ll uncover by joining the points is the story.
Let’s try it:
Leticia stumbled and almost fell. Her left shoe was tight… almost too tight.
Fernando, the owner of the title cafeteria around the corner, saw her and quickly came over to offer help.
“Are you ok?”
“Oh yeah, Fernando, thanks for asking! I may have hit a small rock or something, nothing to worry about…”
“May I offer you a hot coffee, perhaps? It’s on the house, of course!”
“I don’t think I… ok, right. I’ll take you on the offer Fernando, I think I need one… black. Thanks so much for the kind gesture. But I’ll pay for it, ok?”
She sat right there, in a hidden corner, trying to collect herself.
Her mind was racing. She couldn’t help.
The ship had left more than 2 weeks ago…
How could she let him know about the –good?– news now?
Should she?
That was just a quick, silly example.
But remember: it does not have to be perfect.
It just have to be done.
This is an excellent exercise, because once you uncover the first few inches of the story’s thread, the story will start telling itself.
That’s the great thing about stories: they’re always eager to be told!
This little but powerful technique is a secret hack novelists and other fiction writers use often to get “unblocked”.
Now that you’re familiar with the “3 dots” technique, let me teach you a similar technique I came up with to create the first frame of a visual story, loosely inspired by it.
I call this technique the “3-point Initial Frame”, because that’s exactly what it does: you give it 3 points, and it gives you back the initial frame, without fail.
The three points of the technique are the questions:
Who? (Who’s the character)
Where/When? (the point in space-time)
What? (What’s the character doing/What’s happening)
Let’s try it:
Who?
A 20-year old Japanese female piano player
Where?
In a rustic house in rural Japan, 1940s
What?
She’s tuning a dusty old piano in her grandparents home (she’s visiting for grandma’s birthday).
This is the first frame… but it’s still a little out of focus.
Let’s bring more detail to the picture asking the story a few questions…
Questions like:
Is someone else with her?
What are they doing?
What’s their expression (emotions)?
What more is in there?
Let’s do a second pass now and add some more details to the frame to bring it into focus:
Grandma is standing close by, observing her silently.
She just brought her a green tea. The steaming, beautiful ceramic cup, is resting on a little bamboo table beside the piano.
Akiko’s semblance appears a little worried (Will she be able to repair the piano on time?)
Do you see the picture?
And the story that follows?
That’s why I call it first frame.
The picture you’re seeing right now in your mind is the story’s seed!
This frame is certainly not a story yet.
It’s just that: a frame, a frozen moment in time.
A sneak-peek, if you will, into another world.
That’s why, in cinematography, we call it “a still”.
It’s not a story yet, because stories are made out of movement and progress.
But it certainly contains a story inside, fully-ready and eager to sprout out:
I bet you can see the story screaming and wanting out!
Let’s go now and, for good measure, create this first frame using any AI image generator of your choice.
In my case, I’ll use Reve, which is an AI image generator that produces incredible quality and realism, and it’s currently free to use.
Let’s quickly write a prompt:
“A 20-year old Japanese girl tuning a piano in a rustic country house in Japan, in 1943. Her grandma is standing close to her, looking at her trying to repair the old piano. A steaming, beautiful classic porcelain tea cup is resting on a rustic bamboo table beside the piano. Natural lighting, day time, cinematic”
This is what Rave gave me:
And this is ChatGPT’s interpretation:
These are great starter points for our story!
And there you have it: Your story’s first frame.
You can repeat this simple process as many times as you want to come up with unlimited story ideas!
I’ll see you in the next issue of “Flawlessly Human”, when we’ll be infusing life to this initial frame using the magic of AI Video generation!
Take care,
Leonardo
P. S. If you happen to know someone special that would LOVE to be part of this journey with us, please share Flawlessly Human with them:
P. P. S. I know what you’re thinking:
“Hey, since we’re talking about Japan here… wouldn’t it be cool if we could visualize the story in anime style?”
I was wondering the same:
I just asked ChatGPT to make it into anime style, like so (it doesn’t have to be more complicated than that!):
