Storytelling Tools Quotes

I don't actually see that much difference between telling stories in journalism and telling them on film. The tools are very different, but the basic idea is the same.

When I was coming out of college, storytelling was very much something you did with pencil and paper, so the technological platform versatility, I think, is really valuable.

Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.

I personally think montages are one of movies' great gifts to everyone. I think they're so much fun and so effective when done right.

Comic-book pages are vertical, and movie screens are relentlessly horizontal. But it's all the same form. We use different tools, but we get the job done. I'm completely in love with CGI. It's great for conveying a cartoonist's sense of reality.

Bringing words to life, storyboards show you things that words can't.

When I started working in film, I loved photography, I loved the image, I loved telling the story within a frame, but as I started playing around with film and video, it was like, 'Oh my god.' You just have so much more to play with.

With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity - voiceover, the camera's point of view, good acting - but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph.

The technology can change, but storytelling remains the same. It's just a digital world now instead of an analog world, but now the storytelling's the same. You got different tools. That's all.

I think that technological tools that filmmakers use to tell stories, in a perfect world, need to become invisible. When it's brand new and it's never been seen before and you're birthing this stuff, it's very much on people's minds.

I think the advent of things like YouTube have made it possible for creators to tell stories cheaply and efficiently and to have a built-in audience.

Video is just exploding on Instagram - motion is the new filter. We're going to help people use visuals to tell their stories.

In my house, there is an old Chinese cabinet full of little figurines on two shelves. They are for my daughter, to tell stories. We have told hours and hours or stories using these figures. There are all kinds of people, children and adults, and all kinds of animals - elephants, tigers, snakes.

Photography must be integrated with the story.

I just watched so many Westerns as a kid that you end up using archetypes and sort of tropes of that genre, because there's a language there and you can twist it and turn it on its head or play to it or go sideways at any time.

I think comedy is so much easier to do on the page than it is in real life. When I'm writing, comedy is an easy way to win over the reader. You're automatically more disposed to keep reading, thinking maybe, "I'll get another laugh or two." I think it's a survival instinct in me. I mean, you don't want to lose these guys within five or ten pages. You want them to keep going. I think to some extent it's a desperate measure that I throw out there, because a novel isn't a complete waste of time if it made you laugh.

Some of the ideas are kind of inspired by the songs, and I always want to use music to tell the story and give the movie a certain kind of mood. That's always essential to me.

A good story needs conflict, and virtual reality is a great hypothetical way to create conflict. ... In some ways, the future is going to be more boring than we think.

Don't forget that costumes, like dreams, are symbolic communication. Dreams teach us that a language for everything exists - for every object, every color worn, every clothing detail. Hence, costumes provide an aesthetic objectification that helps to tell the character's story.

The same tools that make any writer good, plus a cheerful willingness to suspend belief.

The best stories in our culture have some sort of subversiveness - Mark Twain, 'Catcher in the Rye.' You provide kids with great stories and teach them how to use the tools to make their own.

Every medium has its own projection, and I find animation is much bigger than normal.

The only difference between comedy and drama is that, in comedy, I'm going to utilize the tool of creating laughter to deflect discomfort and, in drama, I won't use a tool, but we're going to actually deal with the discomfort and see what comes out of it.