12 Stages Of The Hero’s Journey — Christopher Vogler
Film Courage: Chris, can you please give us a 10 minute version of what The Hero’s Journey is?
Christopher Vogler, Hollywood development executive, screenwriter, author and educator: Yes, The Hero’s Journey, I’m going to give you the quick down and dirty version in the way I look at it. I broke it into 12 stages and it doesn’t necessarily have to be chopped up that way. You can describe it in 10 stages or as [Joseph] Campbell did, sometimes he would take 16 or 32 because he was interested in telling you every possible thing that could happen. But I cooked it down into this rough outline of 12 stages because I was trying to get something that could be useful in many cases for analyzing scripts. Basically I came up with this 12 point proposal of what the story really is down deep.
The first stage is The Ordinary World. You need to introduce the character, the main character the story is about you have to introduce the world they live in and let us know what’s been going on there up to this point this is like a stage that you create on the screen and you bring your characters out and introduce them to the audience and show the character doing something…
