The 80/20 Technique to Script Films of 6 seconds

Or How to Make your Vines attractive.

Since the beginning of Vine, animators have found a powerful platform to express themselves. Among all kind of Viners, these film makers have pulled out great stories mainly because of their deep perception of time. This basically means:

Each second and each frame matters.

In this article, we’ll deconstruct an animator’s brain to understand how easily we can come up with practical yet powerful scripts for our films.

So what’s the secret?

Start thinking in verbs and nothing more.

Verbs contain within them a micro-cosmos of information appliable to different contexts, with their proper limits and restrictions. In a sentence, it represents the most important particle to understand the purpose of our ideas. Let’s consider the following example:

I __________ Coffee.

The easiest answer to fill in the blanks would be to write the verb drink, but how different our story would be if we put the verb love or hate?

Go further. Imagine the verb rain (It’s raining Coffee)

One way to apply this principle is to do the following exercise borrowed from language learning techniques: Using a deck of cards, pick from one to five verbs randomly and imagine how the actions are connected. Change the order if you want, but no matter how weird the connection might look, try your best to create a compelling story.

Forget about having the best ideas at all times.

Sometimes you just need a “simple” idea to start. Let the story flow by itself. [Tweet this]

This is a great way to avoid creative block and procrastination.

The best part of all:

You’ll quickly become better at storytelling.

PS. Thank you very much for reading! If you got any value out of this, I’d really appreciate it if you hit the recommend button (the little heart). Feel free to add your comments, I`ll be very happy to read them.

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