Storytelling and Narrative - Week 1 (26/09/2025)

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As a part of the preparation for our animistic project, we learned about how they key differences between story and narrative and how narrative can be executed when trying to tell a story. on of the ways we learnt the key differences between the two elements was by learning about the different narrative structures formatted by writer; Kurt Vonnegut. He presented a lecture in-which he demonstrated the different beats and structures that writers adopt to present their stories.

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For our first task, we had to choose between two pictures and make a three-panel story based on the image we have chosen using one of three narrative structures: Bot Meets Girl, Man in Hole, and From Bad to Worse. One image featured a little girl snuggled in bed, surrounded by family members, while the other image featured three ghosts traversing a quiet suburban neighborhood in the night with a flashlight in-hand.

I had grouped with Armani on creating a three-panel comic based on the three ghosts utilizing the “Man in Hole” plot beats (Characters are fine, characters face problem, characters get out of problem). While making a “Bad to Worse” comic was very tempting, me and Armani decided on making the story lighthearted using the “Man in Hole” structure. Our story involves a family of ghosts deciding to overcome their fears of people by meeting one in-person. Once the door opens, they are faced with a horrifying monster, scaring them, but it's wearing a Halloween costume expecting trick-or-treaters. The three ghost float away from the exchange, with two of them shaken up from the scare, whilst their small ghost daughter happily licks on a lollipop as the homeowner waves goodbye.

For our next task, we had to get in groups of two and collaborate on another storyboard/comic, but this time using a six-to-ten panel structure with different narrative steps. For inspiration, we were presented with an illustration of a crowd all holding telescopes. I had been grouped with Jemima on this project, but because we were both sitting next to Alex and 12, we had misunderstood the group size requirements and proceeded to work on the storyboards with them as a group of four instead (Oops)! We wanted to make the story unpredictable, so after much conceptualising and planning, we had all decided to subvert the "Boy Meets Girl" narrative into what we dubbed "Girl Kills Boy", where the story ends on a bad/ambiguous note instead of a good one. While this narrative shape does lean into "From Bad to Worse", I believed the way the story unfolds made it different enough to give its narrative a different term.

The story begins with a crowd of humans looking through a telescope with uncertainty (Bad fortune) to see a giant "person" in the sky. The giant then turns its head and waves to the people with a smile, causing them to react happily (Good fortune). The populace show the giant their affection, causing him to float closer towards the earth, blanketing the people in a shadow of his size. Everyone panics, underestimating the size of the giant as the earth explodes in its embrace (Bad fortune). The giant looks at the crumbled planet in sadness before turning around and seeing something in the distance. It extends its telescope that it always had even though it was nowhere to be seen in previous panels and zooms on the figure.

It sees a giant "person" in the stars. It turns its head and waves happily (Good/Ambiguous fortune).

Learning about Kurt Vonnegut’s perspective on narrative tropes and structure has been an eye-opening experience for me as a writer and conceptual artist. I usually dislike theories on storytelling and art because I more-often-than-not hear about them through cynical viewpoints, but I love Kurt Vonnegut’s lecture on how narratives are constructed because it emphasizes the flexibility and durability of narrative whilst making it easy to understand and apply myself, rather than pointing at it and say “these things are similar, are they not? Hmmm?”. I will most definitely be applying this narrative conceptualising method onto my future projects, I already started doing it for my upcoming animatic!

Sources:

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Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories. (30th October 2010). David Comberg. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ [Accessed 1 Oct. 2025].

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Troilo Staci. (2021). Basic Plots: Vonnegut’s Man in Hole. [online] Story Empire. Available at: https://storyempire.com/2021/01/06/basic-plots-vonneguts-man-in-hole/ [Accessed 1 Oct. 2025].