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The Story Clock

Jan 14, 2021


Introduction

The story clock is a useful way to help get your ideas for a film down. Today I'm going to be giving you the history of the story clock, how to use it to better record your ideas and give you examples of how it can be used from other films.

History

The Story Clock was created by Dan Harmon, he is currently an executive producer on the show Rick and Morty. A few years later, Seth Worley would put his idea for the story clock notebook onto kickstarter. I actually bought one of these notebooks and I can say it's really quite great for getting the story structure down


How to use the story clock

The story clock is a very simple method of recording the structure of your ideas it looks a little something like this:


The clock is your film. Let's say for intense we're using the film 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade'. The film is two hours long so the six o'clock mark is the one hour marking the film. How it works is that you wright down the events in which they happen on the clock at the appropriate time. So we can use story structure and record it on this clock.


Studio Binder has an interesting way of putting it:


1. You - The first thing you need to do is create a protagonist we want to invest in. Not everyone liked Don Draper, but we certainly wanted to watch him!

2. Need - Now that we're obsessed with your protagonist, we need to know what's motivating them! Establish an active drive - what do they need?

3. Go! - Look at them go! We're off to the races as the protagonist has initiated their journey to find, build, buy, steal, or win over whatever they need.

4. Search - Put them to test! Let's see what they're made of. Nothing worth doing is ever easy, so make sure you challenge your protagonist a bunch of times.

5. Find - Mission accomplished! Or is it? It appears as though your protagonist has gotten what they set out for, but it can't be that easy. 6. Take - How badly do they still want it? This is where we see how steep of a price your hero is willing to pay to accomplish their goal, to get what they need. 7. Return - Now our hero must return home. Having taken what they wanted and slayed the metaphorical (or real) dragons, they make the journey back. 8. Change - "The only thing constant is change." - Heraclitus, and college dorm posters. Your hero isn't the same person they used to be, show that change here.


So this is a great way if you are writing a script to determine the timestamps in your film that certain events should take place.


As Ryan Conley puts it on an interview with Seth Worley 'So it's really just taking the main sort of lightning strike eureka ideas that you have when you're coming up and excited with the project and then being able to fill the rest in based off of those ideas and where they should line up in the story'.


When you get your ideas for a film, you write them all down, then you place them on a clock to where you think they will fit into the story. Now you can see all of the gaps that need to be filled. Instead of filling the gaps with ideas that have noting to do with your story, you can extract ideas from what you already have using the power of symmetry like the diagram bellow.


So where can you get this wonderful little clock?

For more info:


Do try making a story clock, either for a film that already exists or a film that you are currently working on and make sure I see your work:

Tag me: @Under_The_ledge

Use the Hashtag: #Undertheledge


Elliot Hartley

Under The Ledge



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