Sat 3 Nov 2007

Storytelling, part 1 — Heroes

No, I'm not going to tell you a story. Instead, I want to try and write down some of my thoughts about effective storytelling in various mediums. Each piece is going to be based around a particularly effective (or ineffective) example I've seen recently.

Generally, I'll try to write in a spoiler-free fashion, as far as plot points are concerned. Obviously, by talking about style and presentation, some of the mystery will be revealed, but hopefully only enough to pique your interest if you aren't familiar with the work in question.

First up, my impressions of the storytelling in Heroes...

Heroes, season 1

A bit over a month ago, the first season of Heroes was released on DVD in Australia. I didn't watch the show when it aired on television, but I kept hearing good things about it. I ended up watching the whole season over the course of about five days.

It's an episodic series, aired as one hour (including commercials) weekly television episodes. Pretty much the whole of each episode is devoted to the season-length story arc; there are very few asides. However, the arc consists of half a dozen or so relatively interlocking sub-stories, so it's not just 22 episodes following the adventures of one guy.

The stories aren't bad, but with traditional presentation I doubt they would stand up as a strong series. Which is exactly the point: this show has a very different style of storytelling from normal episodic television. It's a western-style comic book brought to film in a very faithful fashion. Lots of cliff-hangers, both within the episodes and at the end of each episode, lots of intense emotional punctuation, seemingly random cuts between stories that telegraphed the next thing was important without giving away the plot. Things like that. This could have been a disaster, but, instead I think it works fairly well as a form of easy entertainment.

Think back to the weekly comics you may or may not have read as a kid. Whenever somebody said or did something significant, one of two things usually occurred: (1) you had a close up of either their face or the person they were talking to, or (2) you have a long shot showing the speakers dwarfed next to a large structure, indicating their insignificance in comparison to their surroundings and the task they were about to undertake. Sure, it's fairly predictable manipulation, but it works. If you are willing to be entertained, but don't want to work too hard at it, the film maker or television writer can't be too subtle.

Heroes is filmed in exactly this style. Right down to the camera shots at "significant moments". There were also the comic book standard diagonal tilt shots, stark shadows in the scene setting shots, rapid learning montages (time passes as the hero of the moment learns a new and necessary skill without us getting too bored) and dream sequences. Yet it doesn't suck. The style is put together in a reasonably natural fashion as far as the story characters were concerned. The show periodically contrasts its own comic-book-like style with real comic style by having some paintings as a plot point that were in comic style and using comic book lettering for a few title sequences. That has the subtle effect of pulling your brain back into the show by reminding you that it isn't a true comic book. These are live actors and scenes.

The artistic style used in this show really grabs my attention, even on the first viewing. I'm a huge movie theory fan. I love looking at how both live and animated shows are put together, and how story elements are conveyed visually. The slightly risky approach taken by Heroes was 22 episodes of enjoyment for me.

All the visual prettiness in the world wouldn't have saved a truly terrible set of scripts. As I said, I don't think the stories would hold up in traditional format, but they were written for the style of the show. They were designed to be short snapshots of events that end uncompleted and then move onto the next one. It's the comic book style, so that you'll keep reading, keep buying next week's issue, never be too disbelieving of whatever unlikely plot twist might occur. In that respect, the script worked fairly well. I don't think all the characters are equally well done. For those who've seen the shows, I wasn't too taken in by the Niki, Micah and D.L. storyline. It had its moments, but they got a lot of screen time for a relatively low-level payoff in the finale. Probably could have cut back there. The Matt Parkman (the LA police officer) character's story seemed to be a bit incomplete by the end of the first season and from what I've seen of the second season, they seem to just skip a few bit of his back story. Not sure if that's a production editing tragedy or intended.

Lest it sound like I view the show as just a comic book brought to life, I'll note that there are some areas where the television medium allows the creators to go beyond what you could in a comic book.

If you were to write the graphic novel of Heroes, the Hiro and Ando storyline would probably look very shallow. Hiro would go through each panel looking like a wide-eyed naif and Ando would have his mouth half-open and look a bit befuddled by the whole thing. You would not see that the visual appearances were only part of the characters and conveying their mannerisms in still pictures would have been very hard. As it was, I definitely came away feeling that Ando observed the pairs' adventure, whilst Hiro actively participated in it, as a rule. From time to time, though, each character had turns in the other's shoes. There was some real depth to those two that really only came through because of the actors' efforts. Ando, particularly, seems to be a slightly shallow character given real spirit by the actor who plays him (James Kyson Lee).

Finally, it's worth noting how the links between episodes is done. Most of the episodes end in a reasonably heavy-handed fashion, building obviously up to a cliff hanger (although you don't always know what the cliff hanger will be). It's the start of the episodes that are interesting. Rather than having the traditional "last week on Heroes, ..." recap, we see a few seconds (maybe five, sometimes ten) overlap from the end of a previous scene and then it plays forwards a bit further, for a few minutes. Then we'll see an overlap from another scene, another storyline in the previous episode and again things will move beyond that point and forwards. So the writers aren't telegraphing which are the important characters you need to be reminded about for each week's episode. Instead, you get a few seconds to remember where those characters were last week and then it's on with their story. Fairly uncommon and very effective.

Heroes is an interesting piece to examine from the perspective of how the story is conveyed. On a purely intellectual level, it contains some pretty obvious cues for manipulating our feelings. But we don't read or watch or listen solely with our analytical mind. Our emotions do play a part and often we are prepared to just be entertained. This isn't a detective novel or a show on quantum physics. It's an adventure story and we've asked to be taken along for the ride. When you're in the right mood, it's completely absorbing (did I mentioned I watched the whole season in only a few days?).

In fairness, though, I may have spoilt myself a bit by seeing season one so rapidly. I watched the first few episodes of season two, which is fortunately being screened more or less simultaneously in the US and Australia, so I saw the opening two episodes in the states and then the third was shown in Australia just after I got back. It feels too slow. The dramatic points and the slightly formulaic need to put lots of unknown and "how will this pan out" moments into the early episodes of a season make it drag a bit. Since I'm unlikely to be able to watch each week as they air, I think I'll just wait for the DVD release and watch them at a slightly faster pace, particularly the early episodes.

(Make note of my dissatisfaction with the slow build-up period here. After seeing season one and thinking the same about the early episodes there, I read a novel that had the exact opposite style and it was quite a counterpoint. I'll discuss that in the next instalment.)

Topics: art/design, entertainment/storytelling