The Story Spline

I am not exactly sure where the story spline originated, as I have come across it in a variety of contexts. I first encountered it while looking over materials from the Art for Animation course offered by the UC Berkeley Undergraduate Graphics Group (UCBUGG — check ’em out!). A few keystrokes later google brought me to Josh Sutphin’s summary of a Pixar master class in storytelling with Matthew Luhn. Sutphin give a detailed summary of several storytelling exercises Pixar uses in their development process. The story spline is a fun one. It’s an exercise for teasing out variations in a story by thinking about cause and effect. This is the format of the spline:

Once upon a time…
And everyday…
Until one day…
And because of that…
And because of that…
And because of that…
So that finally…
And the moral of the story is…

You can smash all sorts of stories into this structure. This week, we did a couple in class exercises based on the story spline.

First we tried breaking down The Incredibles into a story spline.

Once upon a time… there were super heroes
And everyday…they went out and rescued people
Until one day… someone sued them
And because of that… they went into hiding
And because of that… they got boring jobs
And because of that… one of them had a mid-life crisis

At this point, we got hung up a bit because we still had the entire film in front of us and there were going to be a lot of “because of thats”. After further discussion, we decided that this was the spline for the backstory to the film — the Story of the Supers, which we then revised to fit the arc of the movie.

And because of that… they went into hiding
And because of that… they got boring jobs that they went to everyday
Until one day… an evil supervillain attacked the city
And because of that… the last Supers came out of hiding
And because of that… the city was saved
And because of that… the people appreciated the Supers again
So that finally… the Supers could use their powers openly and for good again
And the moral of the story is… appreciate the talents of the people around you and don’t sue them!

Our discussion then led to the idea that there were story splines for all the characters in the film as they went through their hero’s journey, so we decided to do a spline for Bob, aka Mr. Incredible. I won’t write it out here, but you can give it a go on your own.

After that, I passed out scratch paper and we did another spline activity. As a class, we came up with three options for Once upon a time…

Once upon a time there was… a shy boy
Once upon a time… there was a tired student
Once upon a time… there was a cat with a gun

Then we voted (the cat with the gun won, obviously!) and moved onto the next line, doing the same thing. And then repeated with the third line. So by the end we had:

Once upon a time… there was a cat with a gun
And everyday… he worked for the mafia
Until one day… he found another cat in his litter box.

From here, I asked the students to complete the spline on their own. Then we read them aloud. It wasn’t long before we noticed a trend.

Once upon a time… there was a cat with a gun
And everyday… he worked for the mafia
Until one day… he found another cat in his litter box.
And because of that… he shot the other cat
And because of that… the mafia got mad because it was the don’s son
And because of that… he had to run away
Until finally… they caught up with him and killed him
And the moral of the story is… don’t work for the mafia

I would say about 70% of the student’s splines were something along these lines — basically, the plot of every mafia movie you’ve seen. (Two students wrote that the cat fell in love with the other cat in the litter box and they ran away together).

I wasn’t quite expecting such uniformity in their stories but it was the springboard for a great discussion on how easy it is to pluck the “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to story and rely on conventional expectations. This is a mafia movie, so it has to have these plot elements because every mafia movie has those. Plus, it’s the first thing that popped into my head and it’s too much work to think of something else. So, with that in mind, I challenged them to climb the ladder to the top of the tree and get that gorgeous fruit that no one else had touched. We did the exercise again, starting in the same place. The results were very different the second time around.

Once upon a time… there was a cat with a gun
And everyday… he worked for the mafia
Until one day… he found another cat in his litter box.
And because of that… he discovered a long lost cousin who worked for the circus
And because of that… he ran away to join the circus
And because of that… he became a trapeze artist
Until finally… he became famous in his new life and the mafia left him alone
And the moral of the story is… you can always make a change for the better

Breath… of… fresh… air! It really drove home the point that writing and then re-writing will get you to the next level.

We did one last exercise in which each student wrote down the first three lines of their project idea into story spline format. Then we passed those around the class, with each subsequent student filling in one line before passing it on. After getting hers back, one student commented, “Well, that didn’t go in the direction I expected!” Which is sort of the point. External review can bring unexpected ideas to the table.

Whether or not these exercises will result in some better stories for their final projects remains to be seen. But overall, it was a great day in class!