WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.220 --> 00:00:06.899 Survived the last episode eh? Darn. Shaking you off is proving to be harder than I thought. 00:00:06.899 --> 00:00:12.670 Let’s continue Good Writing Bad Writing with The Shepherd. Here is the place to watch 00:00:12.670 --> 00:00:14.200 it. 00:00:14.200 --> 00:00:24.499 It’s just so fricking good! The end hits you with the big reveal that it’s not just 00:00:24.499 --> 00:00:27.999 the shepherd with all the sheep, it’s the lady with all the cats, the guy who feeds 00:00:27.999 --> 00:00:33.950 flocks of pigeons - these people are protecting the earth from monsters. Way to paint your 00:00:33.950 --> 00:00:36.120 small story into the bigger picture of the world. 00:00:36.120 --> 00:00:37.180 If I could stop vibrating with excitement that’d be good. 00:00:37.180 --> 00:00:42.130 The Shepherd is the complete opposite of Tiger, which we saw last episode. Which makes it 00:00:42.130 --> 00:00:46.860 interesting that the creator of Tiger is part of the team that made The Shepherd because 00:00:46.860 --> 00:00:52.550 Tiger is a mess. It tried to gradually build up a world of mysterious things happening, 00:00:52.550 --> 00:00:57.940 but in the end all it did was leave us confused - or arguing about what it means. Tiger is 00:00:57.940 --> 00:01:02.740 better suited as an attempt at surrealism than anything else. 00:01:02.740 --> 00:01:08.450 The Shepherd also tries to gradually build up a world. And holy fright, it succeeds. 00:01:08.450 --> 00:01:15.170 Because, unlike Tiger, The Shepherd is clear. It gives us a mystery and clues and then answers 00:01:15.170 --> 00:01:18.540 them. Tiger didn’t give us any clues, it was just like pbtbhtbth this happened. Then 00:01:18.540 --> 00:01:19.940 this happened. Here’s a strange event, and uh… no hints about what it means. 00:01:19.940 --> 00:01:24.030 Yes, it’s cool to leave some elements of your story open for imagination, but if you 00:01:24.030 --> 00:01:27.890 don’t resolve anything it gets very frustrating for viewers very quickly. Lobbing unanswered 00:01:27.890 --> 00:01:32.340 questions at us is lame. Honestly, if you build a good story, fans will make up their 00:01:32.340 --> 00:01:36.659 own questions and answer them, like figuring out characters’ pasts and relationships 00:01:36.659 --> 00:01:42.170 and futures and other parts of the world that might exist. Fanfiction. Fan art. 00:01:42.170 --> 00:01:46.450 So that’s the comparison between Tiger and The Shepherd, but it’s hard to see what 00:01:46.450 --> 00:01:51.900 builds any good story without taking the wall apart and looking at the individual bricks. 00:01:51.900 --> 00:01:55.960 Here are the building blocks of a story that you probably learned in school. 00:01:55.960 --> 00:01:56.190 Characters, Setting, Plot, Conflict, Resolution. 00:01:56.190 --> 00:01:57.810 And here’s my short list. 00:01:57.810 --> 00:02:07.070 Characters World 00:02:07.070 --> 00:02:13.060 These other things are conventional storytelling methods. You can tell stories in unconventional 00:02:13.060 --> 00:02:17.860 ways. You don’t need resolution. Drop your readers off a cliff if you want. Slice of 00:02:17.860 --> 00:02:22.230 life stories usually don’t have a central conflict that affects every episode. Heck, 00:02:22.230 --> 00:02:27.290 individual episodes may not even have a conflict. They could just be a fun vacation day at the 00:02:27.290 --> 00:02:30.790 beach. 00:02:30.790 --> 00:02:36.160 The short list is Characters and World because you can tell a character driven story or you 00:02:36.160 --> 00:02:42.090 can tell a world driven story. Anything else is totally dependent on these two elements. 00:02:42.090 --> 00:02:46.989 You don’t have a plot, conflict, or resolution without a world or characters. And you will 00:02:46.989 --> 00:02:52.319 find that a good story has either an interesting world or relatable, flawed characters - if 00:02:52.319 --> 00:02:56.670 not both - and that information about the world and characters tends to be gradually 00:02:56.670 --> 00:02:59.840 revealed instead of dumped on us all at once. 00:02:59.840 --> 00:03:07.459 As far as animations go, most are character driven. As you watch these animations you 00:03:07.459 --> 00:03:11.440 get to know what the characters are like, and you’ll become able to anticipate how 00:03:11.440 --> 00:03:16.379 they will react to a situation. Your interest is mainly in the characters and how they’re 00:03:16.379 --> 00:03:16.970 doing. 00:03:16.970 --> 00:03:22.349 The Shepherd is more a world driven story. We have characters, yes, but the point of 00:03:22.349 --> 00:03:27.819 the animation is to reveal this secret space alien side of the world. This is one of the 00:03:27.819 --> 00:03:32.750 reasons there is no dialogue in the animation. If the characters talked, it would, well, 00:03:32.750 --> 00:03:37.209 give them more character, and that would make them distracting. Keep the characters simple 00:03:37.209 --> 00:03:41.019 so the focus stays on the events that are happening. 00:03:41.019 --> 00:03:46.000 The Shepherd is all about the gradual reveal. Let’s take a stroll through the story to 00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:52.080 see how it smoothly moves us from small village life to secret sci fi space hero. 00:03:52.080 --> 00:04:00.110 Starting off with a bang. I immediately forgot this happened because the next scene is an 00:04:00.110 --> 00:04:09.459 action chase scene, but I remembered the comet later when some hints kicked me in the short 00:04:09.459 --> 00:04:10.319 term memory. 00:04:10.319 --> 00:04:14.379 First hint is how the villagers react to the shepherd. They’re scared of him. We don’t 00:04:14.379 --> 00:04:19.359 know why right now, but it’s enough to tell us something is up here. Why would a guy with 00:04:19.359 --> 00:04:22.320 a meat cleaver back down from an old man? Knife beats stick. Yet the butcher is scared 00:04:22.320 --> 00:04:23.340 of the shepherd. 00:04:23.340 --> 00:04:28.310 A sheep eats a bird. I loved this shot. I laughed. It’s so out of place. I thought 00:04:28.310 --> 00:04:36.680 the animators were just being funny but no, this is also a clue that this world is weird. 00:04:36.680 --> 00:04:42.580 It’s great because you should know the sheep are monsters just for this, but everything 00:04:42.580 --> 00:04:46.860 else is so normal that it seems impossible. So you write the carnivorous sheep off as 00:04:46.860 --> 00:04:47.650 a joke. 00:04:47.650 --> 00:04:52.949 As a result, it isn’t until the three minute mark that we realize this is more than a simple 00:04:52.949 --> 00:04:59.570 boy, sheep, and shepherd story. A strange beeper goes off and the camera pans up to 00:04:59.570 --> 00:05:05.580 remind you about the mountain at the very beginning of the film. Plus, creepy nightmare. 00:05:05.580 --> 00:05:07.490 Sheep eyes are creepy. 00:05:07.490 --> 00:05:12.250 At this point the audience knows something is wrong. Now the writers are free to start 00:05:12.250 --> 00:05:16.270 revealing the big guns. We go into the sci fi part of the cartoon. Strange doors, suits 00:05:16.270 --> 00:05:22.220 with multiple arms, schematics for a shepherd’s crook, fancy maps and weird languages. 00:05:22.220 --> 00:05:27.570 From here, the story could have gone to default save the world mode, no more growth. But the 00:05:27.570 --> 00:05:29.880 momentum keeps building. 00:05:29.880 --> 00:05:35.370 We find out the shepherd is the one with multiple arms. So he doesn’t have a weird space alien 00:05:35.370 --> 00:05:38.479 collection, he is a weird space alien. 00:05:38.479 --> 00:05:42.490 Big battle, and oh my gosh what horrible thing is going to happen to the alien, oh. Oh my 00:05:42.490 --> 00:05:46.540 gosh all the sheep are aliens. That’s why they eat birds! 00:05:46.540 --> 00:05:51.770 The writing guides you to be able to understand the world. To make sense of what didn’t 00:05:51.770 --> 00:05:57.199 before. You went from being an average person to a person who is in on this big secret. 00:05:57.199 --> 00:05:59.650 Just like the kid protagonist here. 00:05:59.650 --> 00:06:05.370 Story over, good story, NO, this event isn’t exclusive to one small village. There are 00:06:05.370 --> 00:06:10.300 more fighters out there! More monsters! Protect the planet! Heroic overture yay! 00:06:10.300 --> 00:06:17.270 A very satisfying ending, but still with lots of room for more stories. That’s a good 00:06:17.270 --> 00:06:18.320 ending. 00:06:18.320 --> 00:06:22.600 Of course the interesting thing is that if there were to be more stories, there would 00:06:22.600 --> 00:06:27.840 need to be character development. The cartoon would move from being world driven to being 00:06:27.840 --> 00:06:32.150 character driven because we’d be hard pressed to watch a thirty minute episode without any 00:06:32.150 --> 00:06:35.870 dialogue, and without any more information about the characters’ feelings, motives, 00:06:35.870 --> 00:06:39.509 and histories. We get a sense of personalities from The Shepherd, but in this short time 00:06:39.509 --> 00:06:44.009 we don’t really know the characters. And right now, we don’t need to. It’s a good 00:06:44.009 --> 00:07:22.090 story about secret heroes in a normal world.