Starting a story
(And maybe also learning from mistakes while we're at it)
So a few things have happened since the last time I posted here. The big one is that I launched a new YouTube channel! I’m aiming for more of an art/animation focus with this one:
And things certainly seem to be off to a good start. I’ll probably talk more about the channel specifically in another post, though. What I want to talk about right now is something I was able to learn from it.
See, one of the things I posted here was my college Senior Thesis, Not So Superheroes. I’d posted it already onto my previous channel, but this reupload managed to get more than twice as many views.
And that means I might actually get some useful data from the analytics:
This is the retention graph on the new channel’s most viewed video, and from what I understand, this is a fairly good result. Few people who click on the video are clicking off until the end card, and even in the beginning where you tend to see the steepest drop-off, there’s not much of a dip at all.
But this is the retention graph for Not So Superheroes. Admittedly, we’re working with almost exactly 1/100th the amount of data here, but I think even this small sample size is enough to draw at least one conclusion from. I made a mistake with this. It seems that people who got past the beginning stuck around until the end, but that early drop-off is steep, and I think I know why.
Not So Superheroes is the story of the world’s worst superhero, Aardvark Man! And to start the story, I wrote a short scene demonstrating what a superhero is in this world by way of an overly sanitized corporate-style presentation.
About 15 seconds in, the camera pulls out to reveal that this video is playing on someone’s phone, in the process revealing this presentation to be diegeticaly existing in the story’s world. Which I still think is a cool way to start the film, but it had an unintended consequence.
The more I learn about storytelling, the more clear it becomes that characters are the most important part of it. But for those first 15 seconds, new viewers are just seeing the presentation. That’s all there is. No characters, no story, nothing. And I think that caused a lot of people to click off.
So now I’m working on a new story, In Search Of Adventure, which I’ve actually already talked about here:
Ideally I’d like to avoid making the same mistake. but this problem’s not so easy to solve. I opened NSSH like that for a reason. I needed to establish quickly and comedically what a superhero is in this world. I had to do that or else the concept of our main character, the world’s worst superhero, wouldn’t work. He needed something to be compared against. And creating a full scene with potentially a whole different set of characters and voice acting would have been… probably impossible all things considered. (My team and I barely finished NSSH on time as is.)
For the same reasons, I wrote a structurally pretty similar opening to this new story.
Short, simple, and comical. It sets the tone and loosely explains the story’s premise. I plan to start every episode with this opening. But even though the main character is the one saying all this, you don’t get much of an idea of who he is as a person. On the writing front, I couldn’t figure out how to fix this without ruining the speed and simplicity, but fortunately this is a visual medium.
I’ve just started the storyboarding process, and though it’s not much, I think I was able to address the issue here. This is what I did:
Instead of just having the text appear on a black screen, I’ve changed to so that we see a silhouette of Dart saying these words in front of us. We won’t get a clear look at him just yet, but we will get to see his body language, and crucially, him falling over just before the camera cuts away. (Just barely failing to hide the embarrassing moment.)
It really isn’t a huge change, but I think it’ll make a big difference. It gives us a character to latch onto from moment one, and even a slight idea of what that character is like before properly getting introduced to him. Namely, that he has no idea what he’s doing.
Will it be enough of a change? There’s only one way to find out! So as I continue working on this new project, I’ll keep making posts here. I’m trying a lot of new things with this one, so we will see how it goes!