Book summary “Directing the story”: summary

Introduction

You want to make a movie or a cartoon that moves people, but your visual sequences often feel flat and confusing. Beginners typically make the mistake of stringing random cool shots together without building genuine dramatic tension. Audiences do not watch films just to look at pretty pictures. They pay to experience an emotional journey driven by conflict and delayed gratification.

Master the visual and structural language of filmmaking through storyboarding, composition, and narrative timing to guide audience emotions.

Francis Glebas provides a complete framework in Directing the Story to help you solve these creative problems. You will learn how to transform static scripts into dynamic storyboards, draw for motion rather than mere objects, and direct the eyes of your viewers. The book covers fundamental staging, visual semiotics, editing rhythms, and deep narrative structures.

How do you translate a written script into cinematic action? How can you control where the audience looks on screen? What makes a visual composition create suspense?

1. The Goal and Common Beginner Problems

Audiences ultimately watch movies to feel good and have an emotionally satisfying and meaningful experience. Everything humans do is biologically driven by the fundamental need to avoid pain and gain pleasure. Although conflict and tension are painful, watching characters overcome them or learning how to avoid pain provides a rewarding experience of delayed gratification.

Audiences watch movies for emotionally satisfying experiences driven by conflict, while beginners often fail by creating run-on visual sequences and overwhelming confusion.

What Is the Audience Doing?

The audience is never passive; they actively construct the story in their heads by paying attention, hunting for clues, and testing theories. Viewers visually hunt for information, identify objects, translate pictures into words, and constantly swing between hope and fear as they anticipate what will happen next. They attribute motivations to characters and feel suspense based on what they do not yet know.

A viewer watches a man climb a tree, hears a dog bark off-screen, and forms a working theory that the man put the dog in a sack on train tracks, experiencing suspense until the twist is revealed.

Asking what-if questions sets off an automatic unconscious search that provides a storyteller with endless creative ideas and plot developments. Instead of forcing or judging ideas, you can simply set up a character on a quest, introduce obstacles, and relax while letting the unconscious mind answer narrative questions.

• Set up a character in a quest
• Throw obstacles in the character's way
• Ask what if or what would happen if
• Relax and listen without forcing, interfering, or judging the answers that come from your unconscious mind

Common Beginner Mistakes

Visual storytelling can be understood through a speaking metaphor where images function like words in spoken sentences. Just as people speak one thing at a time with nouns and verbs, a visual story must present one idea at a time in a series of pictures. Francis Glebas noted that during his work on Piglet's BIG Movie, some storyboard artists suffered from run-on sequences or failed to use proper punctuation by stepping on a punch line with a new character entering the frame.

Boredom and confusion are the two primary enemies of good design in visual storytelling. Boredom stems from a lack of dramatic questions or events when nothing happens visually. Confusion arises from a sensory bombardment of too much information occurring simultaneously, which violates attention theory stating viewers can only pay attention to one thing at a time.

2. The Beginning Basics of Storyboarding

Storyboards translate scripts into visual blueprints of cinematic action, using beat boards, pitch performances, and staged blocking to solve continuity problems.

Alfred Hitchcock noted that once storyboarding is finished, a film is mostly done and the rest is mere execution. He estimated that a movie is 95 percent complete at this stage. Originating practically in Disney studios to organize thousands of production drawings and pre-film cutting, storyboards allow you to solve continuity and structural problems on paper before entering expensive production. Alfred Hitchcock and Delmar Daves relied heavily on storyboards to solve continuity problems up front, believing that if a sequence does not work on the storyboard, it will not work on film.

Visual Blueprints

A beat board consists of single drawings representing key scenes, used for pitching to executives. Story reels combine storyboards with temporary dialogue and music to function as an emotional road map and exact time template of the finished movie, allowing you to spot story problems and reorder ideas.

Visual storytelling relies on a sequence of juxtaposed images that communicate actions and emotional causes before their effects, avoiding dull talking heads. Instead of stating information through dialogue or showing a single confusing image containing multiple conflicting facts, you must break ideas down into sequential sentences of images. Showing cause before effect naturally builds tension, foreshadows events, and engages the audience through narrative questions. In the Three Little Pigs adaptation, showing the wolf's tracks before showing the pigs' terrified reactions clearly establishes cause and effect.

Pitching and Staging

Pitchers must act as passionate storytellers who guide the audience's attention through the visual sequence sequentially, maintaining eye contact and keeping the performance timed to the actual length of the scene. Walt Disney Feature Animation introduced the internal Gong Show pitching forum in approximately 1990.

Follow these rules when pitching:

• Rehearse beforehand and know the story inside and out
• Tell your story simply, clearly, and with passion
• Do not apologize for imperfections
• Make eye contact with your audience and set the pace
• Pitch your story in real time without dragging it out
• Do not hide the drawings with your body
• Do not explain the camera work because drawings show it implicitly
• Draw bold lines using a grease pencil, marker, or 2B pencil
• Number your drawings

Staging and blocking organize character positions and camera placement to establish clear screen geography and z-axis depth in a scene. Rooted in theatrical tradition, staging explores the clearest and most dramatic physical arrangement of actors relative to the camera. You can map this out using a football-play-style blocking diagram before thumbnailing individual shots.

Apply these staging practices:

• Create a blocking diagram of the action like a football play to establish screen geography
• Thumbnail very quick, little drawings right on the edge of the script pages during the working process
• Explore different arrangements to find the clearest and most dramatic presentation

3. Drawing for Motion and Emotion

Drawing obstacles are entirely mental, requiring you to draw action verbs rather than static nouns, avoid symmetry, and utilize three-point lighting.

Many people stop drawing after starting school because society prioritizes other subjects. To fix stiff stick figures, you can turn them into balloon people by adding volume. You can also use curved lines and a simple skeleton with opposing shoulder and hip angles.

Chuck Jones shared that his instructor at Chouinard Art Institute said that every student has 100,000 bad drawings inside them. You need to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

Overcoming Drawing Obstacles

To bring dynamic life to your panels, you must focus on physical motion and strong poses.

• Keep a small sketchbook or Post-it pad with you when you go out.
• Start with a stick figure using curved lines to bring the figure to life.
• Imagine stick figures as long skinny balloons and inflate them to add volume.
• Add a simple skeleton with two lines for shoulders and hips moving in opposite directions.
• Draw an imaginary line of action representing the main thrust of forces animating the figure.
• Think of what the hand is doing in terms of action verbs instead of drawing all the parts.
• Use a mitten shape for hands when storyboarding actions.
• Feel the pose in your own body and verbalize what each part is doing.
• Draw with a pen rather than a pencil to force confidence and avoid relying on an eraser.

Walt Stanchfield corrected a student struggling with a woman under an umbrella in fifteen seconds. The student focused too much on the feet while missing the action of checking for rain.

Lighting and Technical Aspects

Symmetry makes drawings look rigid, while dynamic angles and asymmetry create excitement. Bad tangents occur when two levels of depth touch in poor alignments that flatten space.

• Move pieces around so they overlap rather than create bad tangents.
• Use angles to avoid symmetry and rigid poses.
• Draw borders so you have to compose to them.
• Watch the body's landmarks where bones reach the surface like hipbones and ribs.
• Use a key light as the main illumination source.
• Add a back light to create a rim separating the figure from the background.
• Fill in shadows using a fill light or a reflector to soften stark contrast unless aiming for a film noir look.

4. What Do Directors Direct

A film director is fundamentally a master of misdirection and attention management, operating similarly to a stage magician, hypnotist, or ventriloquist. You must capture audience attention, protect it from distractions, and guide the conscious mind while the unconscious mind processes background details.

Directors operate like stage magicians and hypnotists, managing attention, leveraging Gestalt perception, and using suggestion to bypass audience resistance.

Ventriloquists use contrast in voices, throw their voice with closed lips, move the dummy's lips to distract the audience, and engage with the dummy as if it is real. Humans never experience the world directly. All perception is mediated through internal maps built from sensory information, which the brain constantly filters.

Francis Glebas recorded sound for an early film and was surprised to discover distant car sounds and barking dogs over half a mile away that his brain had completely tuned out.

Attention Management

Storytellers can use hypnotic techniques derived from Milton Erickson to bypass audience resistance and induce a state of eager suspense. Techniques include utilizing what the person offers, confusing the conscious state to force internal searching, creating a series of obvious yes-set questions, and employing presuppositions and implications.

Bugs Bunny hypnotizes Elmer Fudd by accepting Elmer is hunting rabbits, confusing him with the approach, asking obvious descriptive questions that create a yes-set, and walking away until Elmer shakes himself out of the trance.

• Capture the audience's attention first.
• Protect audience attention from distractions.
• Misdirect the audience to entertain them while clearly directing where to look.

Suggestion and Gestalt

Gestalt psychology principles explain how the mind organizes individual visual and auditory fragments into meaningful, unified wholes. The mind naturally seeks closure, fills in missing blanks, and organizes information based on principles of proximity, similarity, common region, connectedness, symmetry, and good continuity.

Milton Erickson walked a wavy zigzag path in the snow as a child, and people naturally followed his footsteps rather than taking a simple direct path. Suggesting elements rather than showing them entirely allows the audience's imagination and personal experiences to fill in the blanks with greater emotional impact.

In Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, flashing lights and helicopter sounds were used to save the film budget from the cost of actual helicopters. Stories are driven by a hierarchy of narrative questions that dictate audience thought processes, decision-making, and emotional engagement.

• Start a scene with a clear narrative question.
• Delay the answer to the question using action or dialogue tension.
• Deliver the answer simultaneously with a dramatic climax or emotional blowup.

5. How to Direct the Eyes

A director must visually provide two things: tell viewers where to look and show them what they are looking at through image structure rather than just content. Beginners often focus purely on the content of a drawing or photograph, ignoring where elements are placed on the page. Image structure acts as the form of the content and can speak more powerfully and emotionally than content alone.

Visual composition acts as emotional subtext, telling the audience how to feel and revealing power relationships between characters.

Good visual design combines design elements and organizing principles to create emotional illusions while avoiding the twin enemies of boredom and confusion. In Disney's Pocahontas farewell sequence, the author redesigned the ending from a standard dock goodbye to a foggy, desolate landscape where Pocahontas watches the ship alone from a peak, using composition to convey her deep sense of isolation.

• Tone down graphic noise by playing sections softly like a musical conductor
• Punch up the contrast where you want the audience to look
• Leave breathing room and negative space to avoid crowding
• Cluster darks together instead of creating spotty, high-contrast images

Space and Lenses

To represent three-dimensional space on a flat two-dimensional screen, directors use artificial perspective and optical depth cues. Telephoto and wide-angle lenses create radically different spatial distortions, emotional impacts, and viewer engagement.

Weaving light over dark and dark over light through counterchange unifies compositions and creates atmospheric perspective.

American regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton used counterchange to masterful effect in his artwork. Planning composition and character blocking from a simple top-down map prevents visual blockages and controls audience emotional proximity.

• Place light over dark and dark over light to weave elements together
• Keep color value ranges within specific depth layers, such as 95 percent gray to white for the foreground, 70 to 15 percent for the midground, and 40 to 20 percent for the background
• Establish the horizon line at the viewer's eye level
• Use one-point, two-point, or three-point perspective depending on camera placement relative to the subject
• Line up figures of equal height standing on the same ground plane along the horizon or eye level
• Use telephoto lenses for beauty shots and bringing distant objects near
• Use wide-angle lenses on the camera's axis for dynamic excitement and maximum movement through the frame
• Work out the placement of figures and items from a simple plan first before drawing or staging
• Use arrows to plan blocking and camera moves on your layout
• Use wider shots to keep audience distance when a character is narrating rather than engaging directly

6. Making Images Speak with Semiotics

Images communicate rich subtext through semiotic signs, master tropes, object meanings, and genre codes that allow audiences to construct the story.

Semiotics breaks down how different sign types communicate information without relying on dialogue. In Fantasia 2000, without using words, the filmmakers showed Donald Duck missing Daisy by giving him an iconic drawing of her and a locket. Eskimos use over 50 words for snow to differentiate crucial survival conditions.

Denotation is the dictionary meaning of an image, while connotations are associations. Stacking multiple connotations upon each other allows a single object to communicate rich subtext. In The Straight Story, David Lynch uses a bundle of sticks tied with a ribbon to connote warmth, unity, family strength, a gift, and a silent thank you.

Signs and Tropes

Visual storytelling divides signs into three distinct categories:

• icons that resemble their referent through photographs or drawings;
• indexes connected by a causal relationship such as smoke indicating fire or footprints indicating walked paths;
• arbitrary symbols that rely on agreed-upon conventions that must be learned.

A footprint acts as both an icon because it looks like a foot and an index because it signifies someone walked there. To speak indirectly and gain true persuasive power, you can use the four master tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. These rhetorical figures render the unfamiliar familiar and allow concrete visual images to express abstract themes, inner psychological states, and comparative relationships. In The Straight Story, David Lynch uses a visual metaphor by having Alvin shoot his broken lawn mower tractor, comparing it to putting a dying farm animal out of its misery.

Objects and Codes

Alfred Hitchcock utilizes functional objects such as McGuffins, symbolic objects, and threatening objects to drive plots and shift character stakes. McGuffins are objects that set the story in motion because everyone wants them, regardless of what they are. Symbolic objects transform in meaning as information is revealed. In A Shadow of a Doubt, a ring given by Uncle Charlie starts as a gift of love, becomes suspicious upon seeing initials, turns into horror when matched to a murder, and signifies the niece knows her uncle is the killer.

Every film relies on everyday codes, genre codes, and specific cinematic codes to provide the context required for the audience to understand visual meaning. The first five minutes of The Matrix establish its entire operational code and rules through visual signs. The semiotic square serves as an analytical tool to map out primary values, their contraries, negations, and negative values to explore all sides of a story's theme. Invented by Algirdas Julien Greimas and utilized by Robert McKee, the square allows different scenes or characters to embody opposite quadrants, building a robust filmic argument.

To use the semiotic square in your work:

• Establish a primary positive value for your story theme.
• Add the opposite or contradictory value to create a binary pair on opposite corners.
• Add the respective negations and opposites to complete the four corners of the square.
• Assign different scenes or characters to each quadrant to explore all sides of the dramatic issue.

7. Conveying Meaning and Managing Suspense

Film editing and the juxtaposition of shots are the most important elements of filmmaking, allowing directors to create a seamless illusion from disparate fragments. Unlike painting where viewers look wherever they choose, film forces the audience to see exactly what the director selects through close-ups and cuts. Juxtaposition creates meaning that is not self-contained in a single shot.

Editing juxtaposes shots to create meaning, utilizing causality, retroactive reframing, ticking clocks, and dramatic irony to generate intense suspense.

Edwin S. Porter used preexisting footage in 1903 to create The Life of an American Fireman, proving that juxtaposition modifies the meaning of shots. Lev Kuleshov discovered that cutting a neutral facial expression of an actor to different objects like soup, a coffin, or a child makes the audience read distinct emotions into the actor's face. Narrative drive relies on causality, functioning through physical, linguistic, emotional, semiotic, and supernatural forces that connect events into logical chains.

Meaning in film is anchored retroactively, meaning full significance and understanding emerge only at the end of a scene or sequence after all facts are presented. Films like The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, and The Village use retroactive endings to radically change the meaning of what happened while watching. Pacing balances boredom and confusion by expanding and contracting time, often utilizing a ticking clock to heighten tension against a specific deadline. Back to the Future structures its climax around a ticking clock where Marty must reach 88 miles per hour when lightning strikes at 10:04 during the 120 minutes of chronological time.

Pacing and Dramatic Irony

The rule of threes utilizes pattern recognition to build expectations and surprise by having a character fail twice before succeeding on the third attempt. One or two attempts cannot establish a pattern, while four or more become repetitive and boring. Three attempts show that failed efforts are learning experiences, creating surprise when the character finally succeeds. Wile E. Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons experiences repeated failures, playing with the pattern of expectations.

When you use the rule of threes in your projects:

• Show a character attempting to achieve a goal and failing.
• Have the character make a second attempt that also meets with failure to establish a pattern.
• Have the character try once more, having learned from the previous two attempts, to achieve the goal.

Dramatic irony controls the flow of information between characters and the audience, generating suspense when viewers know more than the characters. Alfred Hitchcock noted that if the audience knows about a bomb under a table, the scene has much greater suspense.

When you design suspense using dramatic irony:

• Work out a chart of key information mapping when characters and the audience get to know it.
• Use the chart for ironic commenting on the story.
• Give your characters impossible choices to evoke desires and fears.

8. Aiming for the Heart and Story Structures

Filmmaking prioritizes emotional truth over strict logic, utilizing master themes, plot curves, and genre techniques like horror and comedy to resonate deeply.

Structures and Themes

Structuring a narrative should begin with the ending because the ending represents what the story aims to prove. Aristotle’s plot curve maps dramatic intensity and audience immersion against time, dividing stories into three distinct sections. A typical live-action movie runs 120 minutes, split into 30 minutes for the first section, 60 minutes for the second, and 30 minutes for the third, while animated films last 75-90 minutes.

The hero's journey can be reframed as the neurotic’s road trip dealing with fear, psychological change, and growing up. Francis Glebas created the 22-minute animated film Guardian of the Grin as a sophomore at Pratt Institute using these stages.

To build a solid narrative structure:

• Find your theme and use it as your compass.
• Discover what fantasy you are trying to fill for your audience.
• Thumbnail fast and try alternate versions.
• Keep two books with you: one for networking and the other for ideas.
• When you don't have work, your job is to look for work 40 hours a week.

Emotion, Horror, and Comedy

Adhering strictly to logic reduces emotional impact, as seen in cinematic cheats where characters touch hands before they could realistically see each other across a distance. In the Pomp and Circumstance sequence of Fantasia 2000, Donald and Daisy Duck touch hands in the dust even though a logical framing would have shown them 50 yards apart.

Horror films create terror by exploiting vulnerability and breaching fundamental boundaries. In Alien, the monster was on screen for less than 5 percent of the film, yet it became one of the most terrifying creatures because it developed slowly from a seed pod.

When you design scare tactics:

• Provide the audience with a fake scare that reveals it to be something innocent, like a cat.
• While they are still feeling relief and their guard is down, provide the real scare.

10 Key Ideas

1. Audiences actively construct stories in their minds by hunting for clues, translating pictures into words, and swinging between hope and fear as they anticipate what will happen next.
2. Storyboards translate scripts into visual blueprints of cinematic action, using beat boards, pitch performances, and staged blocking to solve continuity problems.
3. Drawing obstacles are entirely mental, requiring you to draw action verbs rather than static nouns, avoid symmetry, and utilize three-point lighting.
4. Directors operate like stage magicians and hypnotists, managing attention, leveraging Gestalt perception, and using suggestion to bypass audience resistance.
5. Visual composition acts as emotional subtext, telling the audience how to feel and revealing power relationships between characters.
6. Images communicate rich subtext through semiotic signs, master tropes, object meanings, and genre codes that allow audiences to construct the story.
7. Film editing juxtaposes shots to create meaning, utilizing causality, retroactive reframing, ticking clocks, and dramatic irony to generate intense suspense.
8. The rule of threes utilizes pattern recognition to build expectations and surprise by having a character fail twice before succeeding on the third attempt.
9. Dramatic irony controls the flow of information between characters and the audience, generating suspense when viewers know more than the characters.
10. Filmmaking prioritizes emotional truth over strict logic, utilizing master themes, plot curves, and genre techniques like horror and comedy to resonate deeply.