story beats

"Start with the disordering event, and let the beat be about the attempt to restore order."

- David Mamet*

(Above: sequential art by Paul Pope, color by Jose Villarrubia : Batman Year 100 publisher: DC © DC)








*Mamet, D., 1992. On Directing Film, Great Britain: Faber and Faber



LIMITATIONS

January: laptop self destructs and I find my old watercolour set... sketchbooks replace Wacom tablets and there is no undo function on a real page.

In the Gnomon workshop Visual Storytelling DVD, Iain McCaig describes the importance of story beats, explaining that, "A beat is, if you think of a train track, a beat is a piece of the train track and your story is the train. And so, the beat is the thing that allows your train to move forward on the track. If you miss a story beat, it's very easy to tell because your train quickly becomes derailed." Visual beats can unravel the needs of the narrative as you find visual solutions to convey the motivations and obstacles of the world that your characters inhabit.