Chapter 6. Story Analysis

Good storytelling invites the audience to take part. It involves them. It asks them to be invested—to be emotionally wrapped up in the story. How does this happen? The filmmaker presents a problem or puzzle that the characters and the viewers themselves must solve: a + b + c = ?

How involved viewers become depends on how artfully they are led toward the conclusion. If the answer is just on the tip of their tongue when it is finally revealed, then you’ve won them over. If the answer is too obvious or too opaque, then don’t count on the audience sticking around for the conclusion.

This makes the moment when you let your story out into the world a daunting one. As the creator, you are not there to modulate the viewer’s experience: why a certain shot is shaky or poorly framed, why a particular cut was made, or why the narrative feels vague or confusing. The story now stands on its own. Once your art has been released to the audience, it is now theirs. Their interpretation and understanding are as true as your own.

The filmmaker controls how the audience responds to the video through the various tools at his or her disposal. Proper planning, mounting, shooting, editing, and all the tools presented so far in this book are part of the filmmaker’s arsenal. In this chapter, we present examples of how GoPro has used all these tools to tell complete stories. Whether or not you think these are great stories, the process of analysis is important to storytelling.

Moments can consist of one-take shots or several shots cut together. They are short and sweet. Each shot is impactful and every second matters. A moment can go on as long as the audience’s attention is held, but the most natural length seems to be between one and two minutes long. Ending the video at the point of maximum engagement leaves the audience hungry for more.

Moments, like any story, have a beginning, middle, and end structure. The jellyfish video featured here was shot by one of our users. Production artist Tyler Johnson edited the moment and, in the rough cut phase, nailed the beginning and middle beats. However, the video ended while the girl was still swimming through the jellies. It was beautiful and flowed well, but the moment didn’t feel complete because nothing else really happened. Tyler went back into the footage for the second pass and found the clip where the girl reached out and held one of the jellyfish. The human connection to that magical world gave the moment completion and was the perfect ending beat.

For a product release montage, editors tend to group shots into several different categories.

Introductory shots introduce the characters and their environments.

Gear-up shots show the characters getting ready, whether they are literally putting on gear or traveling toward their environmental obstacle.

Action shots show the characters conquering inherent obstacles or danger.

Reaction shots capture the characters in moments of genuine reaction to their triumph. These tend to be smiles, celebrations, and expressions of gratitude toward life or nature. Reactions form crucial interludes between action sequences. They give the video a sense of continual reprise or return to center and work well as the video’s resolution.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the montage is pacing. Both music and cutting speed control the edit’s pace, with cutting speed increasing as the music builds toward each climax. Individual shots and action cut sequences should be long enough that the audience fully understands where they are and what they are watching, yet short enough that the momentum isn’t slowed down. Here, discontinuity in time and space serves as an asset, causing the audience to constantly anticipate what’s next. The relentless crosscuts keep the viewer from ascribing too much importance to any one sequence, instead producing a greater sense of awe at the mind-boggling scope of human endeavor.

The “Leah Dawson ‘Slow Down’” video is a magical character piece. Dawson shot the surfing sequences during her travels and recorded the song on her rooftop at home. Structurally, Leah’s song both implies an obstacle (the pace of modern life) and offers a solution (slow down) for the audience to think about.

Another of our favorite character studies is “See You Tomorrow.” Kelly Slater is arguably one of the best athletes in the world, and a somewhat mystical character. The kickball game shows Slater’s childlike curiosity and excitement for the small meaningful moments in life. It also symbolizes another game that has been a part of Slater’s life for many years: the ASP World Tour. He’s an 11-time world-champion surfer, currently besting athletes half his age, who weren’t even born when he won his first world title. Slater grins at the ageless turtle and is seemingly ageless himself, a better athlete than ever at 40 years old. The end line “See you tomorrow,” represents what Slater is innocently telling the audience. No matter who’s the world champ this year, he’ll be back.

All of this may seem subtle—and it is. But viewers can only take away what is poured into a piece. Any piece of art retains inherent meaning from the amount of thought and emotion put into it by the creator. An audience may not always consciously recognize it, but they feel it.

Post-production additions such as graphics can reshape videos entirely. There is an industry saying that is often uttered on productions when something goes wrong: “We’ll fix it in post.” The power intro takes this saying quite literally. We use this structure often at GoPro: It’s a fun way to give depth and add story to a run-of-the-mill action sports montage. It can also be used to link together footage from different characters or locations, as can be seen in the Travel Montage structure presented later in this chapter.

The power intro provides the perfect opportunity to experiment with visual effects. For the beginner, designing and sustaining quality graphics over a short intro is easier than doing so for an entire edit. Kislevitz did all the visual effects work for the featured video “Mt. Hood Snow Photo Expedition” in After Effects and then augmented it with a number of other techniques, including sound effects, voiceover, music cueing, and audio filters. Extra touches like these do wonders to integrate graphics into a video and make them feel believable for the audience.

Stories in this genre often center around the character of the racer, whose great obstacle is to win the race. But what happens when the racer doesn’t finish, or even loses? This is when storycrafting gets interesting because the story must be about something other than winning.

The “Baptism By Fire - Vegas To Reno With Nick Woodman” video is a great example of how to combine or rearrange certain sections of a race to create a better narrative flow, while remaining true to the spirit of a piece. Production artist Pat Barrett’s rough cut was properly sequential. Pit stop 1 arrived, then pit stop 2, and so forth, each with an interaction and insight into Nick and Dave, the two characters. In the second pass, we took more liberties, rearranging the character interactions and pit stops. These character interactions, rather than any particular mile marker or pit stop, became the beats of the story. The memorable exchange about paying to take a shit—and Dave’s maniacal laughter—actually occurred early in the race. But moving it to right after the final breakdown and Nick’s perilous wounding earns the moment and connects the two characters. While the narrative may not be 100% chronologically accurate, it’s right on target emotionally. When we showed Nick the edit months later, he couldn’t recall that anything was out of place chronologically. Emotional truths can trump chronological facts, even to the characters who experienced them.

We include this video as a nod to the classic action sports formula we grew up watching. Story-wise, not much directorial planning is needed for a video like this. Shooters capture plenty of coverage, while the editor introduces the characters individually and gives them their own action sequences. We tried to equally distribute the sequences with the best tricks and angles to keep viewers invested just when they might be on the verge of tuning out. The face shots and funny moments with the athletes break the action-induced hypnosis and give the viewer a second to breathe between sequences.

Overall, the combination of never-before-seen shots and a catchy music track made the “2010 Post Office Bike Jam” video a benchmark for GoPro and the first of our videos to hit one million views.

The original inspiration for the “Shaun White’s Birth of a Board” video came from the opening titles of the film Lord of War, when the audience follows a bullet from its manufacturing process until it’s fired from a gun in a war. Our video follows a snowboard from its origin as a tree in the forest to a finished product that White rides. We were having a hard time finding a natural ending in the editing room when it hit us: bookend it where we started! We called White and asked him to take a run and lean the board up against a tree to mirror the opening shot. Sometimes reshooting during the rough cut stage can give you the missing piece that pulls the puzzle of an edit together.

During the rough cut of the “Alana and Monyca Surfing Hawaii” video, we felt the piece was becoming just another action montage. During production, Alana Blanchard and Monyca Byrne-Wickey wore chest-mounted cameras for hours while shopping around town. The editor dug back into the raws to find funny moments of the girls singing and shopping. He cut those together in a staccato intermission that broke up the montage and gave the audience a glimpse into the day-to-day life of two model surfer girls.

Creating a framework and thread that the audience can follow helps the sequences work together. The “Jamie Sterling Big Wave World Champion 2011” video uses graphics and geography to link many disparate locations around the world. Each section could potentially be a short little web episode on its own, but the editor uses a framework to tie them all together. The video “A Year with Andy Mac” employs a slide motif and Andy Macdonald’s constant chatting to move through the adventure. This video showcases a great use of teasers to hook the audience and features a nice bookend. We begin and end at Bucky Lasek’s Backyard Bowl, with Macdonald giving us a positive message and hope for a new year. Intuitively, this conveys one of the most rewarding things about traveling: eventually you return home. You return to the same place, but you are not the same person. The experience has transformed you.

A mountain biking piece such as “Lost in Peru” is an especially natural fit for this structure. The piece was an orphan edit for a while: gigs upon gigs of unorganized footage passed around to various editors who tried to create a narrative flow. Finally, we decided to start at the top of the mountain and journey toward the bottom, structuring the theme and lessons learned along the way.

The introductory beat is the arrival in Cuzco and establishes the characters. We didn’t have many over-the-top, death-defying feats in the footage, so we grouped together all the steep, dark, cloudy shots and anything featuring ruins or cliffs. Because this was filmed over weeks on multiple mountains, we let the rocky paths and some color correction pull the disparate locations together. When Ali Goulet and Aaron Chase talk about the consequences of a fall, the trail starts to feel dangerous and threatening—enough to make viewers lean forward in their seats. This made the mountain itself the obstacle.

The middle beat, starting at 2:20, comes as the mountain’s grade flattens out. Though it may seem like a random intermission, the mini-store beat is essential because it shows the first awkward engagement between the main characters and the local people. When you’re first traveling abroad, the environment and indigenous people can feel intimidating and scary. But when you’ve established a connection, you quickly realize that the world is a good-hearted place filled with curious people just like yourself. As the characters connect with the local children onscreen, the clouds lift and the sun comes out. The trail is now friendly and welcoming. If the edit started off with this footage, the story would not have felt emotionally progressive for the audience. The new structure shows the characters learning something about themselves and the culture—which should be the true purpose of the journey, not just shredding some new line.

The subsequent climax has been earned and sums up literally what was only hinted at before. At a local school, the characters are able to give back in their small way to the people and culture, empowering those who have empowered them. The difference between the rough and final cuts is huge. The audience members probably won’t grasp all the beats on the first viewing, but they’ll feel the change in narrative flow. That’s the beauty of structure and story. Make every second and every shot count in the stories you tell.

The “Still Lost in Peru” video features Chris Van Dine, Aaron Chase, and Ali Goulet returning to Peru with friends for another biking trek. The edit presented difficulties due to the similarity of the content. The first rough cut was a 15-minute montage containing basically the same journey as the original Peru edit, including another final beat with the same children at the same school. For the second pass, the editor dove back into the raw footage and found a conflict between two of the main characters. This became the new obstacle. We reworked the major beats and began the sequel where the original story left off. This allowed the original theme to grow, from foreigners learning inside a new culture in the original video, to traveling friends working together and learning from each other in the sequel.

“The Family Crest” walks through a modern band’s typical day as the band members generate enthusiasm for a newly released album. It was a great collaboration because both GoPro and The Family Crest were born in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is the video’s location. The band’s label, Tender Loving Empire, has longtime been a musical collaborator with GoPro’s media department. We also used an instrumental version of the song featured in this video for our HERO3+ product reel.

In the video, the song’s structure gives natural boundaries to each sequence. The first verse introduces us to the band and various environments. The first chorus coincides with the band playing in its practice space. In the second verse, the band takes photos and creates flyers. The second chorus hits as the band takes to the streets, playing live shows and distributing flyers for an upcoming performance. A quick bridge reminds us where we’ve been and where we’re headed. The last and most triumphant chorus drops as the band plays its album release show on stage at the Great American Music Hall. The whole edit has built toward this moment. The music plays for a little longer as a series of recaps reminds us of the journey we have been on. Then, the images cut out as the last chorus ends.

The music video is a format that many of us have seen since childhood. It’s a popular genre, simply because it works so well. And while a lot can be gained from a strictly “action cut” music piece, we believe that the best and most memorable music videos have story and structure built into them.

The first few days were spent listening to Healey and Mancino, and we noted their similarities and differences. From our conversations, a few common themes emerged: their tendency to seek spiritual experiences inside of nature, their fearlessness and fascination with predatory underwater animals, and their lack of trust in other human beings. Overall, we saw a story about two people who had an easier time connecting with nature than with other humans.

The Bahamian locations provided ample imagery, with sunken planes and ships that were great subtext for the two characters—one a bird, the other a fish, both moving through the story trying to connect with each other.

The introduction dives into the underwater world as both Healey and Mancino explore the surreal depths alone. They abruptly meet amidst shallow wreckage and part ways distrustfully. The shipwreck footage starting at 2:40 shows a spooky visual embodiment of the internal fear both independent characters need to overcome in order to make a connection. The surreal sequences, including Healey’s happy place in the pool and Mancino’s chase with the fake shark head, project their idealized worlds to extremes within an already dream-like reality. The two characters finally connect by riding a tiger shark, thus bringing together their mutual need to connect with each other through nature. The final shot bookends the introduction with an ascension back into the sky, calling attention to the existential question “What is real and what is a dream?”

For this video, post-production was scheduled for a week, which was a little optimistic. The surreal version ended up being a little too heady for a product release video, so we cut a simplified version and released the director’s cut eight months later. If you look closely at Healey’s pool scene, you can see both of this book’s authors, one floating on an inflatable mattress, the other wearing a cowboy hat and deftly cleaning the pool with a long-handled skimmer.

Nevertheless, that rough cut stumped us for weeks. We had a badass soundtrack, loads of footage, and nearly three minutes of introduction. So, what next? The raw moment between Van Dine and Chase worked great as an introduction, but the truth is that it was the only real climax or resolution in the footage. We tried making the plaza at the bottom of the hill the climax, and while the connection with the local culture was nice, it always felt flat for a climactic moment. So we decided to keep the climax and resolution where it was and make the ending the beginning. It was a fun little nod to Tarantino or Memento, giving the whole edit a cyclical, samsaric feel. The last scene ends right where the introduction began. You get back to the top of the hill, the music drops, and you find yourself exactly where you started.

From the time we spent with Beschen and from watching the footage he sent us, a few things stood out. Though he was from San Clemente, he seemed to have put that chapter of his life behind him. Clearly, he’d moved to Hawaii to get away from the madness of California and his past there. He also seemed to have a special fondness for growing things, including trees and plants. He was creating a green utopia in his own backyard. Finally, he was raising a family and cared about them very much.

A story began to emerge. We started to see Beschen as a gardener, a man who had put the past behind him, gotten a piece of land, settled down, and worked on creating a world to grow things in. One of the things he was growing was his little girl, Marley, nurturing her but also protecting her from the outside world. It was a beautiful story, with deeper undertones concerning time, age, and what it might mean to bring a child into the world.

A common way to use music is to create tension with a brooding song and then bring on the more evocative, soaring tracks as the tension resolves. For this edit, we tried something a little different. We paired three music tracks with the three main “characters.” A “dark side” version of Beschen, representing his past, is paired with a song from Black Moth Super Rainbow. A “light side” version of Gavin, the gardener, plays the ukulele. His daughter, Marley, is paired with the Magnificat, the Song of Mary. When the three characters finally collide in the edit’s climax, their individual songs come together, creating a strange harmony. This technique manifests musically what the story tells us literally and emotionally.

The opening scene from “Lions – The New Endangered Species?” was our first encounter with the naturalist Kevin Richardson and two lions, Meg and Amy. We decided that involving the crew showed the sense of wonder and danger they experienced as it actually happened. Richardson’s easy interaction with the lions tended to lull the audience into a state of bliss. Using the crew as a foil not only reminds us how lethal and dangerous lions are to humans, but it also opens a door to talking about the reverse: just how dangerous humans are to lions.

Once we introduced Richardson and planted the seed of the cause at 2:45, the hyenas came along, offering a kind of humorous left hook that gave the audience a break from the lion exposition. Richardson’s voiceover and intimate knowledge of the hyenas as individuals personalizes them and sets the tone for the final section. The crew members in cages bring the audience back to reality and the attack on the vehicle highlights the danger.

The final section begins with the story of the lions Meg and Amy. Shots of Richardson interacting and face-rubbing with the lions give the impression that they are more like his daughters than wild animals. We are tactfully tugging at the viewers’ heartstrings, getting the audience to recognize the lions as individuals like us, before reintroducing the cause.

Naturally, the interviewer asks Richardson about his kids and the future, and this leads us back to the root of the problem and the reason for the video. It’s the same seed planted ten minutes earlier in the edit. Now, after our journey with Richardson, the problem is really beginning to bloom and make sense to the audience. The final sequence gives us the visual and metaphorical representation of his utopia: walking with his daughters Meg and Amy in the sunset grass without cages or bars. This challenges the viewers to assess their own impact on the natural world, and hopefully moves them toward supporting Richardson’s cause.

The opening foreshadows Walter releasing a bird over an epic vista. The bird is paired with Kerri’s narration of her first fearful experience flying with Walter. After the introduction, the duo travels around the wilds of Africa saving birds. The interviewer asks where they met and Walter gives a general response before Kerri diverts the conversation to bird exposition. All her information about the individuals finding mates and being parents are subtle inferences to the evolution of Kerri and Walter’s relationship.

The interviewer hesitantly asks again where they met. They awkwardly tell the story, both interrupting each other to recount their different perspectives. This creates the tension that carries the audience through the rest of the piece. Like any love story, the main question is: will the couple stay together?

Power usually switches from one person to the other in a relationship, so we tried to be selective in editing to create a verbal jousting match. Kerri jabs at Walter about stalking her to come paragliding. Walter’s knowing grin tells her how much he thought she would appreciate it. Kerri responds with how ridiculous he seemed. Walter reasons with her logically and wins. Kerri takes the power back by interrupting about stalking again and they laugh it off. Kerri finally admits how scared she really was, and we hear the sincerity in her voice after they lift off. Walter knowingly grins because this takeoff parallels the start of their amazing relationship. In this sense, they both win the joust. In the end, all they can agree on is that they don’t agree on anything.

The opening of the story confidently begins with a failure. The protagonist, Geoff Mackley, and his partner, Brad Ambrose, attempt to descend into an active volcano. Halfway down, weather rolls in, and the audience becomes aware of how perilous the journey is, on account of the acid rain and the difficult rappel down. Showing the audience the consequences of failure in the opening allows the editor to then relax and take his time in establishing all the characters afterwards. Exposition on the characters and their mission is given at the basecamp while they wait for the weather to clear. The audience is willing to wait with the characters because they are now invested in seeing what is inside the volcano as well. Creating that expectation allows the filmmaker to elongate the tension.

The sun finally shines through, and the crew descends again. Geoff gets entangled in rappelling equipment halfway down, reminding the audience of the difficulty again while also developing our character as he pushes on in spite of adversity. This is all part of the “human versus nature” conflict, but when Geoff reaches the inner sanctum of the volcano, the audience begins to wonder “Why is he doing this?” The “human versus self” conflict is then interwoven with voice-over, and Geoff contemplates his own individual existence and how it connects to life on our planet. Director and editor Mike Pfau only found this final beat after the rough cut, when he went through his interviews with Geoff again, and linked all the pieces together in the second pass.

It can often be useful to keep in mind the rich history of human storytelling when drawing inspiration for a piece. One of the stories we had in mind while cutting Geoff’s climatic epiphany was the biblical account of Moses and the burning bush. At the edge of the roiling lava lake, Geoff forces his tearful eyes open to stare into the face of God, perhaps to find the meaning for his own existence and the connection between life and death.

We explored a number of different frames or motifs trying to structure this edit. One option included a wild introduction set 200 years in the future with the viewers being analyzed by a sentient GoPro computer and placed inside a Ryan Price avatar on a spiritual mountain-climbing-skiing quest. The video employed tons of graphics and After Effects work in the process. It was silly, and the wild ideas were distracting us from what was supposed to be an earnest story. The simple school frame we eventually choose, using chalk writing on black title cards, was instantly relatable and got the story moving quickly.

The edit is a twist on the traditional search for meaning or enlightenment, which often ends quite literally with an archetypal mountaintop. Here, the journey is envisioned not as a climb up the mountain, but a descent down. Anticipation for the answer to the question mounts as Price and his friends ski through varying terrain. The philosophy and physics sequences give the viewers examples of the innumerable ways humans interpret their reality and imbue it with meaning. The tension mounts until at last the climax, when the frame of the pop quiz breaks down inside the ice cave. Here, the narrator attempts to give us an answer to life’s ultimate question, beyond philosophical abstractions or mathematical formulas. The ice cave realization informs the last montage of the edit, then gives the characters and audience a reason to climb the mountain again, live life, and discover their own meaning inside of it.

This edit in particular was a breakthrough in experimentation. Over the years, one of our mottos at GoPro has been: try to do something new with each and every video, even if it is only one thing. Difficult projects like this give you the chance to expand your horizons rather than resorting to the familiar or formulaic. The effort may work, it may not. But just by trying you have pushed your own limits and will grow as a creative artist.

Every feature story needs a protagonist and an antagonist or conflict. As described in Chapter 5, we generally have the essence of both in our videos. Fortunately for the “Our Orangutan Brethren” video, we had an actual physical representation of our antagonist: the deforested wasteland. This physical antagonist allowed us to form a classical three-act structure in this short film.

The following list outlines how a classical three-act structure can function.

The obstacle, problem, threat, or antagonist is introduced: Peter explains that time is short, orangutans are at the brink of extinction, and every individual counts. Peter even looks at his watch as if to confirm that time is running out. It’s good to note: we didn’t stumble upon this shot until digging back into the selects after the rough cut. Every frame counts in telling the story, and those details are so subtly important.

The “B” love story is introduced: Betty and Suri’s mother and daughter relationship is the B love story. Usually the B love story empowers the protagonist to rise and conquer the final obstacle and bring about the climax of the story. In this case, Betty, the mother, lets go of her daughter, Suri, during the final climactic release.

Reaching the false summit or midpoint: The midpoint is when the story ascends to an understanding or small climax and everything seems to be wonderful. In the story, Suri is actually ascending a tree into the sunlight. Peter informs the audience that orangutans and humans are genetically similar. The story has arrived at a wonderful peak, but this is just the false summit that occurs right before everything comes crashing down. Suri drops the stick, and the audience fears that all hope may be lost.

All hope is lost: This is the turning point of the film when the protagonist has reached the lowest point. The audience learns that our human consumption of palm oil is destroying habitat and causing orangutan extinction. Our irresponsible human actions serve as the antagonist embodied in the wasteland. This beat occurs right before the climax of the story.

Rise to the climax: The protagonist rises up and conquers. Typically, the rise is empowered by the B love story. Visually, we are actually climbing a rise here, and Peter’s entire team is running together. Peter is repeating, “Every individual counts at the moment.” The metal box slides open, and Suri is set free.