What is a story?

So, before we start talking about storyboarding, we should talk about stories, right?  The question is: what is a story?  You know what a story is, right?  So go ahead and tell me.  Go ahead, right now.  Ok, ok, you can have a minute to think about it.  All right, let's hear it.

It's hard, isn't it?  Believe me, I know.  And I know exactly what you were thinking just before I cut you off.  You were going to say a story has a Beginning, a Middle, and an End.  But notice the verb there "has".   "To have" is not the same as "to be".  OK, OK, enough with the philosophizing, what is a story?

A story, in a short, is a change.  Something begins as one thing, and ends as another.  The best definition of a story I ever heard was given by a comic book writer, and despite a lot of digging on the internet (which I'm told never forgets), I haven't been able to find out who he was.  Anyway, this is what he said a story is.  What it was, what happened, what it is now.  That's it, that's what a story is.  It's so brilliantly simple, yet elusively complex.  A story is what something was, what happened to it to cause a change, and then what it becomes at the end.  Each one of these elements is indispensable.  Each one tied to the other yet unique.  And they're applicable to pretty much every movie you can think of.  Well, the good ones anyway.  I'll give you a few examples.

Ghostbusters
Ray, Peter, and Egon start out as scientific jokes.  They start a business that works.  They end up as the heroes of New York City with people chanting their names.

Rocky
Rocky starts out a loser, a low level enforcer for a loan shark.  The Champ decides he wants to fight an unknown because of his name.  Rocky makes it and goes the distance with Apollo Creed.

Pinnochio
Pinnochio starts out as a little wooden boy wanting to be a real boy.  He learns lessons about honesty, and self sacrifice.  At the end he's rewarded by being turned into a real boy.

Star Wars
Luke Skywalker starts off as a simple farmboy.  He boy two droids that leads him to an old jedi who teaches him the ways of the force.  By the end he's saved the Rebellion and destroyed the Death Star

The Little Mermaid
Arial starts out a rebellious teenager dreaming of being human.  She sells her voice to the sea witch with dramatic consequences.  At the end her father makes her human permanently.

These are just a few examples that could be easily broken down into three sentences. There are dozens more that would require a little more analysis and a little more explanation, but that still conform to the "what it was, what happened, what it is now" principle.

That's enough for now.  We'll go deeper into each of these elements later as well as discuss things like camera angles, characters placement, acting, composition, and of course, drawing.  But this is enough for now.

The Beginning

This here is my blog about storyboarding. There aren't a lot of books or websites about storyboard (at least, not ones that I like) so I thought I'd put mine forward. I hope you like it.