I have long taken special interest in the most concentrated forms of storytelling. These teach a great deal about the nature of storytelling because they have stripped away all extraneous detail. Here’s a visual analogy: a drawing that reduces a cat to its visual essence:
This drawing presents only the absolute minimum of visual cues needed to communicate the image of a cat. In like fashion, these examples present stories boiled down to their absolute minima.
The Far Side
This is a comic strip that ran from about 1982 until 1995, when the author, Gary Larsen, decided to quit at the peak of its popularity. The Far Side is now deemed to be one of the greatest comics ever created, largely because Mr. Larsen was a genius at compressing entire stories down to a single image. Here are some examples; there are so many great examples that I spent several hours boiling the set down to these:
Larsen drew all his comics in black and white, but many people have colorized them; I used the colorized versions where available. These present the middle fragment of a story, yet the complete story is easily imagined by the audience. In some cases, the beginning of the story is readily imagined; in others, it’s the end.
Thi is a txtul anlgy of th cmx: enuf 2 figur ot th menig.
In this textual analogy, I was able to delete many of the vowels but few of the consonants. This teaches us that vowels are not the primary information content of a word; the consonants are the most important components of words. In the same manner, the comics eliminate all but the most important components of the story.
Commercials
A few commercials tell stories in wonderfully compressed form. Here are a few examples:
The story this tells is rather abstract
These commercials are not as tightly condensed as the Far Side comics. We could measure the size of the files to figure out the difference. The comics files are a few hundred kilobytes, while the commercials consume many megabytes of storage. Even so, they are still able to present a complete story in 60 seconds or less, where a typical movie needs a minimum of 90 minutes.
Study these closely, then contemplate the essential elements that they use.
March 22nd, 2021
