Focus Your Inciting Incident
Last week I had the extraordinary opportunity to interview more than 45 thought leaders for my PBS-targeted documentary about Barbara Marx Hubbard.
During these interviews, I was reminded of a storytelling principle that will help focus your film’s Inciting Incident. As you may know, this important catalyst event sets off your protagonist’s quest. You can further define that quest through what I call the Protagonist’s Statement of Desire.
This is a line or two in which the protagonist (or a related character, or the narrator) states what he or she is wanting. It’s a way of focusing your viewer on the film’s narrative arc.
You’ll find a great example in the Oscar-nominated documentary Wasteland.
Early in the film, just after the inciting incident, protagonist Vik Muniz says, “What I really want to do is to be able to change the lives of a group of people with the same materials that they use everyday. And not just any material. The idea that I have for my next series is to work with garbage.”
Note the phrase “really want to do” in the first sentence. The Protagonist’s Statement of Desire usually contains a word like “want”, “intend”, or “goal”. Vik, a world-famous artist, wants to return to his native Brazil to create art from the world’s largest garbage dump. Eliciting such a statement of intent during your interviews gives you a powerful tool for focusing your viewer’s quest.
If you’ve found this strategy helpful, you’ll find dozens more documentary storytelling strategies in my upcoming new virtual seminar, Structuring the Three Act Documentary.
This five-week seminar begins August 19th and will help you structure both character-driven and essay-style films.
Get $100 off the seminar price by registering before August 8th at:
https://newdocediting.com/products/structuring-the-three-act-documentary
