David Baboulene - Working With a Contemporary Step Outline: The tool of choice for story development: Includes the full step outline for the film story: Bella

Once upon a time

I set about a multimedia project to develop a story from the initial germ of an idea right through to getting a film up there on the big screen (or at least on Vimeo). Welcome to The Bella Project.

Bella is based out of my website at www.baboulene.com . You are almost certainly here right now because you started from there and are following the set path, however, if you have somehow arrived out of left field, fear not! This document works fine in its own context. However, you might like to go to the website and pick up on how we got here in the first place and where it all goes next. Indeed, unless you are reading this before the close of 2020, the whole project should be complete. The script should also be available for you to read and the final film of Bella should be available for viewing.

The main purpose of this multimedia project is to shine a light on how stories work and how an author can manage their inspiration and ideas to work them into the best final product they can possibly squeeze from that inspiration. The story is, of course, central to everything that happens. Every job, every role, every deal that is done in any area of story industry without a story there is nothing. Nothing to work on and no-one has a job, so finding a good story, and telling it to its absolute optimum is a jolly good idea for everyone concerned.

Understanding how stories work is essential if the story you love is going to be the one that gets delivered. One of the main problems for writers is that there is a strong wood for the trees effect in story development. The tiny nugget of gold that inspired you in the first place and from which all the value must be generated gets lost in the enormity of the development effort, particularly once collaborators get involved. I have seen many an author get lost in the detail, tangled in the options, frustrated by the nuance of their story and, once the script is written, I have seen many a story trampled to death in the rush to make a film. Identifying the beating heart in your story idea and having a reliable, proven method for keeping sight of it as you nurture a story into life is essential if you are going to deliver a finished story that retains the power and integrity of its inspiration.

One of the best tools available to an author in terms of managing a story development project is the step outline . It provides the method and mechanisms that manage the relationship between the initiating inspiration and the final text. The step outline works as a mediator, linking your creative self with your analytical self. Your imagination is casting all over the place and coming up with all sorts of possibilities, while your final product must be a meticulously composed and considered representation of your founding thoughts. The step outline is the tool that accepts, connects and works with the two extremes. It is also the fundamental tool of story design. By documenting not only what happens in a sequence with how you intend to deliver that story event in subtext , you create a reassuring measure of the story power within each event. This is priceless, because when you are no longer able to work with an event using pure instinct and inspiration, the objective elements in every step will give confidence to proceed when reassurance is needed.

This document is a sanitised version of my step outline for Bella . By which I mean it was an incomprehensible mass of notes and scribbles when being used. I have smartened it up to show the ideal form and added notes to explain it. In the normal course of a story development, nobody else will ever see your step outline, so do not be intimidated by mine. It has been honed for this document. Make it your focus to understand the job it is doing, then personalise it to your own preference and make it work for you. Do not worry about what you should or should not do. It is yours. Only you will ever see it. Adapt it to you.