Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling – Rule 11

Hey there!

Nothing is more important to your art than the abilities you have in storytelling, and how important it is to your VO career to develop and hone your storytelling skills.

It’s essential.

So, every so often, I like to roll out items from this list from Emma Coats, who used to work at Pixar as a story artist, and who serially tweeted Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling.

I’m giving you one of these rules every so often as we move through the next several months, along with how you can apply the rule to your VO artistry.

Today, Rule 11…

Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.

Let’s talk about marking up your script.

Making notes to yourself in your head about how a certain word is pronounced, or how you want to hit the brand name, or tell the joke, can get lost when there’s more than one note.

So do write, sparingly, on your script, what you need to remember.

A word of advice: don’t over mark your script with multiple underlines and quotes and circles and asterisks. You’ll spend too many brain cycles trying to remember what the heck you were trying to tell yourself.

And what you need to do is to be able to read through that script easily, without the side chatter of trying to figure out what you meant by that stroke.

So do get those notes down on paper – but don’t overdo it.

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Next rule?

How to dig deeper for more choices.

I’ll share that with you next time.