Storytelling -> Data -> Storytelling

HOW TO DESIGN A DIFFERENT MOVIE METADATA MODEL?

Truth, as the saying goes, is in the eye of the beholder. This is only one side of the coin, because truth is also in the hands of the storyteller. Both sides of the truth are exemplified by the movie Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014), which revolves around Nick and his wife Amy who live in Missouri. On the day of their fifth wedding anniversary Amy goes missing. The days count up while the police try to figure out what may have happened. Something is clearly off and even though there is no corpse, evidence of possible foul play starts to point to Nick. That’s when the story pivots to a different perspective. As it turns out the whole missing person act has been a carefully crafted and executed master plan by Amy to frame Nick.

Gone Girl is about subjectivity and it effectively shows that we, the audience/beholders, just like the characters in the movie (even the police), construct a unique and personal truth from the available information. It also shows how the perceived truth is manipulated by Amy at the story-level and by the filmmakers at the meta-level. As such the movie is clearly also about storytelling.

It isn’t the subjective truth of the storyteller (intent) nor the subjective truth of the beholder (interpretation) that make Gone Girl interesting to me. It’s about what lies in between. A culture of storytelling where similar stories have similar recognisable characteristics. This is explicitly referenced in the movie during a scene in the second act that explains how Amy’s storytelling domain knowledge is learned by analysing books and tv shows about crime and murder. Ultimately she comes to understand the building blocks that are needed to build her story by first deconstructing comparable stories.

This is similar to the journey that I’m on. I’m trying to understand what the essence of movies is and how this can be consistently captured as data. I believe that Gone Girl shows that the gateway to capturing the essence of movies is understanding storytelling. How can storytelling be envisaged as data?

Let’s start with a definition.

Storytelling happens at the intersection of three components:

1. the message/story conveyed (what)
2. the intended audience to convey it to (who)
3. the medium used to convey the message (how)

Amy understands this storytelling trinity. She uses this expertise to convey her message that Nick is guilty of murdering his pregnant wife, and adapts her execution (medium) to the best fit for each separate audience. For the befriended “local idiot” neighbour she focuses on personal conversations about pregnancy and Nick’s violent temper. For the police she stages a factual evidence storyline, with a half burned diary, credit card debts and poorly cleaned blood traces in the kitchen.

Her storytelling is effective, because it has a well-executed design. Effective in this context means that the audience picks up on the intended message. Amy understands how the beholder eyes the truth and uses this to tell her story. A storyteller needs to understand the message, the audience and the medium to be able to use that knowledge in designing the storytelling experience. This obviously applies to movies, books, tv shows and speeches, and maybe less relatable, it also applies to data.

Data storytelling uses a ‘data medium’ to convey the message to the audience. For instance a dashboard or a transaction receipt. A company executive can create a dashboard to convey a message of success to the CEO and a retailer can use the transaction receipt to convey the message of a particular purchase to a customer. As said these forms of data storytelling can only be effective if they have been designed.

This design process is called data modelling. It starts with defining the conceptual model that intends to accurately capture the business requirements and it ends with the physical model (the final technical implementation). Designing the conceptual model means translating the end goal into requirements, structure and definitions. If this translation fails the final physical model will fail as well.

For instance, designing the data model behind a transaction receipt means working back from its business requirement and creating a data model that captures the data needed to print an effective transaction receipt. The purpose of a transaction receipt is to convey the message of a specific transaction, at a specific time and for a specific price. If the timestamp isn’t taken into account it will be impossible to convey the intended message. This applies to any type of storytelling, because if the intended message isn’t understood it will be hard (or even impossible) to convey it.

That is why I believe that defining a method for capturing the essence of storytelling of movies works best if it’s also treated as a data modelling process. In other words, determining the conceptual model behind movie storytelling by capturing the elements and structure needed to tell an effective story. By modelling this way, the actual tagging of a movie can be consistent, reproducible and will have the same data structure as the tagging of any other movie, making it easier to compare movies with each other. Similar to how every logged transaction in the above example will have the same structure.

The intent of this data modelling endeavour is to create a movie metadata standard that differs from conventional movie metadata such as genres. The above elaboration on the story of Gone Girl hopefully shows the value of such a standard. Simply tagging this movie as either Thriller or Drama (or both) fails to capture its complexity and offers little to compare it to other movies.

In more or less the same way as Amy did, I need to capture the movie storytelling elements that are essential for telling a (specific) story. I believe that the descriptive analysis of this (specific) message/story should be the core of the ‘Movie Meta Model’. It’s what captivates us (the audience) most about movie storytelling. It’s the component we’re most likely to discuss with friends and family.

It’s not my intent to further elaborate on the specifics of this in this article. I believe that the best way to show how it could work is with a detailed example in a follow-up article.