Pacing, in 3 minutes 38 seconds
A breakdown of pacing in an animated music video and how to apply it to my own non-fiction writing.
How do you tell a deep, meaningful story with layers and humour in a 3:38s video… with no dialogue?
We’d have to ask Alexis Beamont and Remi Godin, the directors of the music video for Let's Go! by French indie band, Stuck In The Sound.
Their little masterpiece of animation has captured my heart and I want to know how they did that. Specifically, I’m amazed at the amount of story in such a small frame of time. The pacing is so tight, and I need to explore it and see how to move the plot in my own writing. This essay is my study of the pacing of Let’s Go and how I might use those techniques.
Let's take a moment to appreciate the human emotion of this story. I will do it a great injustice and rattle it off like a waiter giving the specials. This is science, and Let's Go is going to be dissected...
This is the story of a Chinese boy who wants to be an astronaut on the moon. Giving himself entirely to this pursuit, he forgoes many aspects of life as he drives towards his goal.
After being suited up and launched into space, he has made it. Before the unthinkable occurs, earth completely explodes. Flashbacks of lives he could have had boil his disappointment over leaving him derefect and full of resentment. A new hope arrives in the form of a blurry image of a blonde in his space craft. The international space station is orbiting above. He wants a family and this could be it. As pieces of earth's debris starts pummling the moon, he fights his way to the space station. After a few near misses the station opens and he is pulled inside by the host. To his utter frustration, the "blonde" is a man. No space family.
The story ends as a playstation controller drifts towards him, wiping his eyes he goes and joins the host as player two.
Damn, that is a cool non-verbal story! Doing the “right thing”, pursuing his dream and being having it fall to nothing — hits me hard. All that life he could have lived! The twist of the blonde being a dude always gets a good chuckle to anyone I share this with. Kudos to Stuck In The Sound for their awesome song and music video.
Want to watch it first, before reading the breakdown? Here is the link:
I’ll also share the same link at the bottom of the post, if you want to watch it after the breakdown (my preference).
But let's talk shop. How was so much story conveyed in so little time?
As a writer, I’m desperate to be able to convey the same amount of interest and emotion I see here, in my medium of non-fiction writing. The techniques I want to look are around pacing. How quickly or slowly to describe things. Lets go…
Lesson - Don’t fill in all the details
The opening scene is of our boy-hero sitting on his bed, staring at a child’s drawing of an astronaut on the moon. It's clear that this is his drawing, but we never saw him drawing it. Adding frames to show him drawing it, would only slow us down and hurt the pacing. Worse than slowing us down, the details might confuse us... was the boy an artist, what led him to draw this picture?
For good measure, repeat the interesting details.
A famous saying in theatre is -> if the gun shows up in scene one, it should get fired in scene three. These details we describe in the story matter more than showing us the setting, they become the story. Resist the urge to add too much detail and distract the reader, keep it lean.
If, however, we follow this advice to the letter, we may still end up losing our reader’s interest. Not because we haven’t been diligent and considerate, but because they don’t understand the steps that led to the conclusion.
How do we balance this?
Lesson - Driving the story
In a story, we can be detailing the scene or we can be driving the scene.
And like great sex, we don’t want it to be over in 5min.
Hiking, traveling, building a career… all of these have one thing in common. The journey is as important as the goal. The pull of the goal drives us but the details in the journey make us feel. In writing, we see the goal as the intrigue or mystery — as the plot that we want to see resolve. And the details are what will make us believe it.
Let’s Go is a short story. Yet it still has scenes of exercising (showing the cost) and of earth’s debris smashing into the moon (showing the stakes). It even sets us in China, where a mission to the moon is a believable goal. Without these details, we don’t feel the weight of the plot.
A great storyteller will incorporate both detailing and plot in such a seamless way, that the reader may not even notice it. The humble writer that I am, I must be aware of which I am doing. Am I detailing or am I driving? Are their opportunities to combine them?
Detailing slows down the reader, and driving speeds it up. Give the reader evidence that the resolution is both interesting and full.
There is also something more you can do in the details. To build up a store of interest for later on. You can use those details for foreshadowing.
Lesson - Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is placing hints of what is about to happen in front of the viewer. Priming them to anticipate action. And anticipation… is awesome. Turns out we want to know what’s going to happen. There is an emotional hit we get, when we are able to connect pieces of the story ourselves, to see how the beginning leads to the ending.
In the music video, we see a girl try to flirt with our hero. After rejecting her, and focusing on his mission, he starts to get sadder and sadder and eventually it turns into a gritty resolve.
These details are there, in front of us, but we are still focused on the main arc, the story of our hero being pulled by his dream. These details are secondary, and we treat them as such.
But then…
Earth explodes and our hero feels the pangs of lives he never lived, of the price he paid for his dream, turned to nothing. All those scenes of sadness and the girl he rejected, make us believe his pain. We needed the foreshadowing to believe it.
Give readers the tools to understand your conclusions. In non-fiction, this can be more obvious. State the destination, then expand on the journey.
Like how this piece, is about pacing in my writing. How I should be conscious of the interest level of my reader and where to add detail.
Details are both for weighting the plot and for building up anticipation for it. But if the plot evolves, how do keep it tied together into a single story?
And that brings us to depth…
Lesson - Building Depth
Good stories have layers. And what I've come to learn that means, is that there are surface-level stories, like the boy wanting to become an astronaut and there are deeper themes, like the man coming to terms with discipline and hope. The astronaut story is enough to capture our interest, but becomes so much more interesting when we learn of the deeper story of cost, disappointment, and resenting the world.
What fascinates me most here is the timing of these stories. We'll need to go a bit deeper to understand how that impacts pacing...
Let’s look at the timeline
There are three mini story arcs in this.
The "I want to be an astronaut" story ends 28% in, when the earth explodes.
The "I want to have a moon family" runs from 57% - 83%.
And the "I'm drained there is nothing left" finishes off the story from 91% onwards.
If we plot out the whole timeline, we see something like this...
Notice the intention and obstacle as it changes from surface stories to deeper themes.
Ultimately, we come down to the core human condition, our boy hero just wants to be happy.
The first two arcs take about the same amount of video time, one third for each, but different character time. Years to get to become an astronaut, minutes to get to the space station. The last arc is the quickest in both time frames. This is pacing, the amount of time or the amount of words we spend on which parts. And it shouldn’t match the time frame of the story, it should match the interest of the story.
You can go fast, when the reader knows what will happen and slow when the reader is curious.
Last lesson, a conclusion
There is one takeaway I have, after disecting this:
The interest of the reader is the runway we have.
The interest the reader has, will dictate how we can play with pacing. When there is high interest, we can expound on details and talk more. When we have low interest, we risk losing them and must move quickly.
The promise of any story or essay is that something interesting will happen. Readers will give us a chance to prove it, but if nothing catches them soon, they will drop. And if we don’t keep their interest throughout, they’ll drop.
We should not waste time filling in all the details when a few bold strokes will do.
When we can afford to slow down, because of rich interest, we should use the opportunity to add details that will give weight to the plot or use foreshadowing. Building up a store of interest for later on. And like all delicious things of calibre, build depth and provide a meal worthy of savouring and sharing with others.
The story in Let’s Go was inspirational and I want to be able to write and convey as much meaning as it did, with as few frames. I want to have that pacing control, and I look forward to applying my newly learned lessons.
And if you haven’t yet, go and check out Let’s Go, by Stuck in the Sound…
Special thanks to
and for their fun feedback!