Q: I wonder if you can tell me first of all what the problems were that you'd encountered in your life that made Dramatica seem something you'd like to develop.

A: I started as a film editor and, as a film editor, I often had to construct new scenes that didn't exist in the original motion picture because there were problems during production. In constructing new scenes, I found that there was a relationship between time and space, the order in which events happened and their dramatic meaning. That sort of education led me to believe that maybe just looking at a structuralist approach to stories was not absolutely correct at all. Later on I mi- met my partner, Chris Huntley, the two of us worked out an initial theory, about 13 years ago, about how these concepts might be used in creating a whole new theory of what stories were and how they work, which ultimately led to Dramatica.

Q: What were the existing theories that you built on or did you reject ----(OVERLAP)---

A: (OVERLAP) At fact we didn't build on any existing theories at all, which is one of the problems we have in convincing people of our validity sometimes. We looked at stories a whole new way and said that stories weren't just about a bunch of people doing a bunch of different things and it had a certain outcome and goals and such, but that what happened was, the original storytellers trying to make an argument, to their audience, to say that not only here is a way to solve a problem, but here is the only way to solve the problem, and by trying to move their audience to make that argument, they had to anticipate all the different ways that the audience might look at that problem in advance and incorporate that into the story's structure and dynamics.

So, in effect, they created all the different ways that a human mind might look at a problem in the conventions that became what we know today as story conventions. That actually is an analogy of the human mind's problem-solving process, something we call the story mind, and that's the model at the heart of Dramatica.

Q: Do you see that problem- solving is actually the essence of story telling?

A: Well, intriguingly enough, that is the common way that is being used today to write stories, is to look out problems and solving them, if anyone even thinks about having a reason or a purpose to stories, but in fact a problem can be looked at as an inequity, it can be looked at as an adversity that must be overcome, it can be looked at as an unknown area that has to be explored. It's a good way to think about it, to begin with, as- that there is a problem, but another way would be to say that there are adversities that we must face, here is a specific kind of an adversity and all the ways in which we can come to know it so that we can deal with it.

Q: This was 11/12 years ago you say you were actually beginning to work on this. What what point did the theory leap into computer practice?

A: Leap is hardly the word, I think stagger is more the,the appropriate term here in how Dramatica came to get on a screen!

We started thinking about the theory 13 years ago, on and off, and about 3_ years ago, Chris, having along with Steve Greenfield, built up Screenplay Systems, which is the predominant supplier of software and designer of software for the entertainment industry, said - look, we've got these resources and we have this theory, let's get together and see if we can maybe turn this theory into a software program, so it wasn't starting as a software program, it was starting as a concept.

That was 3_ years ago and we've spent the last 3_ years working out a theory that, in its implementation required chaos theory, and fractals - we even had to invent something called frictals to describe dynamic patterns. All of that sounds very complex. The trick was to put it into the heart of the model of psychology so that anyone as a writer, even a student, can intuitively get in touch with the program and have this complex model behind the scenes keeping consistent with their own intent.

Q: There are other software programs on the market, can you just distinguish Dramatica, although it's not yet released, can you distinguish Dramatica from the existing available software.

A: The programs that currently exist in,in the market are all designed as either databases or as fill in the blank programs. If it's a database, they've looked at existing, successful stories throughout the ages, including modern ones, and found certain similar patterns that recur in them and saying - if you use these patterns, you can be successful and, in fact, if you use those patterns and create that kind of a story, you're successful, but the minute you step off the path, you're lost, if you want to do something different or inciteful.

Other system use databases where they say - well these things can go together in many different ways and, if you go through the branch tree, you can create any one of a number of combinations.

The difference with Dramatica is that it's a model of the story mind, a model of psychology, of the human mind's problem-solving process. As such, you pick multiple choice answers, as you decide I want my story to move this way, as opposed to that way, I want these kinds of forces in play, as opposed to those kind of forces, kind of like a Rubik's cube of story, you twist it up and turn it and when you're turning the front part of it, which may be plot, but that part which is theme comes right along with it, to keep you consistent with your own intent. It builds a solid story form that then allows you to do your story telling on top of it, so there's never a formula involved, it's form without formula, completely flexible but then, once you've got your story form, you still have to tell it and that's why it won't replace authors.

Q: Now given that ...work in all kinds of different ways, Dramatica seems to me possibly a very, very good analytical tool but not something that would actually help you as you go along.

A: Well, OK, let's look first at story creation and then just touch briefly on,on analysis.

In terms of story creation, you can use Dramatica right at the beginning to seek out what it is you really want to talk about and come to it to find your ideas, build the story form that expresses what you want to express to your audience and create that through your story telling.

On the other hand, you may want to follow your own personal muse and explore throughout a lot of different areas until you discover what your story is on your own, without Dramatica. At that point, you can say - well now I know what my story is but a lot that I did earlier is no longer consistent.

So then you can take your information, put it into Dramatica, with what you know about your story now at this end of the process, and say - this is consistent but this is not, this is what it ought to be, and you can hone what you've done, saving as much as you possibly can, and still be consistent with your own intent.

When you analyze, it's a whole different ballgame. If you're analyzing your own work, well you know what you had in mind but, since the story telling is going on top of the story form, when you see a finished work they're all blended together and you can't really tell what an author had in mind, you can only suspect what he had in mind based on what he actually said or did. So the problem then becomes trying to interpret what they intended and of course you can see broad strokes in existing stories and say - well I know exactly what they had in mind there and it worked or it didn't, but when it gets down to the nuance, it's a lot more of an iffy proposition unless you've got the author sitting next to you when you're analyzing his work.

Q: Again, to what extent could the program be seen as an aid if you're basically you know a working stiff trying to get scripts out on a fairly regular basis but if you really wanted to create something which like breaks the form, breaks the mould in some way, will Dramatica allow you to do that or will it nudge you and say - ah ah, don't do that?

A: Well the nice thing about Dramatica is that although it will guide you into what's a good story form, if you ever don't like what it's telling you, you can unplug it, which is a lot different than a lot of friends you might go to for some comments on your script, you can't unplug them and they keep going on about it forever. So as - as a writing assistant, that's very valuable.

In terms of breaking the mould, Dramatica, because it is a complete argument as it were, a complete exploration of the story mind with particular adversities, you are then able to anticipate how you might want to break the mould for propaganda purposes. Propaganda, in stories, is a very complex issue because it's not what you say up front, it's what the audience is getting behind the scenes and, in order to do that, you leave a piece of the model out and, while they're looking at a piece of the story model that is missing, they fill in something from their personal lives into that hole and you've put a subliminal message in your audience.

So in terms of breaking the mould, in terms of trying something different, Dramatica will be able to predict the effect you can have on your audience or choosing a particular effect will tell you where to break it, so you get exactly what you intended.

Q: Is there any relation with the ideas that you have evolved through elaborating Dramatica - is there any connection between your discoveries, if you like, and pre-existing theories and concepts of,of story, or indeed of human behaviour?

A: Well, interestingly enough, Dramatica doesn't have any real touch points with existing theories of story other than it's kind of like the story of the elephant where Dramatica is the elephant and you have one person trying to describe the trunk, one describing the tail, one describing the tusks, they all have a different view of it.

Aristotle fits into Dramatica, Dramatica is a bit larger than that, he had a view of a three act structure, Dramatica has a three act and four act structure available in it and a lot of other views, so you see that stories all the way back to,to humankind's earliest attempts to try and discover what stories were. Those were all aspects of looking for that central concept, that it was really an analogy to the mind, that's what you need to Dramatica, but describing the mind, describing the story mind is something that is required. Today's knowledge of fractals, of chaos theory, of nomina equations, iteratives, synchronisity and a lot of other concepts that come together to make a completely fluid model that is not structured, not anchored to anything but deals in a more relativistic or holographic way, where everywhere in the story you find elements of theme, everywhere you find elements of character, although there are certain nodal points, or standing waves, where you can actually see them come up and become visible that everyone in the audience and every author can relate to those,those nodal points directly.

A... We call those appreciations, like a goal, or maybe a requirement, or maybe someone's personal problem, something like that comes right up to the surface because that's where all of these forces come together and intersect. The engine takes care of all the intersecting stuff so the author doesn't have to worry about it and just lets you pick those points that you want the audience to be getting out of your story.

Q: So the claims that you're making for Dramatica, which are fairly sweeping and bold claims, how do you hope that you'll be able to overcome what is perhaps an inbuilt scepticism amongst writers about the value of computer programs generally?

A: Well there- there's an ... question. Writers may have some initial scepticism and,and we expect quite a lot of initial scepticism that Dramatica can do everything we're claiming it can do, and that's understandable and it could be a problem except for the fact we're right.

Q: Apparently the Writers Guild Journal awhile ago, or the Writers Guild, I'm not quite sure which, circulated a questionnaire to their members asking them about the level of use of computer software both for script development and also for like the script formatting, daily use of it, and were surprised themselves by the low level of take up from their members in the people who responded to the questionnaire or whatever. What kind of conclusions do you draw from that?

A: Well writers,writers usually come to writing not because they want to hammer things out for the Hollywood mill. They come to writing because they have something they want to say or a way they want to go about saying it, or because they enjoy the experience of writing.

The problem is that the,the current products that are out there are trying so hard to give formulas or methods by which people can construct a story, and Dramatica doesn't do that. Dramatica says - here's the tools to play with, have fun with them, rearrange them any way you want, follow your personal muse, be creative, try something different, something bold. Dramatica will keep you consistent with that.

The reason there's a low level of participation by the writing industry, in using software right now, is because nothing else can do what Dramatica is about to do for them.

Q: Do you think if you are a writer and you're using Dramatica, is it going to make the process easier, more complex, more difficult, more - will they have to deliberate that much more and therefore take that much more time and therefore in the end turn the machine off and say the hell with it?

A: Well Dramatica's not designed to make writing easier, Dramatica's designed to make writing harder. It's designed to make it harder at the time when you figure out whether you have a plot hole or not, whether your characters are consistent, whether your themes actually make sense and communicate, because if you gloss over that, in the writing process, as so many people are tempted to do today in order to meet a schedule or a

A... deadline, then no matter how good their talents are as a storyteller, they're building it on a faulty foundation. The problem is that a lot of authors consider it a waste of time to try and get that stuff together.

Well the fact is that with an author who is figuring he's wasting his time by handling the preliminaries, in the end he's really wasting the audience's time for watching the product he's turned out.

Q: Do you think -- clearly there have been thousands ---

Q: We're approaching 100 years of cinema and obviously thousands and thousands and thousands of scripts, some successful, some less so, have been written without the aid of a single you know device. Do you think Dramatica is a distillation of what some writers either have an intuitive grasp of from the beginning, or learn through 30 years of script writing - is it that?

A: Dramatica is a distillation, even though it's revolutionary and a step apart, it's a distillation of the instincts of writers because all of us, when we're communicating to our,our fellow human beings, we're trying to say - this is how I feel, can you feel that with me, this is what I think, can you see how I see it. Well those are intuitive qualities to all human beings and to story tellers, they are driven to try and get that message across, to share it with others. To do that, they have to phrase it and couch it in terms that can be communicated, they have to get the,the form in which that communication takes place, into a form that can be then decoded by the audience and understood.

We've been feeling around that for thousands of years, as we create stories, we've been feeling around it in cinema for perhaps a hundred ye- a hundred years as we try a new way of story telling. Dramatica, in leaping ahead and saying this is what's at the heart of it, this is what we've all been trying to embrace, now gives us something we can clearly see that we can reflect those intuitions off and find them coming purely right back the way we intended them.

Q: If it's not a prescriptive device, and it's an aid to story forming, and you also have like the freedom to opt out at

Q.. any point along the line, don't you therefore also have the freedom to use Dramatica, from beginning to end, and still mess up.

A: (LAUGHS) Yes. The point is that Dramatica is a model of the mind and, as such, it has mathematical relationships that no one could get in touch with directly unless they had a degree in mathematics. Because of this, we have had to take certain semantic terms, words that we've attached to appreciations you see in economy and story, like theme and plot, or morality, or self interest, or learning or understanding or doing or being, things that crop up in all stories at one point or another.

Now those words are unique to our culture, they're unique to our time and in a sense they too are a form of story telling because it's not the purity. If you could take the,the centres of all the different settings of Dramatica and plop it down in the audience's mind direct, they would feel exactly what the story mind feels, they would see what the story mind sees.

Well we have to go through a middleman, we have to go through a medium, we have to go through our own cultural semantics and symbols and we turn those into action and we turn them into speech and,and when we put all of that together, we recreate those settings in the mind of the audience if we have told the story properly.

So an author is not guaranteed of turning out a wonderful work just because they have a wonderful story form from Dramatica, they still have to couch it in the symbolic terms of their culture and express that, through the story telling, in a way that the audience can decode it into what was intended in the first place, and there's plenty of opportunities to (LAUGHING)...

Q: When you were developing the product, did you run cross checks as it were with existing movies and existing story structures and forms from those - did that throw up any interesting (OVERLAP)...

A: (OVERLAP) Interestingly enough, the theory wasn't developed ---

The Dramatica theory was not developed by looking at existing stories but once we realised what we had in terms of a model, of story, we went back and did compare it to a lot of existing stories, everything ranging from classics like Hamlet, to Aesop's Fables, ranging up to Jurassic Park, everything from touchy feely stories about trying to find oneself, all the way to hard hitting action stories about just doing something, and we found that indeed it works, it is not only predictive about what is going to work in existing stories, but it's also pre- prescriptive about what could have worked better, say in the case of Jurassic Park.

Q: Can you say a bit about that?

A: A bit about Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park, as we all know, is about order and chaos, but in Dramatica there are two views of every story. Since we have a story mind, we could look from the story mind's point of view through the eyes of a main character, that's where we have the thoughts and feelings that are going on, in the story, that touches on the heart, that's kind of the passionate view in the story.

Then we have a view from the outside, more like a general on a hill, who's watching the story take place, is concerned with the outcome but looking at it more analytically, the objective view or dispassionate view, and it's the dissonance between those two views, the experience of not knowing the future and struggling as a soldier in the trenches, and the view of the overview, from the general who's seeing it all happen and getting a more analytical picture, that's what creates the dramatic tension in the audience.

Now, in Jurassic Park, they really only have one of those lines drawn, they have the objective, analytical view, which is unfortunate because the thrill of seeing dinosaurs alive and having that mean something to us from a subjective view, would be so wonderful to experience, but we're not provided that.

The problem of the story, order and chaos, in Jurassic Park should have also been the problem of Dr Alan Grant. His problem should be that he saw the kids, in the story, as being chaos in his orderly life and he should have seen that, that looking - his point of view should have been that looking at the,the dead fossils was a very orderly thing, looking at the live dinosaurs was very chaotic. His message to He... shouldn't have been - oh yeah, I subscribe to chaos theory and you can't keep things closed, his message should have been - yes, we can't allow chaos into our lives, you're right to put up fences, but up three of them. It would have taken a whole different turn if he had still believed in his heart that chaos could be overcome, as he tried to overcome with children, and to avoid that in his life.

Later in the story, in Jurassic Park, when things start going bad, he has the opportunity to put up the few fences that are down, with the computer, and if he had chosen instead to say - no, put them down, put them all down, let chaos reign, at that point that's when the tyrannosaurus should have been released from its pen, that's when it should be able to come back at the end and save them from the raptors. It's because he made the proper choice to change his view, and the reason he did was because he saw that the chaos the kids brought to his life in the wild, when he was lost, is what saved them all, it allowed him to grow as a human being, to realise that chaos has a place in any balanced equilibrium, and to allow it to reign free at the end. Then the whole objective story about chaos in Jurassic Park, which is dispassionate, is complemented by the passionate view of what chaos means to the individual and we have this wonderful dissonance between the two that creates a movie like ET that everyone is going to see and feel so good about.

Now Jurassic Park has gone over the top of the chart, even beating out ET, for the all time No.1 moneymaker of movies of all time. That's why, when we say Dramatica will - you write a story form that is absolutely airtight to your intent, it doesn't guarantee financial success, that still comes down to the story telling and, in Jurassic Park, the story telling was quite wonderful.

Q: We've talked about Dramatica in terms of writing a story, we haven't kind of specifically related it to movies other than by talking about movies. Is it story specific or is it film specific - I mean would a novelist be able to use Dramatica?

A: Dramatica's not a theory of screenplay, Dramatica's a theory of story. As such you can use it for any means of communication that you have in mind, whether you're even writing a short subject in an essay, you would know which points you would want to touch on to make a complete argument in your essay. You can use it for a novel, the short story, or,or any other form that you would want to apply it to.

The reason we're focusing on motion pictures is because screenplays...that put hundreds of thousands of dollars into research and development on this over the last 3_ years, they are a company that came into being to provide software to the entertainment industry, motion pictures specifically, and so that's the initial incarnation. There'll be other versions coming up that cater to specific other areas of writing, but this first version can work for all of them as well.

A: There's a reason Dramatica is on a computer instead of just in a book. We do have a book under way at the moment and it will be released about the same time as the program. Certain essential concepts, for example that a main character doesn't have to be a protagonist, when you look at a story like To Kill a Mockingbird and you see that the protagonist is Atticus but the main character is Scout and you realise you're looking at the story through her eyes, you begin to see that there is the objective and subjective view.

Now this concept - anyone can grasp and use immediately and you could get that out of a book, but when you have to keep track of the holographic dissonance of fractel and frictel levels that are dealing in what creates an appreciation of,of them and plot and the order of events that have to take place in order to create the proper dramatic tensions you're looking for, that sort of thing is way beyond what one can calculate in their own mind and requires the model and the computer to bring it all together in a way that's simplified and easy to use.

Q: The first question is ... ...

A: In order to illustrate something of what the Dramatica program does, I've loaded up Star Wars into Dramatica, something we're all familiar with.

Normally an author would go through a series of questions called the Dramatica query system, that would guide them into what they intended to do and help them make selections but since we've already loaded Star Wars, I'm going to go directly to the heart of the matter, the control panel that directly controls the Dramatica engine.

In this control panel, there are only 12 essential questions that have to be answered. There are four questions that deal with the subjective view of the story through the eyes of the main character, four questions that deal with the objective view of the story, more the God's eye view, or the author's view, or the general on the hill watching the events, and four questions that describe the relationship between the subjective and objective views. That's what creates the dissonance that makes the dramatic tension that an audience is going to feel.

Now 12 questions may seem like not an awful lot, in order to create an entire story form, but when you think about the fact that DNA has only four bases and out of that all forms of life that ever have existed or will exist can be created, then you begin to realise the magnitude of what you can create out of only 12 essential questions.

Once we have run the story engine, which has twisted and turned that- that Rubik's cube of all the structure and dynamics and relationships, we're able to access that information to begin forming our story, and one of the interesting ways that we can get the Dramatica output, out of the many available, is by building characters, and when we go to the build characters window, we've already included icons representing the Star Wars characters. We have Luke and OB1 and Leah and all the -the other primary characters that are,are involved in the story.

Now Dramatica sees characters not as just being independent people running around doing a bunch of different things. Dramatica sees characters as representing points of view of the story mind. As such each point of view in a story mind needs to be represented by a character so there isn't a plot hole or an inconsistent character point of view.

A: As we begin to build our characters, we find that Star Wars is very archetypal in the way it builds its characters. For example, Princess Leah is the character representing logic and therefore she's the one who looks at things intellectually and tries to reason them out. She also has a trait of being control and, as the control character, she is rather a cool character because of her logic and her controlled or calm approach.

Whereas, when we look down to ¿Chubaka, Chubaka is her dynamic opposite, in Star wars. Chubaka is feeling to Leah's logic and, as such, Chubaka is always dealing with his emotions, and Chubaka is also very uncontrolled in so far as that he always loses his temper. When he has the handcuffs put on him he loses control, when they're down in the garbage dump he loses control. The two of them are these dynamic pairs that create two archetypes. The Leah character we call reason, the Chubaka character we call emotion.

Now there are many other combinations that can be put together with characters to make them more interesting, it's just that Star Wars happens to use these archetypal arrangements.

For example, in Wizard of Oz, you look at Leah's character of logic and controlled. Well part of that is shared by the Scarecrow, the Scarecrow is logic but the Scarecrow takes uncontrolled, that Chubaka had in Star Wars. As a result, the Scarecrow has all the plans but he's all over the place, falling all over his feet, in Wizard of Oz.

A: OK.

Now dealing with,with characters in this manner is a way of deciding how they are going to react and in what scenes they need to appear to represent their point of view at the proper point in the story's argument. But that's only one portion of what Dramatica offers. Once we move out of the billed character areas, we have several views that give output to the author from which they can write, and one of these is the outline view.

As we bring up the outline view -- which will take a moment here --- the outline view gives us an output in conversational English of all of the major story appreciations of the dramatics, so that you're able to read through and say the main character of this story if Luke, Luke believes that his personal problem is due to continuing and imagines ending to be the solution. Well what does that mean - continuing and,and ending?

Well, Luke sees that he's stuck on this planet, he's never going to get off there -- I'm never going to get out there and fight with the rebellion -- and he sees ending his association there of,of moving on to something else and getting beyond that planet as the - as the solution.

That was really bad!

A: OK.

Once we're out of the billed characters area, we can move to other areas, like an outline form or like this story points window that shows over 100 different dramatic appreciations an author ought to know are in his story and know how to relate them. But all these things need to be done before you actually begin to write your story - you need to have a sense of what you're trying to say in order to communicate something, otherwise you can't communicate what you haven't figured out yourself.

A: One of the first things we can bring up, after we have primed the story engine, is the billed characters window, and we can see that these characteristics need to be represented by the different characters in the story. In Star Wars we can see a lot of archetypes were built by putting these different -------God - let me take that one over --------

A: Once we've primed the story engine, we can bring up a number of differing outputs that help the author write their story. One of the most interesting is the billed characters window where we can actually see the character traits that have to be represented by the characters in the story to make the full argument. Here, in Star Wars, we can see that Leah represents logic and also represents controlled, making her an archetype we call reason.

Chubaka, on the other hand, represents feeling and represents uncontrolled and, as a result, is her dynamic peer, a character we call the emotion archetype.

A: Ok. Normally ---------

Normally we would have an author go through something called the dramatica query system that would allow them to be led through a number of questions to help them find their intent. In this case however we've loaded up Star Wars, something we're all familiar with, so we can go directly to the control panel at the heart of the story engine.

Here we see there are 12 essential questions - four questions that deal with the subjective view of the main character in the story, the passionate view; four questions that deal with the objective view of the story, the dispassionate view, the view from the general on the hill; and four questions that describe the dissonance between them that creates the dramatic tension in the audience.

Now 12 questions may not seem like a lot but when you consider that DNA has only four bases and will create all the life that ever existed or ever will exist, (DIRECTIONS) 12 is an awful lot.

A: ---see that disappears. OK, now we come back up to characters --

A: OK. Then we have characters like Leah here ----

A: In Star Wars we can see that Leah is a character representing logic because she tries to --

A: In Star Wars we can see that the characters are very archetypal. For example, Princess Leah represents logic because she goes about things in a very intellectual way and she also represents control because she does it calmly as well, and we call this archetype the reason character.

Then her diam...opposite ---

A: ---Chubaka - Chubaka - oh, bring it up to the top? I'm sorry ----

A: Leah's dynamic opposite is Chubaka, who represents feeling to her logic and also represents uncontrolled to her controlled approach. That makes Chubaka the archetypical character we call the emotion character. Between the two of them, we can see that Star Wars has a very archetypal make up but these characters can be made much more interesting by just rearranging things a little.

For example, if we look at the feeling characteristic and we look at the uncontrolled characteristics that are in Chubaka, let's look at Star Wars. We see Star Wars has the feeling characteristic as the Tin Man but the Tin Man is very controlled --

A: OK. Once you've answered the 12 essential questions and you have primed the dramatic engine, the engine comes to life and gives an output. The output is seen in the story points window here.

Story points has many different ways to look at the dramatic items you need to discuss in your story to make your point, some high level appreciations and dynamics, the objective story line, the subjective story line, the main characters through line and the obstacle characters through line. Each one of these points is an essential dramatic focus that you have to be aware of and communicate to your audience not to have any holes in your story.