Peacock

A story circle into the creative unknown

Feb 12, 2021

The more I looked at the following photoshoot to write something about the creative experience, the more I saw similarities for Dan Harmon’s Story Circle.

The Story Circle is a Joseph Campbellesqe structure for telling a narrative about personal change. A similar structure can be found throughout tales like the Odyssey, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars.

It’s similar in structure but Harmon breaks it down into 8 segments based around the main protagonist in a singular story.

A character is in a zone of comfort, but they want something. They enter an unfamiliar situation, adapt to it, get what they wanted, pay a heavy price for it, then return to their familiar situation having changed.

Broken into its 8 elements it looks like the following.

A character is in a zone of comfort,
But they want something.
They enter an unfamiliar situation,
Adapt to it,
Get what they wanted,
Pay a heavy price for it,
Then return to their familiar situation,
Having changed.

What I find particularly interesting to me with this shoot is how much her emotions in the images reflected my own thoughts as I was on my own journey. I’ve been in search of a particular color palate and style creatively for a while that relied on a different use of lights and dilation of time.

So let’s break down this shoot with the story circle. I’m going to pick an image that I feel represents my own creative journey for each step as we go from day into night, down the rabbit hole, and into the unknown.

1- character is in a zone of comfort

We started this day with an intent to shoot something surreal outdoors and discover both what would happen during the day and at night. Our sights were set on a hypothetical, what if Miley Cyrus decided to show up to this little backyard in Florida?

Taking myself as the main protagonist. This is my place of comfort.

Test shot dialed in, batteries charged, camera ready.

2- but they want something

By this point I knew a journey was about to unfold and I had a want to get something dynamic, alive, experimental, surreal, magical, and personal.

I’ve felt recently that my photos weren’t capturing enough of myself in them. Yes, I was capturing the person in the shoot and framing it through my vantage point with the camera, but me as myself felt removed in the images.

I wanted an image that when you looked at it you would feel a sense of connection to the person behind the camera. This image that I shot at the time ended up giving me a good frame of reference to where I was, but left me with a want of where I wanted to go.

3- they enter an unfamiliar situation

I’ve been using lots of dynamic colors and lights in my photos recently to create a specific energy and environment around the shoot itself. However, this time I didn’t want to drag out yards of extension coords into the yard to get the emotional effect I was looking for.

The sun was setting and I had to rely on what I had already set up to tell a story of what was taking place.

I’ve only been using off camera flashes for a few months now so my shutter speed has stayed relatively quick to get a clear image, but out in the back yard it was muting the outside world.

I realized how much my previous ways of setting up the camera were limiting the outside world from coming in. I had to start thinking about leaving the shutter open longer to allow more of the backyard into the scene.

4- adapt to it

This adaptation of letting the shutter stay open longer started to create a doorway of mysticism to enter the frame.

I could feel a new challenge starting to unfold. A new way to see the outside world and how my camera would capture it.

The sun was starting to go down further and I decided to bring around the propane fire pit to keep us warm knowing that we wanted to shoot more photos outside after it got dark.

Before we headed inside we shot a few more photos with a longer shutter speed to capture the motion of the fire agains the sunset.

My safety net in a new photographic setting is to start shooting the style I want to achieve in black and white first before shooting in color. Seeing the world through the viewfinder in monochrome helps me to identify what story I would want to tell with this look and feel before adding the variety of color to it.

5- get what they wanted

Now the sun had set and we went back outside to shoot more photos in the backyard.

This was jumping back into the unknown, unsure of what would happen.

The first few images were too dark, but taking what I learned earlier, I started leaving the shutter open rather than bumping up the ISO. With the shutter staying open for 1/4 of a second the lone external flash would pop as a last breath before the image was captured.

What I was seeing on the screen as the resulting images were what I was looking for. The motion, color, and mysticism I was chasing.

6- pay a heavy price for it

At this point I was pretty impressed with myself.

I found a new technical setting that could create an image that I hadn’t seen before, but what I started to immediately realize was that I was in a loss of control of what the image would look like.

With the shutter now pushed to stay open for a whole second, I couldn’t easily convey motion or direction throughout the shoot. I had to trust that the actions she was performing in front of the lens would be a match pair for the motion I had on the other side of it.

I found a new ability, but it was now completely tied to the motion of everyone in this tiny photographic bubble.

7- they return to their familiar situation

At this time I was excited with the images I was getting but I could feel that this creative exploration was starting to wind down energetically.

I was glad that I stumbled across this new way of capturing images by blending different types of slow and fast light sources with a longer shutter, but I was also feeling slightly worrisome of the unknown elements.

I stumbled into this lighting setup and I was unsure if I would be able to reproduce it again in the future, unsure what types of potentials it could have for creative ideas, and unsure if the images would still look compelling the next day editing them on a laptop.

I had no choice at the end of this long photoshoot but to shift my mind to gratitude for the experience. With that I mind I just started walking around the yard to shoot a couple more photos before we headed inside.

Where I was moments ago worried about the inability to direct action, I now decided to embrace it and throw some more intuition into the mix.

What I got were images that told a story, a story created through a series of completely random events.

8- having changed

I had to laugh a little bit.

Here I was, an artist that typically talks about following your own intuition creatively and I was feeling boxed in when a new technique required more of my intuition rather than less of it.

This image here, is a look that I had on my mind for YEARS unsure of how I would get this type of energy surrounding it.

What it took for me to find this new creative style was a story circle into the creative unknown, my own Rick and Morty adventure in a Florida backyard.

Next time you’re wanting to push yourself creatively, set up a new situation and ask yourself how you would act if you were the main protagonist of your own story?