Sometimes a film needs a creative jam in post. So this week, we got the whole team on a call to work through two films that are edited and waiting on final production blocks.

To give a bit of insight into our process, I wanted to share a few thoughts we had.

At this point in the process, it’s all about going through the structure of a film we're deep into. We know we have a great character. The stakes are there. But on this one, the middle just sits there.

Not bad. Just a bit flat. Seven minutes of someone telling us things happened to them, and yet we haven’t flipped the switch to where it feels like those things are happening to us.

So here comes a challenge we’ve been butting up against more and more. How do we tell better stories while making our clients feel great?

We've been using Story Frameworks for like a decade, and they serve us extremely well. They give clients confidence. They give us a shared language. Conflict here, journey there, resolution at the end.

The problem we’ve been finding, though, is that by simplifying within a repeatable framework, when every story bends toward the same shape, we've started to feel like our films are getting too predictable.

And a brain that knows where something is going stops paying attention.

So we've been pulling on this thread. Not scrapping frameworks. Just asking whether we're structuring around the right thing and challenging ourselves to push out story research further.

That's when we found a great idea from Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut didn't outline plots. He mapped how the character feels. A vertical axis from misfortune to good fortune. A horizontal axis from beginning to end. Then, one line tracks the character's emotional state throughout the story. That's it. No scene descriptions. No shot lists. Just the shape of the feeling.

We haven't adopted this as a formal practice. We're playing with it. But even holding it up loosely against the films we're working on right now, it started explaining things we'd been sensing but couldn't name.

The middle of our film isn't flat because the wrong things happen. It's flat because our character's emotional state doesn't move. She talks about hard things. She talks about losing things. But the feeling stays at the same altitude the whole way through. And if the feeling isn't moving, the audience’s isn't either.

Here's what's interesting about this for anyone making brand films. Most of the tools we use in pre-production map what happens. Scene breakdowns. Storyboards. Frameworks with plot points. Very few map how the character feels when those things happen. And that gap might be where the flatness lives.

Think about any film that's held you all the way to the end. Somewhere in the middle, the character's emotional state dipped below its starting point. They thought they had the thing, but they lost it. That dip is what pulls you forward. You lean in because you feel the cost. Without it, the resolution doesn't land because it was never really at risk.

This was a great reminder of the importance of play.

Could this become something we use more often? Maybe. No idea, honestly. But thinking it through helped us address a narrative problem we had, and that solution will make the film stronger.

If your films are technically well-structured but something still feels off, try drawing that line. It might show you what your storyboard wasn’t.