Storytelling in Flash assignment

Firstly, I want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I wrote this post in the cool atmosphere so it feels quite good and suitable for a Christmas day.
Now I want to talk about Flash and the way to create a story in Flash. As you know, the next and the last assignment of DIM2 is a Flash Project. In this assignment, we need not only the Flash skills but also the techniques of creating a story for our Flash. This story must be funny, interesting, logic, non-linear and interactive.
Here are some hints and tips which I have got and I want to show you as a help:
- The first thing is that you must have a main character. The number of side-kicks or secondary characters is up to you but not so much, the best number is 2. This main character must have a situation which can introduce his biography and the following actions must be fitted to it. For instance, a fierce man will probaly have actions of beating animals or somethings like that.
- We also need a theme like film genre. It is easy but you must be sure that all details in your story will focus on this theme.
- As we have learned in class, there are many stages in a story, but for a short story, we sometimes need only 3 stages:

• Begginning: all characters are introduced and the conflicts are created.
• Middle: conflicts go to the peak and character must give his decision.
• End: conflicts are solved and the end is up to you.

- Do not insert so much details in a short story. You should put only most neccessary ones into your story.

- The lines and words of your characters should be clear or you can write them down like subtitle to help viewers to follow your story.

- About the non-linear structure, I am sure that you have learned so much so I won't repeat. However, you must be careful when creating non-linear story which is actually a multi-linear story. For Example, you start from a point, then there are there lines coming from this point but each line only follows a certain and straightforward story line, it is so boring. I just want to introduce you a common structure which some games and story have adopted:

This is called Braided. Although it is still a multi-linear but it is very useful and not boring. I think we can extend it into our story.

You can read more at http://www.shortstorygroup.com/storytips.htm and the article:
"Story Shapes for Digital Media"
Copyright 1996, 1998 Katherine Phelps