The Contour Guide Overview
Sometimes it’s easier to think of your story in bigger moments and then work your way down into the nitty-gritty. Contour knows this and provides the Guide as an alternate way of looking at your story.
Not to be confused with the 44 plot points of Contour, the Guide is a series of 12 sequential text boxes, each with it’s own clever (we hope!) title. These titles are actually defining statements that represent what the general tone of your script should be as your story unfolds.
Even though each text box is linked to a specific plot point in the main part of Contour, each text box actually represents a range of pages (1-6, 6-12, etc.)
The Guide works as either something you can fill in to broadstroke your story, or something you refer to as you fill in the plot points in Contour to make sure the tone of the plot points matches the general information in the Guide. Of course, you can flip back and forth between the Guide and the plot points. The Guide is designed to be both another tool to jar your story ideas loose and get them on paper as well as an easy way to shorthand the major moments of your story.
If you have the full scope of the story in mind, we highly recommend using the Guide first. By filling in the 12 text boxes of the Guide and then jumping back to the plot points of Contour, you’ll find that you’ll have literally 25% of your plot points finished before you even get started!
