Why stories matters
Updated: Jan 12
Why We Really Wanna “Make the Day”
As a First Assistant Director, my professional life is defined by structure. The stripboard. The call sheet. The DOOD. The time and its endless battle against the setting sun.
We AD's are the keepers of logistics, trained to spot a potential overtime disaster three hours before it happens. In the storm of production, it's easy to become overly pragmatic. The script stops being art and turns into a list of potential problems to solve: How many extras? Do we have the permit for the crane? Is the pyro safe? Will there be enough time for XYZ? And most times, that mindset is necessary. It's how the machine keeps moving. But sometimes I can get lost in the pressure of finishing the day, getting all scenes in the can. That's the moment when I have to remind myself why I'm standing on set. It's not because I like to push people to hurry up - but because I want to be part of evoking deep emotions in the audience and maintain one of the oldest and most critical infrastructures of human society: storytelling.
The Original Campfire
Why does story matter?
Because we were telling stories long before we were making schedules. Long before borders, books or even written language, humans gathered around campfires, sharing stories of hunts and losses, of dangers survived, of forces they couldn't yet explain. Stories passed knowledge from one generation to the next. They encoded values, boundaries and warnings to ultimately shape society. They helped us understand the world we were living in and how to live in it.
This is the lineage we step into every time we walk onto a set.
We are the modern keepers of the fire.
A Reflection, Not a Replica
Storytelling is not reality. It is a curated reflection of reality — personal and societal at once.
Life is chaotic, random, and often devoid of easy answers. Stories provide us with the necessary structure and distance to approach emotions and ideas safely. With the full spectrum of grief, love, fear or pure joy they entertain us, challenge us and let us think about our own view on the world and the people in it.
As screenwriting lecturer John Truby puts it, story genres function as philosophically distinct life systems. Each one offers a different lens on existence:
Action stories explore survival and will.
Horror confronts the unknown and mortality.
Drama navigates relationships, power, and social order.
Sci-Fi reflects our growth as society.
These narratives become rehearsal spaces — places where audiences test values, boundaries and consequences without personal cost. Stories don't simplify life. They make it legible.
Empathy Over Accuracy
Storytelling is not about accuracy. It is about empathy.
A news report can tell you what happened and where. It can give numbers, timelines, statistics. But only a story can collapse distance. Only a story can turn them into us.
As ADs, we live in hard data: page counts, hours, meal penalties, turnarounds. But the thing we are protecting is intangible. Emotional. Fragile. When we fight for the integrity of a scene, we're not fighting for perfection, we're fighting for the connection between the audience and the emotion of the moment.
Accuracy informs.
Empathy transforms.
And transformation is what moves us forward as human beings.
When Stories Shift Reality
At their most powerful, stories don't just reflect society, they redirect it.
In 1983, the television film The Day After aired, depicting a nuclear exchange in harrowing detail. It became a shared national nightmare. Not because it was subtle, but because it was specific. Viewers didn't imagine abstract destruction; they imagined themselves inside it. The film entered the collective consciousness at a formative moment, crystallising fears that statistics and political rhetoric never fully could. Even President Reagan later acknowledged its impact on his thinking. The production didn't prevent nuclear war on its own but it changed the emotional landscape in which decisions were made.
Decades later, Marvels Black Panther created a different kind of shift. Wakanda wasn't just a fictional nation; it was a new mythology. A vision of technological advancement, cultural pride, and self-determination rarely afforded that scale or seriousness. The movie resonated so deeply because it placed a community rarely centered in Hollywood at the heart of a powerful, affirming narrative and strengthening identity by replacing inherited stereotypes with visibility, pride, and possibility. And it gave a whole generation of young black people a hero of their own.
In both cases, crews didn’t just “make content.”
They shaped imagination.
The 1st AD and the Story
The director is often seen as the keeper of meaning — the person translating the script into images and performances. That's true. And the 1st AD serves the same goal from a practical position. Our job is to protect the conditions that allow the story to work.
If the schedule collapses, the budget spirals, or safety is compromised, the story suffers. Scenes lose focus, performances get rushed, and decisions are made out of necessity rather than intention. The quality of the storytelling is directly tied to how well the production is run. When you adjust the schedule to give an actor the time to reach an important emotional beat, you are protecting empathy. When you run a complex background scene efficiently, you make the world of the story feel real and coherent.
We manage logistics so the audience can feel something real.
That is why we make the day.
With this said, ready when you are.