Last summer during the three-week Pixar@CCA lecture sessions, hosted by Jo Rivers, I did everything possible to ensure that I was part of next year's selected students. I attended all of the nightly talks, took notes, asked questions, and focused on taking all the steps to ensure that I would be able to participate come this summer. What stands out most from those night's was the theme of crafting a great film relies on a great story.

So what is a great story? According to John Lasseter, there are three key components to a great film.

1. Tell a compelling story
2. Populate the story with memorable and appealing characters
3. Create a believable world for the story and characters to live within
With these golden rules in mind, I began to look at how to take my personal experiences, ideas, and love of narrative and craft an epic of my own. It also doesn't hurt to let technology (Youtube) bring you into lecture halls from all around the world, and open doors to knowledge that use to be available to those with means of mobility. Here are some of the videos that helped me with structuring this project over the past year.

Uploaded by Edmond Dantes on 2014-10-31.

Academy Award winner John Lasseter, the chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios and principal creative advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering, at the Academy event "The New Audience: Moviegoing in a Connected World."

Pete Docter, the visionary director of Pixar's Up, Monsters, Inc. and Inside Out, joined host Richard Crouse in March for this onstage discussion of his extraordinary career in animation and screenwriting. March 23, 2015 TIFF Bell Lightbox tiff.net/specialevents"

Uploaded by I AM (david long) on 2015-08-06.

http://www.ted.com Filmmaker Andrew Stanton ("Toy Story," "WALL-E") shares what he knows about storytelling -- starting at the end and working back to the beginning. (Contains graphic language ...) TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.

Pixar's John Lasseter other key figures responsible for Pixar's moviemaking magic discuss their work at the 2011 D23 Expo. This is the full video of the presentation given on August 20, 2011.

Pauline Kael is the guest on this episode of the Writer's Workshop, filmed at the University of South Carolina on Feb. 11, 1982, and broadcast on PBS. Kael discusses writing with Benjamin Dunlop, William Price Fox, and Fox's and James Dickey's writing class (Dickey is not present).

The Charlie Rose Show (21 December 2012) Quentin Tarantino, the most distinctive writer-director in Hollywood these days, turns 50 years old today. He grew up in L.A. and worked as a teen behind the counter at a video store, where he devoured everything he could learn about the cinema.

Shot in Los Angeles, January 2010

Rollo May~A forerunner in Existential Psychology explains our cultures detrimental materialistic orientation on our heart&minds.

An unedited interview with the late, great Nora Ephron on the subject of creativity in Hollywood -- shot in 2005 for the documentary DREAMS ON SPEC.

Corey Brunish interviews John Hughes about his movies

At this year's Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conference, we had the chance to catch up with Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios President Ed Catmull. Hear what he had to say about the company that makes everyone's favorite movies here.

In the next post on the Story, I'll share a few my ideas that have made their way into the screenplay.