The bathtub story graph has ten sections in classical sequence. Jasper Claus's masterclass acknowledges the practical reality: for most of the stories you create, you won't actually be able to precisely follow the classical story buildup. Especially not if you're having to tell your story in under four to five minutes. And for sure not if you have to tell your story through multiple story lines, such as with the insurance company film. But the good news is that storytelling also works if you mix it up, change the order, and even leave certain parts out.1
The principle: the bathtub-graph is a template you construct the full story against — and then a script you compose by drawing from that full story selectively. The full bathtub-shape supplies the structural integrity; the remix supplies the runtime-and-format adaptation.
The remixing-discipline has three components.
1. You construct the full bathtub-shape first. Even if the final film will not include every section, you construct the full shape. The status-quo, the inciting-incident, the action, the three-level struggle, the dark-night-of-the-soul, the helping-hand, the transformation, the second-decision, the victory, the resolution. All of it. The full shape is the source material the remix draws from.
2. You then construct the remix. The remix may use flashbacks (the story actually starts at a later point and reveals earlier content through flashback), flash-forwards (the story shows an outcome and then reveals the path to it), or omissions (certain sections are not shown but are implied or assumed).
3. The remix preserves the bathtub's structural integrity even when it changes the sequence. The audience needs to absorb the equivalent of the full bathtub-shape even if the remix delivers the content in a different order. Remixes that fail to deliver the full bathtub-equivalent produce films that feel structurally incomplete.
30 Harvests film (flashback remix): The actual film starts roughly at the dark-night-of-the-soul. The whole central narrative, the voiceover in this case, actually almost completely takes place in that very interesting dark knight of the soul. The previous sections (status-quo, inciting-incident, action, struggle) are revealed through the protagonist's interior monologue rather than shown as scenes. The film effectively starts at the bottom of the bathtub and reconstructs the path that got the protagonist there.
The remix produces a specific affective consequence — the audience is with the protagonist in their dark-night from the opening, which produces deeper identification than a linear-sequence construction would have. The film's emotional impact is partly the result of this specific remix choice.
Aegon insurance film (multi-storyline remix): The film follows multiple protagonists simultaneously. No single protagonist gets the full bathtub-shape; each gets fragments. The fragments collectively assemble into the bathtub-shape across the audience's experience of the film. The multi-storyline structure is a remix that operates by distributing the bathtub-sections across multiple characters rather than across a single character's arc.
Claus's specific guidance: the important thing to keep in mind is that you start out by creating the whole story along the lines of the story graph and then you draw from that to make your remix, leaving out whatever you feel you can and creating your own creative balance.
The discipline is two-step:
Skipping step 1 — going straight to the remix without first constructing the full shape — produces films that feel structurally incomplete because they were never structurally complete at the source level.
The remixing-discipline is the flexibility-permission within the bathtub-graph. It permits the bathtub-shape to operate within varied runtimes, formats, and multi-storyline structures.
It connects to the True Storytelling Method — the method's discipline allows for remixed-story-construction within the four-box framework. The story-box can contain a remixed bathtub-shape rather than a linear bathtub-shape.
It has an oral-storytelling parallel in Dicks's BABC model — both Claus and Dicks endorse non-linear story-construction (BABC literally means start at B, not at A). The two frameworks converge on the principle that linear-only construction is unnecessarily restrictive.
Construct the full bathtub-shape first. Then ask: given my runtime, format, and audience, which sections can I show as scenes, which as voiceover, which as visual-implication, which to omit? Build the remix from the answer. Verify the remix preserves the structural integrity of the original bathtub-shape (audience absorbs the equivalent content even if not in original sequence).
Your film feels structurally incomplete. You went directly to remix without constructing the full bathtub. The fix is to retroactively construct the full bathtub and re-derive the remix from it.
Your remixed sections don't add up to the full bathtub experience. Some sections are missing from the audience's experience entirely (not shown, not implied, not voiced-over). The fix is to add the missing-section content somewhere in the remix.
The principle is fundamentally about the relationship between source-narrative and delivered-narrative in narrative-construction — the discipline of building the complete source first and then composing a remixed delivered-version from it. Several other domains have analogous practices that supply both depth and refined methodology for the corporate-storyteller's adaptation.
Editing tradition / film and television editing: Film and television editing operates the same source-and-delivered-narrative distinction at substantial scale. Editors construct a master cut (sometimes called the assembly cut) that contains all the shot material in narrative order, then progressively reduce and reorder to produce the theatrical cut (the final delivered-version). The discipline of constructing the master before composing the final is well-established across decades of film-editing practice. Pairing editing-tradition with corporate-storyteller-craft: editing supplies refined operational practices (the assembly-cut protocols, the iterative-reduction methodologies, the structural-coverage-verification practices) that storyteller-craft can borrow directly. The two fields are operating the same underlying discipline; editing has refined it across far more iterations than corporate-storytelling has, supplying the longer-experience side of the practice. Storytellers who study editor-tradition gain operational sophistication beyond what corporate-storytelling literature articulates.
Jazz performance / chart-and-improvisation tradition: Jazz performers operate the construct-and-remix discipline at the bar level rather than the scene level. The chord-chart is the source (the harmonic structure the performer commits to before performance); the actually-played performance is the remix (the improvisational deployment of melodic and rhythmic material against the chord-chart structure). The discipline of knowing the full chart before improvising is foundational — improvisation without chart-knowledge produces structurally-incoherent music that audiences experience as random rather than as creative. Pairing jazz-tradition with corporate-storyteller-craft: jazz supplies the moment-to-moment improvisational practices that storyteller-craft can borrow for live oral-storytelling contexts; storyteller-craft supplies the longer-runtime structural-remix application that jazz tradition does not address. The two fields are operating the same source-and-remix principle at very different time-scales — jazz at the bar-level, storytelling at the scene-and-act-level — but the underlying cognitive economics are identical.
Architecture / design-versus-built distinction: Architecture distinguishes between the full design (the architect's complete vision documented in plans, renderings, and specifications) and the built structure (what actually gets constructed given budget, regulatory, site, and constructibility constraints). The discipline of designing the full vision before negotiating the constraints is foundational to architectural practice — designing only what can be built directly without imagining the full vision produces buildings that lack the coherent design-intent the full-design discipline supplies. Pairing architectural design-and-build practices with storyteller-craft: architecture has formalized the design-protection practices (specification documents that constrain construction-stage compromises) that storyteller-craft could productively borrow for client-engagement work. Storytellers can develop story-specification documents that lock the full bathtub-shape before remix-negotiation begins, paralleling the architectural design-document discipline that protects design-intent through construction.
The Sharpest Implication The remixing-discipline implies that structural-integrity and runtime-flexibility are not in tension — both can be achieved through the discipline of constructing the full source first and remixing the delivered version second. Storytellers who treat runtime-constraints as forcing them to skip the source-construction produce structurally weaker films than storytellers who construct the source and then remix.
Generative Questions