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Living in Hollywood, there is one particular phrase that I dread hearing more than drunk sorority girls at a karaoke bar: “I’m working on a screenplay.” For years — no, decades — I clucked around Los Angeles smug as hell that I could avoid that ultimate Hollywood cliché because nothing I did as a photographer had anything to do with screenwriting.

Even shooting stills on movie sets, I didn’t really need to know the story. I just had to take good pictures and stay out of the way. But with video squeezing it’s way into photography more and more, photographers no longer have the luxury of ignoring story structure.

For a while now, the novelty of photographers shooting video has allowed us to get by with beautifully shot vignettes like Vincent Laforet’s Reverie or Alexx Henry’s fabulous living one sheets. But as video evolves in the photography industry, more is going to be expected from us. I strongly suggest you educate yourself now so you’ll be ahead of the curve when your clients ask you for video later. (Mr. Laforet saw this coming and is now producing a motion picture shot with the Canon 5D Mark II.)

Furthermore, understanding narrative can be an important skill for any photographer, even those not rushing off to film their first 5D movie. There is a skewed presumption out there that screen writing is easy. It’s not. It just seems easy because the three-act structure of a film is easy to grasp. But as with everything that is magical to watch, the genius is in the subtleties.

Blake Snyder is the author of Save The Cat, a short, brilliant book on screen writing. I recommend that every photographer read it because it explains what it takes to write a movie in an entertaining way.

Movies, long or short, are about organizing sequences of scenes and the beats within those scenes. Mr. Snyder does an extraordinary job of explaining these elements and training you to recognize them. You’ll never watch a movie the same way again. More importantly, as you watch movies, you’ll start to recognize the acts and scenes they comprise and undoubtedly will be excited to use them in your own storytelling.

Save the Cat will also arm you with an overview of how films are written and give you a basic foundation for your own work. Even a short three-minute vignette has to start somewhere and finish somewhere else. Even if you don’t have dialog, you need a story to hold the viewer’s attention. I based my first commercial on this premise, thanks to the advice of my screenwriter friends. I am eternally grateful for their advice. It changed the way I look at everything visual.

In a bizarre twist, now that digital photography seems to have allowed everyone and their golden retriever to call themselves a photographer, these new elements of narrative and motion will mostly likely create the new divide between the wannabe and pro photographers. I’ve coined a word for this new age of photography including video: Photocine. I’m not sure if I like it yet, but at least it marks a new way of thinking about what we’ll be doing.

P.S. LA publicist Lizzy Shaw, a former Disney TV executive I met during my brief tenure as a script reader for a production company in 1990, is the person who put me on to her dear friend Blake Snyder three years ago. I spoke to her yesterday and she told me that Mr. Snyder, only 51, passed away unexpectedly at the beginning of August. He is heralded in Hollywood as a great writer and an extraordinary educator. He will be missed.