storytelling » geniwate.com

teaching by stealth

Issues in education Comments Off

Nov 232012

I delivered last semester’s course in a new way, combining gamified assessment, flipped lectures, and storytelling. Yes, I made the course content into a story. Above is 1 episode.

Why?

According to Peter Guber and Jonathan Gottschall

After a decade of gory stalemate at Troy, the ancient Greeks decided they would never take Troy by force, so they would take it by guile. They pretended to sail home, leaving behind a massive wooden horse, ostensibly as an offering to the gods. The happy Trojans dragged the gift inside the city walls. But the horse was full of Greek warriors, who emerged in the night to kill, burn, and rape.

Guber tells us that stories can also function as Trojan Horses. The audience accepts the story because, for a human, a good story always seems like a gift. But the story is actually just a delivery system for the teller’s agenda. A story is a trick for sneaking a message into the fortified citadel of the human mind.

via Why Storytelling Is The Ultimate Weapon.

I’m repurposing marketing talk to education – and it appeared to work. i’ve never had such a lively discussion about copyright and the internet in a class before, and it was stated by the students – after they read my stroy eps in which our heroes get into trouble for breaking copyright from the Ministry of Blogging.

My media isn’t perfect – or ever, in a lot of cases, finished – but that didn’t appear to matter. Although a lot of the narrative was just text, the students engaged with it.

I don’t usually stick marketing in my blog, but here’s a really cute marketing vid for Tell to Win by Peter Guber

matching genre to medium

Contemporary Media Work Practices, This working life Comments Off

Nov 212012

Never before has this problematic been one deserving so much attention. In the days of heritage media, it was usually pretty easy to determine how to match the type of story with a medium – standalone ninety-minute narrative to cinematic film; poem to magazine; essay to journal article; long-form textual narrative to printed book. And if you couldn’t match it, you changed your concept or got nowhere.

Nowadays it’s verging on possible to create your medium if it doesn’t already exist – but most likely it does. You’ve just got to think laterally.A good example of the lateral matching of genre with technology is diaristic writing to twitter and blog is Samuel Pepys’ diary in blog and twitter form, ‘translated’ by Phil Gyford.

Which comes first, medium or text? I think we have to co-evolve media and mediums. If we’re lucky, (ie, programmers / have programming friends / are well-heeled) we can write both. But even if not, it’s just a matter of researching the options, with more appearing each day. More and more, creatives involved with digital artefacts have to spend a lot of time on this research.

Cowbird, a story-telling community with no advertising

Networked Media, social media, web Comments Off

Sep 252012

I’ve been trying to imagine what a cowbird might actually look like, and after having failed, I realised just what metaphorical power this idea holds: two things that can’t be combined, and yet somehow must be: a flying cow; a ponderous, mooing bird. Like trying to combine image and text: its an art in which opposites must attract.
So over at cowbird.com, I just made my first Cowbird story called Threshold, which unfortunately I can’t embed in my blog.

Cowbird is a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web.
Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are themes and events that touch millions of lives and shape the human story.

Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance.

I’ve read quite a few heart-warming stories from real people about their real lives … I guess there’s a few complete fabrications among them all, but why bother? There is no advertising. That’s right. There is no incentive, I think (hope). That alone gives this space such a refreshing tone, may it long reign!

the indie audio community and storytelling strategies

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Sep 032012

In his interesting and broad-ranging post How the Indie Audio Community Is Transforming Storytelling, Jesse Shapins from metaLAB (at) Harvard, an experimental research unit at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, promotes the work of Indie audio producers, and suggests strategies they should use:

One of the things we’ve been talking about a lot at Zeega is how important sound is to high-quality immersive experiences online. Probably my favorite interactive documentary is “Welcome to Pine Point.” Made by The Goggles, a design duo formerly behind Adbusters, the visual design is certainly a major part of what makes the work so incredible. But it’s the sound which grabs you right from the beginning, with the buzz of the fly playing with the loading animation, and is sustained throughout with atmospheric music, archival audio and other simple, but highly evocative effects, such as slight rustling when we see wheat in the foreground.

Referring to Welcome to Pine Point and Bear 71, he observes:

Neither of these Canadian projects were made by people whose backgrounds were primarily in audio, but I think they illustrate the capacity for audio to be the backbone of rich, interactive experiences that could only be realized in an online environment. And I think these approaches are just the beginning of the potential for creative combinations of sound, story and interaction.

Jesse seems to be juggling 2 balls – design and audio. I think – hope – we’re still learning to integrate audio and visuals in online, hypertextual environments. I think we can do text and visuals well, and there’s a lot of wysiwyg software that can make that particular design challenge pretty easy. But if you divorce the audio from non-interactive video, it can be tricky. Too often, loops become boring; too often the in-your-face-track that sounded just right is annoying a minute later. And in Bear 71, although I love this moody, evocative work, I am confused by all the elements competing for my attention. OK, I can more or less sort it out, but sometimes the elements are too disjointed and the storytelling loses.

Another thing we’ve been talking a lot about at Zeega is the notion of “editing interactive” — in other words, submitting interface ideas to the same intense editorial process that a story would receive. This forces us to treat interfaces as forms of time-based media, imagining in great detail the sequence of a user’s experience. And it requires giving special attention to moments of transition (a classic editorial challenge), which in an interactive context can be addressed in many ways, such as through subtle animations from one click to the next or by atmospheric sound that persists through scenes.

I think we are slowly creeping towards an integrated concept of a media professional who is just as much designer as anything else. Although we can’t wear all the hats at once, we can, and should, at least develop a sympathy for the sister disciplines.

About distribution, Jesse encourages independent produces to look to a broadcast tie-in, for example in community TV.

A requirement for all of the Localore projects is that they’re to be developed in the context of a local public media station. I think this is brilliant and one more quality that sets the initiative apart from others internationally. The potential for this broadcast element is tremendous. It ensures a significant initial audience, enabling novel forms of participatory documentary.

Jesse is a defender of the auteur in the face of do-it-yourself social media:

One thing I’ve learned from the audio documentary community over the years is that good storytelling is very, very hard — in any medium.

Because radio can’t rely on images to carry a narrative or evoke a mood, radio storytellers tend to be some of the most exceptional at crafting poignant stories and refusing to let a single moment of potential boredom creep into a narrative. In my experience, This American Life and Radiolab are two of the most successful examples in any media form of tying quality reporting to captivating, surprising personal stories. And it’s no coincidence, in my mind, that The Moth is a part of the public radio ecosystem and not TV or film.

This expertise in quality, short-form storytelling will be a huge advantage for the radio
community as it makes the transition to creatively combining broadcast and the web from the beginning of projects. This editorial rigor translates not only into the audio components of interactive projects, but to works as a whole.

I’m not sure I wholly agree with him. I think we do, partly, have to take on the roles of curator and remixer when it comes to social media. We have to leverage what’s out there – not only because we’ve usually got a small budget, but because there is so much good stuff that doesn’t get beyond a niche audience. We can only do it if the social media community maintains a copyleft attitude to their work, but I suspect a lot of people would be happy to have their work professionally remixed into a larger work. The original work/s ‘home-madeness’ would become the aesthetic challenge of the professional.

Jesse is involved with Union docs, a really interesting collaborative doco organisation in Williamsburg, NY.

The lessons of Caine’s Arcade

Transient Spaces, web Comments Off

Aug 262012

Why does this act of storytelling work so well? According to Brad Phillips in The 6 traits of great storytelling—in one adorable video, it meets Dan and Chip Heath’s six critical traits that make stories memorable:

Simple. A boy. An idea. Some boxes. Doesn’t get much simpler than that.
Unexpected. This video had at least four unexpected things: An unusually creative boy; a video maker who accidentally stumbled upon the boy’s arcade; a flash mob; and Caine’s surprise at the flash mob. Even though the video’s title (“9-year-old’s DIY cardboard arcade gets flashmobbed”) gave away a lot of the premise, it didn’t matter. We wanted to see how the unexpected played out.
Concrete. There’s one moment that stuck with me more than any other: Caine manually feeding prize tickets through a hole in the box. If there’s a second moment I remember, it’s the claw machine. If there’s a third, it’s the calculator he used to track legitimate “Fun Pass” users. All three of those details are concrete, and the story was more effective for its total absence of abstractions.
Credible. Totally. Not a single false note.
Emotional. Before my wife showed me the video, she sheepishly admitted that it had made her cry. I mildly teased her. Then I watched it and teared up, as well. It felt deeply satisfying to see the boy’s industriousness rewarded. And the father’s pride in his son’s achievement? How wonderful to see a struggling businessman in East L.A. enjoy such rich satisfaction.
Stories. Back to the first “S:” a boy, an idea, some boxes. Stories can’t get stripped down much further, proving that good stories don’t require complexities to work.

Maybe this is the same as (5), but we respond more to stories in which we can identify with the characters, put ourselves in their shoes. No, I’m not saying this rules out fantasy [Heaven forfend], but the most fantastic situations have to be met with a recognisably human response, or they’ll leave us cold. I recently read a piece about Breaking Bad , The author didn’t know why he was interested since all the characters left him cold. It came down to the plot — each plot is an intricate puzzle, an intellectual exercise. His motivation for watching was to see how it could be resolved. That’s unusual. We want, I think, our humanity.

Another thing we want is a happy ending.

So live long and prosper, bye for now.

TS2012, week 8

Transient Spaces Comments Off

Apr 222012

Ts2012, week8

View more presentations from Jenny Weight.

Two types of interactive story-telling projects

web Comments Off

Apr 102012

Interactive Fiction for everyone

Waxy.org looks like a great resource for writing IF. never really done any IF myself, but the ease of this tool makes it enticing. Created by Andy Baio.

Mass participation user-generated story-telling

Shared Story Worlds is a resource for collaborative world-building.

A lot of material here, and food for thought for student projects. http://sharedstoryworlds.com/2011/04/bar-karma/” traget=Blank”>Bar Karma, for example, has a relationship with Current TV:

Bar Karma is an online, collaborative, crowd-sourced television series on Current TV.

Anyone can submit story, character, and scene ideas, as well as suggest songs, costumes, or marketing campaigns. Story-centric submissions are publicly viewable by the Bar Karma community via StoryMaker, a heavily visual content management system developed by Will Wright to support the collaboration and moderation of submissions. StoryMaker allows collaborators to reuse/remix each other’s submissions as well as add their own, allowing for a flexible, dynamic creative process with amazing content remix possibilities.

The Bar Karma production team picks their favorite submissions for integration into the show. If your submission is picked, your name will be listed in the show’s credits.

here’s a sample ep:

a few interesting web narrative projects

resources, Transient Spaces Comments Off

Feb 202012

Still from Take this Lollipop

Take This Lollipop

If you’ve ever had any concerns about online privacy, this is brilliant, short and will confirm all your worst fears (needs a Facebook account). 5 stars!

Bear 71

“It’s hard to know what people are capable of. They can start a revolution on a smart phone but forget to close the lid on a bear-proof garbage can.”

Blurring the line between the wired world and the wild world, the National Film Board of Canada’s Bear 71 is a multi-user interactive social narrative that observes and records the intersection of humans, nature and technology.

Launched with a live, interactive art installation at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival New Frontier Program, the storyworld of Bear 71 is a fully immersive, multi-platform experience. Participants explore and engage with the world of a female grizzly bear via animal role play, augmented reality, webcams, geolocation tracking, motion sensors, a microsite, social media channels and a real bear trap in Park City. This project is the most recent example of how the NFB is changing the face of cinema.

My verdict: A moving documentary with OK footage and fantastic interactive map. 4 stars.

Pandemic

Director Lance Weiler’s storytelling project Pandemic 1.0 is part film, part interactive game, part sociological experiment, and was one of the most talked-about experiences at Sundance 2011’s New Frontier program.

The experience imagines that a mysterious virus has begun to afflict adults in a rural town. The town’s young people soon find themselves cut off from civilization, fighting for their lives. People online work with people in the real world to unlock a variety of hidden clues.

This transmedia storytelling experience unites film, mobile and online technologies, props, social gaming and data visualization, enabling audiences to step into the shoes of the pandemic protagonists.

My verdict: is not a standalone website but rather was linked to an event, so too difficult to understand. An artefact rather than a complete project. 2 stars.

Welcome to Pine Point

Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge, formerly of Adbusters, recreated a town that doesn’t exist anymore. Part book, part film, part family photo album of a place that’s been lost in time, the National Film Board of Canada’s Welcome to Pine Point website explores the memories of residents from the former mining community of Pine Point, Northwest Territories. Overall, it’s an interactive media exploration of how we remember the past.

A multiple-award winner (including two Webby Awards), the online experience combines photographs, sound and video clips, interviews, music and narration by Simons to personally immerse the viewer in a multimedia world of memory and loss.

My verdict: moving and nostalgic excursion to a place that no longer exists, lots of grainy vids and imagery, structurally a little boring. 3 stars

Rome

Originally a concept album for a film that does not (yet) exist, Rome is a multiplatform interactive narrative experience inspired by the music of Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi (featuring Jack White, Norah Jones and renowned composer Ennio Morricone’s original 40-piece orchestra from Italy).

Director Chris Milk, an artist focused on technology-generated emotional resonance through interactive video, created this project. The result culminated into a feature film produced by Likely Story and Annapurna Pictures, which was adapted from the novel The Reapers are the Angels. The project integrated the use of webGL within the Chrome browser, creating a rich graphical interactive experience complete with elements of game play.

My verdict: spacey 3D animation not wholly rendered. You get to build your own lego-like 3D structure and save it to a gallery. I personally, needed a stronger point to all this to emerge. 2 stars.

Go Bzrk

They take the names of madmen because madness is their fate.
They descend into the tiny places, down where the mites leap and the lymphocytes ooze and the spark of human reason fires like lightning from sizzling neurons. Down in the meat. One by one they join the fight. In the macro, in the nano, in both at once, they fight for life, liberty and the inalienable right to be crazy.
BZRK is their method.
BZRK is their battle cry.
BZRK is their doom.

Verdict: A transmedia thriller which seems to revolve around a book and an app, both of which are for sale. Can’t comment on how good it is. Can’t be rated.

the Hyp replacement

The Hyp Replacement takes place over the course of 2010 and follows the daily lives of four Brooklynites – Yaya, Sandy, Eloise and Sol. They are in search of love, employment and happiness. They share the same Fort Greene brownstone. Eventually, they start an underground marijuana coffeeshop. That’s when things start to get interesting.

How does it all work?

Short chapters are published on an almost daily basis.
Told through a 3rd person narrative, but characters express 1st person narratives through Twitter, Tumblr, Blogspot and YouTube.

Verdict: A complex textual experience, set over various media. Although the writing seems strong, I’m feeling a little short-changed. I want my transmedia to revel sensually in audio and visuals as well. However if you’re happy with just text, this might do the job. 3.5 stars.

Read the interview with author E.A Marciano by Megan O’Neill.

creepy comics that go places

Networked Media, resources, Transient Spaces Comments Off

Dec 032011

Went to ‘Multiplatform story telling: from idea to market’ yesterday at the State library of Victoria, Melbourne. Some great speakers and inspiring independent projects of a complexity that blew our little minds. Chief among the mind-blowers was Lance Weiler, author of Head Trauma and Pandemic 1.0 among other projects, who proclaimed, quite simply, that

It’s one of the most amazing times to be a story teller ever

According to Weiler, story telling is a research and development tool, a way to develop new business models and new relationships with audiences. Figuring out how to translate story telling in the 21st century is his focus.

Head trauma was developed by playing around with the idea of interactive comics. Through them he came to realize the value of digital assets. The comics became an amazing asset, setting the tone for the whole project.

But where it got really exciting was when he decided to recontextualise the story. He started to bring the story into alternative spaces like museums and unis. He did interesting live performances which allowed him to create immersive experiences, how can I put people in the shoes of the protagonists, make an emotional connections, use a variety of screens and devices. Used phones on the street, street performance artists, phones interconnecting during the performance. After the performance the audience could take themselves off to the interactive game on the Head Trauma web site – a kind of creepy comic. Then they’d get a phone call… Based on a person’s responses they’d get image/audio on the screen, which was hard to get out of.

Very freaky.

So, this style of story telling starts as communal experience, goes to mobile, then online, then back to communal experience.

To promote the film Weiler’s team ran a 4 week alternative reality game called ‘Hope is missing’. But it’s more than just promotion – it also develops new intellectual property, it’s R and D. They had 2.5 million participants. One thing to reflect upon was that hoax driven elements can damage trust with those you want to build a relationship with.

The most popular element was people talking to each other. But does user generated content affect the quality of what you’re doing? You have singular vision, then it fractures where the audience can play. You need to learn what pathways to encourage and what to snip off.

R&D constantly challenges the way Weiler designs stories

Pandemic 1.0 is his new project, a new story world centering around a strange sleep virus which leaves youth to their own devices.

A new concept of ‘contextual storytelling’, using data to create connections. How can the story have a transformative side? Eg, get some data that can be used in the real world? In Pandemic, he tried to get some data that would be useful in public health issues.

Weiler wants an infinity loop between the audience and story – imagine an ’8′ on its side, and one of the circles has ‘audience’ and the other has ‘story’ and you’re on a motorbike around the outside, going back and forth, back and forth.

It could be a pogo stick …

Anyway, making the two interact and become infinite. A constant balance between the story and the audience

Another project is Robot stories for kids. On ipad. He co-created it with 5th graders. The kids have to help the robot get to LA. Ran for 10 days. The robot then got launched into space.

Flipping through the fourth wall

Issues in education, Networked Media, Transient Spaces Comments Off

Dec 032011

Neil Richards was speaking at the ‘Multiplatform story telling: from idea to market’ event, 29 November 2011 at the State library of Victoria, Melbourne.

He’s making a call. A new genre – linear animated shows for kids with an interactive version online where the kids ‘flip through the fourth wall (ie, the one that rides on the developer being invisible)’ to play the interactive version using the bones of the same narrative – a ‘hybrid tv-online game thing’. His recent project is nightmare high’ is ‘a multimedia game played in a browser but using a lot of different media.

and his job? Being the writer, or in this case, one of two writers.

The writers role is to bring the magic. The project is a dead fish without great story and writing, particularly for this age group. They need to bring fantasy, fun, excitement, the random and make it all come to life.

And now for another quote that sounds even better, although the proof is in the eating, and the meal is still on the table:

Play is not disguised learning. Play is the leaning.

- Beeb Channel 4 blurb

Older Entries

geniwate.com

teaching by stealth

matching genre to medium

the indie audio community and storytelling strategies

The lessons of Caine’s Arcade

TS2012, week 8

Two types of interactive story-telling projects

a few interesting web narrative projects

creepy comics that go places

Flipping through the fourth wall

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