I saw folks commenting about this video on Facebook yesterday, saying it had made them cry. I could see that the video was about a young boy who created an arcade out of cardboard boxes.

I don’t think that’s gonna make my tears well up, I said to myself. But they did. Twice.

What is it about the story that makes folks cry? Triumph of the human spirit, both on an individual and on a group level. It’s better if I don’t go into great detail and instead let you see for yourself how that triumph of the human spirit unfolds.

The story also fits the definition of story I’ve come to support, set forth by Kendall Haven, although “jeopardy” may be a stretch:

A story is: a character-based narrative of an interesting character’s struggles to reach a real and important goal that is initially blocked by some combination of one or more problems and conflicts that have the potential to create some real risk and danger (jeopardy) for that character, all presented in sufficient detail to make the story seem vivid, compelling, and memorable.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Data visualization … infographic … visual storytelling. We see these terms frequently these days and are often told that these images, in fact, comprise storytelling.

I’ve wrestled with the concept of visual storytelling. I have periodically presented in this space roundups of artifacts touted to be “visual storytelling,” and now I do the same with a Pinterest curation.

I have slowly come around to the belief, however, that probably none of these artifacts can truly be characterized as storytelling.

Zach Gemignani recently reinforced that view in a post entitled Data Visualization as Storytelling: A Stretched Analogy:

For practitioners of the craft, connecting our work to stories feels satisfying — it is a call to raise our standards and an opportunity to enhance the influence of our field. Stories evoke images of rapt audiences, dramatic arcs, and unexpected plot twists.

Unfortunately this analogy is a stretch. The truth is that many of the core elements of stories simply aren’t evident in data visualizations: characters, a plot, a three-act structure, a beginning and an end. Occasionally, the narrative flow of a story can be glimpsed in an infographic or dashboard.

At the same time, data visualizations have fundamental characteristics missing from traditional storytelling. Interactive data visualizations let the audience explore the information to find the insights that resonate with them. Visualizations should take shape based to a large extend on the underlying data. And as this data changes, the emphasis and message of the visualization is likely to change.

Gemignani’s view especially resonated with me after I saw a post entitled A Storytelling Experiment by Robert Kosara. Kosara asks visitors to click to “be taken to one of several slightly different versions of a visual story about the development of the gross domestic product (GDP) in different countries.” The user does indeed get a different version of the visualization each time he or she clicks. The experiment is that the version that represents the best storytelling will be most often shared by users:

You will help us understand which types of storytelling work and which don’t. … This is as much an experiment in running experiments as it is an experiment on storytelling: we’re measuring the effectiveness of the different versions by tracking how often they are shared.

Well, the visualizations (see one version at left) are very clever and interesting, but they are not storytelling.

I maintain that many artifacts characterized as data visualizations, infographics, visual storytelling, and other labels still have value in the story world because they suggest or enhance stories.

If I analyze the types of item in my Pinterest curation, I come up with:

• Art that inspires the viewer to construct a story while viewing it. (The artist undoubtedly had a story in mind when creating it that may or may not be the same as the tale the beholder weaves.)
• Illustration meant to enhance or reinterpret a story told in another form.
• Photojournalism that goes a long way toward telling a story of an event on its own but usually needs the context of words to convey a holistic story.
• Photo essays by photographers who specialize in shooting families, children, and family events. These pieces generally suggest an aura of story by providing a visually pleasing slice of the subjects’ lives. Since they are often posed shots rather than candids, the story portrayed may not be fully authentic.
• Similarly, photo essays, often about celebrities, that don’t reveal much if a story, but do offer small, candid slices of life.
• Tools that employ visuals in some aspect of a storytelling process.
• Visualizations of meetings and events that employ an emergingly popular visual note-taking process. These pieces document the events, but do they really tell their stories?

I will continue to explore the storied aspects of visual forms even while rejecting the “storytelling” label thrust upon so many of them.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Your Film Festival is billed as a Global Search for the World’s Best Storytellers. The contest seeks short, story-driven videos.

Some details from the site:

15 minutes to tell a story. Millions of people to watch it. $500,000 to make a new one for the world to see.

This is Your Film Festival. You have until March 31st to submit a short, story-driven video. There’s no entry fee. It can be any format — short film, web-series episode, TV pilot — and any genre. In June, audiences around the world will vote, sending 10 deserving storytellers to open he 2012 Venice Film Festival where a Grand Prize Winner will be be rewarded with a $500,000 grant to create a new work, produced by Ridley Scott and his world class team.

Any format, style and genre is welcome, so long as it’s story-driven. It can be a short film, the first episode of a web series, or whatever else qualifies as a story-driven video. Fiction narratives and non-fiction documentaries are welcome.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Two TED Talks came to my attention in the last couple of days — one that embodies an affecting story (as many TED Talks do) and another that casts a critical and suspicious eye on stories themselves.

I often see storied presentations, and I often see written pieces on integrating story into presentations, but a wonderful post by John Zimmer analyzes in detail a storied presentation. Zimmer is a Toastmaster who blogs about public speaking and often integrates Toastmaster-specific content.

The presentation, embedded below, is by Alberto Cairo, who runs the orthopedic program operated by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Afghanistan.

I urge you to read Zimmer’s full analysis, which is enormously helpful to public speakers, but here’s my brief synthesis that applies the analysis to integrating story into presentations:

• Establish your credibility with humility, and do it briefly (One of the most striking things about Cairo’s presentation, in my view, is how humble he is throughout.)
• Foreshadow that you will delve into the past to reveal a story (which, in this case, had several sub-stories).
• Forego charts and graphs; just tell the story.
• If you use slides, make them striking photos/graphics that go with your story.
• Own your emotions. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable as you tell your story.
• Make your gestures natural.
• Paint descriptive pictures, but keep them simple.
• Use facial expressions appropriate to your story. (Here, I differ slightly from Zimmer’s analysis. Cairo tells a serious story, but he could have smiled occasionally. When he smiles at the end, you wish you’d seen that smile during the story.)
• Don’t be afraid of humor when presenting a serious subject. (The audience indeed laughs several times; these would have been good places for Cairo to smile.)
• Build drama with your physical presence.
• Provide relief to that drama with lighter moments.
• Don’t be afraid to inject pauses, even long ones.
• Think about what you want the audience to remember, and be sure to articulate that message (What’s the moral of the story?). If an audience member were describing the story/presentation to a friend in a restaurant two weeks later, how would you want him or her to express your message?
• When appropriate, become your characters.
• Bring the story full circle by describing a transformation.
• Provide a few supporting points that enhance the transformation’s impact.
• You’ve told the audience what you want them to remember, but take that a step further by describing the action you seek.

The Toastmasters tradition is to constructively evaluate speeches and offer suggestions for improvement, even for high-quality speeches in which it’s difficult to identify ways it could be better. Zimmer calls Cairo’s presentation “a fantastic talk on so many levels,” but he does suggest a few minor improvements. One slide isn’t the best choice for its part of the talk, Zimmer opines, and it stays on the screen too long. Cairo could have employed longer pauses. And Zimmer feels Cairo could have stood closer to the audience, although he suspects, as do I, that the TED folks had him stand in a certain spot for filming purposes. I would add that Cairo could have used more energy. His humility became a bit like an enveloping cloak that made him just a wee bit plodding. Again, a serious subject, but a bit more spark would have enhanced my engagement. He’s not a native-English-speaker, though (he’s Italian), so it’s possible he would speak more energetically in his native tongue. In Toastmasters, he would have been dinged for saying “um,” but I caught no more than two or three of those in a 19-minute talk.

The second TED Talk is a two-year-old deep critique of stories themselves by economist Tyler Cowen (thanks to Stephanie West Allen for alerting me to it). Cowen is suspicious of stories because they (a) are too simple, (b) end up serving dual and conflicting functions, and (c) are often the wrong stories, as served up by marketers and politicians. This third point is the popular manipulation argument often leveled at storytelling.

Throughout the speech, I found myself thinking: What’s the alternative? We have no choice but to think in story form. While he acknowledges that it is impossible for humans not to think in stories, Cowen wants to see more messiness, ambiguity. He wants us to scrutinize stories more critically and suspiciously before buying into them. It’s a provocative talk, and I’d be interested in what story folks think of it.

Interestingly, I was just as engaged in Cowen’s talk as I was in Cairo’s even though Cowen tells few stories — possibly because I had my defensive story hackles up and wanted to understand what he sees as the problems with stories.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

From time to time, I’ve scrutinized the story quality of slideshows, especially resumes in slideshow form; the most recent was last month’s exploration of a “Présumé™” (presentation resume) that was nicely crafted but not really storied.

Since then, I’ve come across a couple of more storied examples. While the above Présumé™ probably has the most sophisticated design of recent examples, these two tell more of a story:

The less successful of the two, The Story of Cory has a very sophisticated design. But Cory’s goals and audience are unclear as he tells the story of his career. He concludes that he is really an entrepreneur, so the resume would not seem to be aimed at getting a job. (Toward the end, the content suggests the slideshow is a promo and recruiting tool for SlideShare itself.) He also violates a number of job-search “rules:” He trashes a former employer, as in the slide above. He talks about all the schools he dropped out of. He spends a little too much time on his leisure activities. He tells his story in third-person, which makes it less personal than if it were in first-person. It’s a beautifully done presentation; I’m just not sure what Cory’s message is. At least it is authentic.

More successful — in fact, arguably the best slideshow resume I’ve seen — is that of Heidi Lilly. The foregoing link (also embedded below) is to the SlideRocket of her slideshow resume, which is specifically targeted to one employer and which has more bells and whistles than the more generic SlideShare version.

Heidi most definitely tells her career story — in a much more positive way than Cory does. She integrates lots of multimedia goodies into the presentation, especially the SlideRocket version — maps, music, animated type and graphics, photos, infographics, a Wordle graphic, a Venn diagram, and a feedback form.

She tells what her story means to the employer in terms of skills and personal qualities, even noting that she uses Excel to “read stories” and PowerPoint to tell them. She conveys passion. In the SlideRocket version, she offers ideas for the targeted employer.

I’d hire her in a heartbeat.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Here are four presentations — three videos and one slideshow — that I’ve come across recently. Story fans may already be aware of at last two of them as they’ve been a bit viral in the story world, but I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose all of them. Each in its own way shows a different approach to using technological tools to tell stories.

Andrew Slack of Harry Potter Alliance is not the first person to suggest a use for transmedia storytelling outside entertainment and pop culture (personally, I’ve suggested transmedia storytelling for job-hunting), but his 13-minute video, The strength of a story, calling for transmedia for activism and social change, is highly thought-provoking.

(In another emerging use for transmedia, A Think Lab “works with organizations to identify their story — whether it’s for a an individual, a brand, a campaign, or an entire organization. Transmedia storytelling is smart communication because it is the language of experience.” I wrote about A Think Lab’s work here.)

Joe Sabia’s widely posted TED talk, The technology of storytelling (embedded below) is remarkable for showing, in less than four minutes, amazing capabilities of technology (in this case the iPad) for storytelling. He compares today’s revolution in tech-based storytelling tools to the pop-up book, created in the 19th century by Lothar Meggendorfer. Once you see this presentation, you’ll want to get an iPad, and if you already have one, you’ll want to start using it for presentations, a task that my friend Stephanie West Allen tells me is not hard to do.

The slideshow entry in this group is not revolutionary, but it does offer a little twist on telling a story in a slideshow. Presentation expert Carmine Gallo uses comic-like speech bubbles to present text in a beautifully designed 91-slide presentation, The Power of foursquare: 7 Innovative Ways to Get Your Customers to Check In Wherever They Are (he used an outside presentation design agency to create the slides). It’s a slightly more artful way to present text in a slideshow — instead of bullet points or text-heavy slides. They enable the show to pretty much make sense without audio narration. Gallo also includes video in the show. Not all of the slideshow is storied, but he presents storied case studies to illustrate his points.

Gallo offers a behind-the-scenes view of how he made the presentation storied in 7 Ways to Tell Stories with PowerPoint.

Finally, a very affecting video (just under 7 minutes) that is a story. Its creator, Jacob Schemmel, doesn’t utter a word as he tells the story of 2010, the worst year of his life and what he learned from it. Instead, he holds up handwritten index cards. His facial expressions, especially his smile, and the background music enhance the story. I’m not sure why he chose this technique or why it works so well (at least for me), but it is highly emotionally engaging. It is called simply My Story. I recommend it.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Updating a post from this past summer about the film Life in a Day, a historic global experiment to create a user-generated feature film shot in a single day. The videos that comprise the film were shot on July 24, 2010.

My friend Elayne Zalis alerted me to the fact that the film is now available to view on the Life in a Day You Tube page. A DVD is also available for purchase.

Participants had 24 hours to capture a glimpse of their lives on camera. The most compelling and distinctive footage were edited into a feature film, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald. The filmmakers whittled down 4,500 hours of footage from 80,000 submissions.

Here’s the trailer:

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Here are two resources that convey a point of view about storytelling in audiovisual fashion.

My friend Karen Dietz turned me on to the 15-minute video, The Arc of Storytelling, noting:

Run, don’t walk to watch this incredibly inspiring video about what we are all searching for in our storytelling.

Even though Bobette Buster is speaking about the entertainment industry, her words are incredibly important to anyone who is crafting and sharing their business stories.

Bobette talks about the most powerful stories (and this applies to our biz stories) being ones showing transformation, becoming fully alive, and offering hope. When we think about stories in marketing/branding we often forget these fundamentals. The majority of ‘business story’ videos I watch these days totally miss these themes and end up being more like digital brochures than real compelling stories that build a growing cadre of loyal customers.

But think about this for businesses: a founding story of an organization is often about being faced with a challenge and overcoming it — that is showing transformation and offering hope to others.

Business stories about people (customers/staff) and the obstacles they’ve overcome + the results produced offer the same messages.

I could go on and on. It’s better to just watch the 15-minute video. Bobette talked 2 years ago at the Storytelling in Organization’s Special Interest Group (SIO SIG) and was masterful. The book The Uses of Enchantment she cites was a textbook in my PhD program. I’m currently reading Inside Story: The Power of the Transformative Arc, and it dovetails nicely with Bobette’s talk. I hope you get inspired and lots of ideas by watching this.

The other is a Prezi slideshow by Peter Fruhmann called Use your narrative space: How to make better use of stories in organisations by collecting, connecting and sharing.

The presentation offers for steps for telling the right organizational story: 1) Listen/Collect, the step Fruhmann spends the most time on; 2) Analyze; 3) Synchronize; and 4) Tell/Connect.

He also proposes a 3D matrix (at left) he calls the Narrative Space of the Organization.

Both of these presentations are worth your while.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Periodically, I like to publish a roundup of items about story in visual form. In the past, I would have referred to this categorization as “visual storytelling.” I am opening my mind, however, and being more respectful to those who believe a visual image cannot fit into the definition of storytelling.

We might question whether a visual image (or set of images) can be synonymous with story. Certainly an image can suggest or prompt a story, but it will likely be a slightly different story for every beholder. One of the visual artists I reviewed for this roundup was teenage photographer Chrissie White, whom I read about in Oprah’s magazine. A section of White’s Web site is entitled A Million Different Stories. “I think of the pictures as movie cels,” White says ” — a moment in a narrative.” Perhaps that’s what a lot of what is touted to be visual storytelling is — not so much a story as a moment in a story and yes, I realize here we’re also getting into the difference between story and narrative. (See one of her photos, above right).

It is therefore with a slightly more analytical eye that I present my latest roundup on visual story.

• Visual Storytelling: The Digital Video Documentary is a downloadable ebook by Nancy Kalow, which according to its publisher, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, “anyone who wants to make a watchable short documentary using a consumer camcorder, digital SLR camera, or cell phone. Nancy Kalow … has written a step-by-step and comprehensive guide to making a low-budget video with a one-person crew. The Visual Storytelling approach guides you through shooting and interviewing, editing, and the ethics of telling someone else’s story.” Again, some would debate whether this form is storytelling, but you can’t beat a free ebook if you are interested in the intersection of cameras and stories. Also in the how-to category is Photographic Storytelling Checklist.

• In the visual-culture blog, I Like to Watch, David Schonauer writes about William Albert Allard, “one of photography’s great storytellers.” The post is part of a series focused on “turning points in the careers of major photographers.” Even if we were to argue that Allard’s photos don’t tell stories (and the one at left certainly is evocative to me), the blog post tells the story of how he became a photographer.
• Back in January, photographer Douglas Levy posed an interesting proposition: I shoot your wedding. You pay $0. A storytelling contest., noting:

  Modern weddings are productions. There are dresses, shoes, flowers, limos, gifts…expenses…stuff. Me? I’ve always been a sucker for a great story. I think that this dates back to my freshman year in college or so when I’d spend hours on Pulitzer.org reading all the winning entries for feature writing … So, with that in mind, I want to hear your stories. Tell me how you met, tell my why your wedding is going to be a great story, tell me how you fell in love, tell me your great aunt is going to do a Lady Gaga dance at your wedding…just tell me your story.

  Levy announced the winner in March, a couple whose first date involved plunges over waterfalls and led to a proposal. The wedding is in September.

• Trendhunter often runs work by visual artists that the site considers to be “visual storytelling.” For example, Bj Richeille’s Episode Finale Dance photo series, headlined on Trendhunter as Bored Performer Photography “seems to shape the story of a bored performer and her equally bored daughter. That, or a failing performer who has lost all hope for a better life and future, and is coming to terms with the unattainability of success and fame.” It’s the kind of visual imagery for which it’s fun to imagine the story it could be depicting. Same goes for the work of Brad Lou Tennant, also featured on Trendhunter under the rubric “Intimate Story-Telling Photography”.

• Artists frequently create visual images for stories that have already been told, as in the case of the 16 prints in Norman Rockwell’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn series. An exhibition, American Storytellers: Norman Rockwell & Mark Twain at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, CT, through Sept. 6. Rockwell has, of course, been cited as a storyteller for much of his non-Twain work (see above right), some of which appears in the exhibition. For a nice piece on Rockwell as story “teller,” see Norman Rockwell’s Storytelling Lessons on Smithsonain.com.
• Perhaps a latter-day Rockwell is Jonathon Bartlett, whose work can be seen in Jonathon Bartlett’s Storytelling Illustrations.
• I’m a huge fan of dance, which I do believe often depicts story though does not tell stories. Most of the dance numbers on my favorite TV show, “So You Think You Can Dance,” are built around stories, as I wrote about here. But a clip titled The Art of Storytelling from a talent agency representing dancers does not strike me as storied at all.

• Another twist on the idea of story and visual images is the Portland Art Museum’s Object Stories project. Tina Olsen, the museum’s director of education and public programs, describes the project in an interview:

  We ended up with a gallery in the museum … It’s in a good location, but it’s also kind of a pass-through space to other galleries. It has a recording booth that you sign up in advance to use, and you go in and tell a story about an object that is meaningful to you. The other parts of the gallery are for experiencing the stories, and for connecting with the Museum collection. We have cases with museum objects that people told stories about, with large images of those storytellers adjacent to the object, and in the middle of the gallery is a long rectangular table with touchscreens where people can access all the stories that have been recorded.

  In a similar but somewhat less storied project, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) asked visitors to share their MoMA stories. “I went to MoMA and …” is the result.

• Stories about objects, in fact, have become increasingly popular. Another example is a clothing line, The IOU Project. As described on Springwise: “The IOU Project plans to track each garment for every step of the way, making the resulting product life story accessible to the consumer via QR code. Consumers who buy the items will also be invited to upload pictures of themselves wearing them.”

• It has just been in the last year that I’ve been introduced to a visual technique that live-chronicles meetings and conference presentations with graphic images. AlphaChimp is one practitioner of the technique, known as graphic facilitation; the company’s work is shown at right.
• The storied quality of data visualization and infographics is debatable, and a good illustration is Maria Popova’s praise of a TED Talk by Aaron Koblin. With the exception of the very first example in Koblin’s presentation, I just didn’t see the stories. Do you?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve been quite scarce in this space this week — perhaps my longest-ever hiatus from blogging. My preoccupation this week has been, you guessed it, Toastmasters. I gave my eighth speech Tuesday, which required the use of visual aids. I’ve also been preparing materials so our club can promote itself to the community at an event this weekend.

I have long wanted to explore the intersection between intuition and storytelling, and this week’s speech allowed me to do that to a small extent. I also wanted to challenge myself to deliver the visual-aids speech in pecha kucha form, the presentation style that originated in Japan in 2003 and consists of minimalist slides. The presenter spends no more than 20 seconds on each slide, for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds — perfect for Toastmasters (where the outside limit for many speeches is 7:30).

Confession: A couple of my slides were a little longer than 20 seconds, but many were well under, so I felt it all balanced out. In fact, my presentation timed out at 6:18. Except for the first slide, all slides advanced automatically, so I had to time my speaking perfectly; I probably worked harder on this speech than any other.

Not all of it was storied; the presentation contained about six slides that comprised brief stories or story fragments. It’s a start.

I centered the presentation around a set of intuitive skills proposed by Daniel Cappon in the article The Anatomy of Intuition from back in 1993.

I’m sharing here a PDF of the slides, which will be rather meaningless by themselves since they comprise virtually all images, so I’m also sharing the script and handout.

I look forward to further evolving my thinking on intuition and storytelling.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.