I wish I had been writing little hash marks each time “story” or “storytelling” was mentioned at last night’s Oscars. So many who spoke cited the importance of storytelling in the movies.

The very first honoree, best supporting actor Christoph Waltz, cleverly crafted his acceptance speech in story form, describing his journey to playing his role in Inglorious Basterds, and weaving in the names of the “characters” in his journey that he wanted to thank.

As the blog Crystal Street (which I think is the name of the blogger) notes, one winner declared that “short films are ‘the jewel box of storytelling.’”

Actors told the stories of working with the best actor and actress nominees.

Many were surprised that The Hurt Locker won for both best picture and director over the wildly successful Avatar; yet I’ve also heard many say that, as groundbreaking as Avatar was in its look and feel, its storytelling was deficient.

As Crystal Street also reports, the same short-film producer said: “The tools never make a great film, the story makes a great film.”

I agree with her words, that “it is refreshing to see that the art of the story is still celebrated in the entertainment industry.”

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Today, the quote from Peggy Nelson that ended Sunday’s entry is our headline and the springboard for a look at some new ways of telling fictional and true stories with new media/social media/transmedia:

• Reader Stephanie Pride turned me on to a “‘micro-community’ of 17th century voices” that have clustered around the Twitter account @samuelpepys, the diarist Samuel Pepys (pictured). As reported here, “He kept a diary. Of everything. And what a diary it was — Pepys was a compulsive chronicler. EVERY DAY, for decades, he wrote something about what happened to him that day — from a few sentences to a couple of pages.” For this Twitter project:

  … they have taken the online archive of Samuel Pepys diaries, parsed them for a daily segment that best represents the activities of Mr. Pepys for that day in history, and converted it to be posted as a “Twitter Tweet” … Oddly enough there has been a growing micro-community of 17th century “voices” on Twitter that play off of Pepys’ Diaries– characters mentioned often in the main diary series (such as Mr. Pepys’ wife) now have their own accounts as well, and they appear to interact with each other from time to time.”


• Over on Facebook, the profile Henio Żytomirski tells the life story of a little Jewish boy, born in 1933 in Lublin, whose name was Henio Żytomirski (pictured).
• I have not been able to discover the name behind the blog StoryCentral DIGITAL, but she (he?) is a PhD student working on “a transmedia [romantic-comedy] fiction which will be the first rom com/chick lit transmedia story to be published in book form as well as on a host of digital platforms.
• I’ve covered several Twitter stories and novels in this space. As described here by Martin Bryant, Meet Mr Keihl is a novel that launched Nov. 22, 2009, and will take two years to complete at a rate of seven tweets per day. “The story is a spy epic set in the year 2130 that recounts the exploits of a legendary agent,” Bryant reports. Candyfloss and Pickles is another Twitter novel that Bryant cites. Bryant also references another type of Twitter storytelling, the fake Twitter account. Behind @dinner_guest is “an artist exploring the use of Twitter to let fictional characters tell their stories in a new way,” Bryant writes. The eight characters of the social-media Love Story November in Manchester each have their own Twitter feeds and blogs, Bryant notes. The story spanned November 2009.
• Also billed as a social-media love story is Crushing It, “a romantic comedy for the Twitter age. It’s a week long ‘live’ semi-improvised story told by the characters themselves using social networking.” The story unfolded between Feb. 1 and Feb. 5. The user was to decide how it all ends.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

What do you get when you cross oral history with digital storytelling?

The blog TC3 Idea Exchange explores the notion of using technology to present oral histories. I can’t find the name of the individual blogger, but the T3 Consortium “is a diversified LLC enterprise supporting key business-to-business and business-to-consumer services.”

The very comprehensive post touches on how to conduct and oral-history interview, presentation software and equipment that can be used to present the history, and how to search for more information.

It’s a terrific post for those seeking creative ways to tell stories of people and events.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Following up on my entry from last week in which I noted that the marketing agency Ink Foundry seeks personality in its intern applicants and is thus asking them to submit videos instead of print/text resumes …

I suggested that a great way for candidates to show their personalities in their submission videos would be to tell stories.

Had a nice comment in response from Ink Foundry’s Carin Galletta about this hiring process and also started following the organization on Facebook so I can keep up with the search.

Gallatta not only agreed that storytelling would be a terrific approach for prospective interns, she also cited and endorsed my blog entry on Ink Foundry’s own blog. Here’s part of her comment on my entry:

We are using the video application process as an opportunity to really get to know the candidates better through their own voices and we love your insight about using storytelling in the video submission. Great, great advice.

In the past, It has been very challenging to make the perfect choice when the initial tool, the resume, simply isn’t up to the task. We’re hoping video will change that.

Building a successful happy marketing agency team is so much more than where an individual has worked and his/her education level. We’ve had some really smart, innovative word of mouth marketing team members who didn’t work out simply because they were not a good fit for the Ink Foundry culture. We want to try to avoid the mismatch by using a video platform.

Later on Ink Foundry’s blog, Galletta cited two videos as great examples of the kind of submission the company seeks (by the way, how great is it when an employer tells job-seekers exactly what it’s looking for?) While I found the videos imperfect, both of them offer stories in ways that text-based resumes can’t.

The first, called A Walk in my Shoes from “Melody” is good because it targets a specific employer; in fact, a specific hiring decision-maker. She also offers the employer a free trial of her work. Occasionally text appears on the screen that adds humor because it encapsulates Melody’s own inner thoughts about the video. She sings at the end of the video, and the song is the origin of the “A Walk in my Shoes” title. I like the camera angles and expressions. On the downside, there’s something a bit unnatural about Melody’s delivery. And at 3:14, the video is a tad on the long side. But above all, I like how Melody kicks off the video with the story of one of her accomplishments with her current employer.

The second, G’s Video Resume from Gautam Banerjee (embedded above), won vault.com’s monthly video resume contest for May 2007. He, too, kicks off his video with a story — about working in Japan when he didn’t know a word of Japanese. I like the brevity of Banerjee’s video — 2:25 — and the fact that he injects personality by talking about what he likes to do in his non-working hours. I would have liked to see him smile a little more and bob his head less.

I have long been skeptical of video resumes as a truly viable and enduring form of career-marketing communication for two reasons: They are time-consuming to view, and they may expose candidates to discrimination.

But video resumes can work well in certain situations — such as when the employer specifically requests them. And they can clearly work well as storytelling vehicles.

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Came across two good slideshows recently that illustrate two applications for storytelling.

Organizational storytelling: I don’t know how Tell Us Your Story: Cultivating an Organizational Storytelling Culture by Teresa Bailey ended up on my desktop, but there it was after I researched storytelling at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for this entry. Although the presentation doesn’t quite stand on its own without narration, the viewer can glean solid information about how storytelling developed at JPL and how it works.

Online Storytelling in Nonprofits: I’ve written previously about Roger Burks and his campaign against what he calls “poverty porn” in favor of “humanitarian storytelling. Burks, senior writer at Mercy Corps, gives a nice presentation that illustrates how humanitarian storytelling is executed at Mercy Corps (which has more than 2,000 stories on its site), how it engages its audience, and how the approach developed after the late-2004 tsunami. It’s called Online Storytelling at Mercy Corps, and it’s embedded below. This show is easier to follow than the JPL one because it has an audio track. Burks talks about why storytelling is effective, how to choose stories, how Mercy Corps integrates storytelling into its Web site (and makes the action step — donating — more prominent), how the storytelling approach has resulted in much greater donations than similar organizations elicit, and how its latest strategy involves authentic but not necessarily polished entries on it blog, especially useful for real-time disaster coverage, as Mercy Corps is currently providing about Haiti.

Online Storytelling at Mercy Corps, Roger Burks / Forum One Communications Web Executive Seminar

View more presentations from Forum One Communications.

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Can you tell a story with just a visual — without words? Of course. I’ve written about visual storytelling in art frequently in this space. I’m not sure, though, if I’ve written about visual storytelling on video that attempts to tell a story without narration or dialogue.

Two bloggers have recently explored that question. In an entry on 10,000 Words, How to create video storytelling that actually tells a story, Mark S. Luckie presents three videos that, he says, “prove that you don’t have to have clip after clip of an interviewee of telling the story for you — sometimes the story just tells itself.”

Escape From Tomorrow (A Day In the Life With Nigel Sylvester) from 13thWitness™ on Vimeo.

Well, I’m sure it’s true that video stories can be told without narration or dialog, but I’m not sure Luckie’s examples truly reach the level of storytelling. The first two, Another night in Beijing and Escape from tomorrow, are more like slices of life than stories. Both have excellent background music, with the music in Escape from tomorrow especially well-synched to the action in the film. (Embedded above because it’s my favorite of the videos I looked at here.) The third, PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death and God, is more of a person-on-the-street interview series in which subjects are asked to share their secrets. It’s tied to a site I’ve written about, PostSecret, “an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.”

Story fares a bit better in the videos examined by Tom Kennedy on Kennedy | Multimedia. Kennedy notes that “visual storytelling can offer a complete narrative with music and images alone” and gives as examples four TV commercials, one of which has been removed from YouTube for terms-of-use violations. The first of these, an ad for a Volkswagen, and the last, an ad for Mini Cooper, decently tell stories. The third, an ad for Mexican beer, isn’t much of a story, in my opinion.

The line of inquiry is fascinating, though, and it makes me wonder what elements are required to create a video that offers a complete narrative with music and images alone, and what are some good examples of these?

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I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of artistic intent. What story is an artist trying to tell, or what statement is the artist trying to make in a given work of art?

Having worked for a while in an art gallery, I came to realize that most artists don’t really like to reveal their intent. Thus, the intent or meaning of a work of art is usually left to the beholder to interpret. A major component of art-history scholarship seems to focus on making scholarly arguments for what an artist’s intent was for a work or body or work.

My fascination with artistic intent was piqued by a new contest Canon is holding, called “The Story Beyond The Still,” which the company describes as “the first user-generated HD Video Contest where photographers become filmmakers, and we all see beyond the still.” The contest is largely to promote Canon’s EOS 7D camera, but also to “demonstrat[e] the social appeal of collaborative storytelling.”

The contest, as it turns out, is not really about artistic intent. If it were, the contest’s name might be “The Story Behind the Still.” Instead, it’s more like “what happens next” in the story of the still photo. The idea is to move the story forward rather than to look back at what inspired the photo.

Canon asked photographer, Vincent Laforet (who is also a judge for the contest), to “interpret” what story lives beyond the first still and to tell that story with the new camera. Laforet collaborated with Grey New York to bring his interpretation of a still image to life in a short film entitled “The Cabbie,” which begins on a still image depicting a teddy bear left on the sidewalk outside of an airport. “The Cabbie” serves as the first installment of a seven-chapter collaborative work in which each participant is asked to interpret the previous winning photographer/filmmaker’s final still image to start their vision for the subsequent chapter. The still photo at right above, a large trunk sitting in what appears to be a warehouse, is the still for Chapter 2. Submissions for the next chapter are due February 11.

Even though I’m a little disappointed that the contest doesn’t focus on the storied intent of these visuals, I admit that Laforet has created an intriguing first chapter (below), and I’m looking forward to subsequent installments.

You can read Canon’s press release here.

The Story Beyond The Still: The Cabbie from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo.

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I’ve written in this space several times about stories — as opposed to data-filled PowerPoint slides — as the linchpin of effective presentations. In her Musings blog, Christine Thompson recently compiled several excellent resources for better — and often storied — presentations.

Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, and Dan Roam are Thompson’s favorites, each offering both a Web site/blog and a book on or related to presentations. None of the three are totally story-focused, but story plays a presentation role for all three.

You can find storytelling in several places on Duarte’s site/blog: Clicking on the storytelling tag yields a few blog entries focusing on storytelling; she offers story-and-structure, as well as visiual-storytelling sessions in her Webinars, and you can preview some of the story-related content of her book, Slide:ology (this book, along with Reynolds’s PresentationZen Design, are the best resources, Thompson says, and Duarte also praises Reynolds’s book in a recent blog entry).

The best way to pinpoint story content on Reynolds’s Presentation Zen blog is to conduct a search on the term “storytelling”, resulting at this writing in 157 mentions.

Roam’s material is the least story-oriented of the three (at least overtly); his focus is on visual thinking. His book is The Back of the Napkin, and you can download nice bits of it.

Thompson also cites the books Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World, by Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath.

For a reminder of the power of stories in presentations, check out this storied Steve Jobs speech that reader Lisa Rosetti shared with me. In a way, it’s not a perfect example of stories in presentations because it’s a graduation speech, where PowerPoint slides would be quite unusual. So, this is not a case of someone opting to deliver a storied presentation instead of a slide-based one. But it’s still very good.

Listen as Jobs tells his audience that he plans to tell them three stories and then does just that:

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The other night, Randall and I watched the HBO movie Taking Chance, starring Kevin Bacon.

We were struck by how emotional, compelling, and affecting this film was given the simplest, starkest of stories.

Essentially a high-ranking Marine (Bacon), who is a number-crunching cubicle-dweller, makes an unexpected decision to escort home the remains of a fellow Marine, a PFC. Apparently it’s unusual for an officer of the protagonist’s rank to escort the remains of a PFC.

That’s pretty much the entire story. Beginning = the decision to escort the remains. Middle = the journey of Bacon and the remains. End = arrival of Bacon and the remains at the home of the family of the fallen Marine.

As I reflected on what made such a simple story so powerful, I concluded that two factors gave the film its gravitas.

The first was the revelation of the process and ritual of the returning of military personnel killed in wartime. Americans have a vague concept of remains arriving at Dover Air Force Base, but we don’t know much beyond that. I didn’t know that each of the fallen gets a military escort back to his or her family.

The film shows many details of the process — how the bodies are cared for with love, honor, and dignity at the Dover mortuary. They are given perfect uniforms, even if their physical bodies are so mangled by war that the military recommends a closed casket so that no one ever sees the uniform. At every point in the journey home, the military escort must verify the contents of the casket and give it “honors” (a salute). Visual storytelling is key to this aspect of the film’s storytelling, with snippets of the process of caring for the remains repeated several times in the film as reminders. The entire process and ritual comprised a revelatory glimpse for me — and I would guess they would for most Americans who don’t hear about these procedures.

The second factor that gives the story power is the tacit knowledge held by many of the people Bacon encounters on his journey that he is an escort and his cargo is a fallen serviceman — from the flight attendant who gives Bacon a crucifix, to the baggage handlers who remove their hats and bow their heads as the body is removed from the plane, to the drivers of the vehicles that turn on their lights and form an impromptu funeral procession during the final drive of the remains to the family’s home. This aspect, too, is a triumph of visual storytelling.

The film serves as an excellent example that a story need not be complex or twisted to elicit a deeply emotional response.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Matthew Cline and Sudipta Shaw have both recently written blog entries that examine how photographs can tell stories.

“A storyteller strives to have a deeper understanding of the subject and convey that through the camera,” Cline writes. He wonders if the many elements that go into making a story can “be captured in one frame? One single image?” His answer: “Most definitely.”

Shaw’s musings are based on a recent visit to the George Eastman Museum of Photography. “After looking at most of the photos (half way of the tour), I found an intangible element in almost all the photos,” Shaw notes. “It’s the “story” behind what (and how) the photo has been shot.”

Shaw concludes that “as any other properties of storytelling, a photo should comprise of one or more of 5 elements — Mood, Emotion, Narrative, Ideas, or Messages.” He goes on to give at least one example photo for each element, along with technical thoughts on how a photographer can achieve those elements.

Cline’s scrutiny of photographic storytelling led him to develop what he calls“a new form of photographic storytelling,” striving to create a “presentation that would make the story behind the photos more evident to everyone watching.”

It’s interesting to consider Cline’s photographic storytelling success based on Shaw’s 5 elements. Same goes for some other nice photographic storytelling I’ve encountered recently:

• The Longest Way Home (below) by Christoph Rehage, like Cline’s creation, is more than photography. Rehage, attempted to walk from China to Germany. He walk about a third of the initial way, from November 9, 2007, (his 26th birthday) until October 27, 2008. Then he stopped, got a haircut and shaved off his beard, and took a plane home. The shave and haircut are significant because Rehage documented his walk with daily photos and short videos, compiling them into the video/slideshow referenced above. The video is set to music and has a few printed captions. I love the way this piece is done with Rehage always in the same position in the photos.

The Longest Way 1.0 - one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

• What kind of stories can shoes at a wedding tell? “Emily G” of Emily G Photography explores that question by presenting four photos of shoes at weddings (below). She writes: “All you need is two pairs of shoes, one bride, one groom and one unique picture to begin to tell the story of your wedding. … This photo will tell a lot more about your wedding than you think. Your shoes reflect not only you and your groom’s personalities but also the spirit of the day. … Take a moment to look at each of the four pictures, all different brides with a completely different story. Just by these two pairs of shoes you can see a snapshot of their wedding day. What was the weather like? Was it a formal wedding or did they dance down the aisle? Did they plan the attire together or do opposites truly attract?”

• Stephen Crowley of the New York Times writes extensively of the storytelling photography of the late photojournalist Grey Villet, citing Villet’s commitment to the “great tradition of storytelling.” You can see the story of that storytelling here and more of Villet’s work in this online exhibition.
• The Julia Galdo Housewife Series gets storytelling props from TrendHunter Magazine.

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