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.

Special screenings are taking place today of 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 exactly a year ago today, July 24, 2010.

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.

You can read more in a Washington Post article by Melissa Bell.

Here’s the trailer:

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Yesterday I accidentally spent more than $100 on audiobooks. I took Audible up on a special offer of credits toward books, but kept getting an error message when I purchased it, so I ended up making the purchase three times. I could ask for two-thirds of my money back, but I’m just as happy to have the books.

Audiobooks have been a huge revelation to me. I first listened to them back when they were on cassette tapes, probably in the 90s, but usually just when I was on a roadtrip. The ease and convenience of mp3s made them more appealing. But as regular readers know, the real turning point for me was realizing that audiobooks could be a way to deal with being a slow reader — slow almost to the point of disability.

The other big realization was that I could multitask while listening to audiobooks. I could listen not just while driving, but while mowing, doing yardwork, painting, doing crafts, taking a bath — and virtually everything else.

I have always been a miserable housekeeper. I would clean the house, say, every six months, or when it got so disgusting I couldn’t stand it, or when guests were expected. But there was something about moving into a brand-new house last year that made me want to keep it clean, so after 26 years of marriage, I became a wife who gives the house a good cleaning once a week. Some “cleaning days” I wake up feeling like I don’t really want to clean, but then I remember I can “read” while I clean and look forward to it.

My listening device of choice is my iPad. In some situations, like driving or bathing, I can just sit the iPad in one spot and listen. (Funny story — I had had the iPad for about four months before I realized it had external speakers.) If I’m in a situation where I’m moving around a lot or making noise (vacuuming, mowing, sanding), I put my iPad into a small backpack and carry it around with me listening through headphones.

Because of this multitasking aspect, I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing as I experienced each book. Elizabeth Edwards’ Resilience? Cleaning up brush and stumps on a ridge on our property. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Painting siding to go on the house. Steve Martin’s Object of Beauty? Rototilling our vegetable garden. And so on.

A similar theme emerges from Audible’s recent solicitation of customer listening stories. The collection of stories is an obvious ploy to promote the books customers talk about in their stories, but it’s also interesting to see that, like me, people associate books with what they were doing while listening to them,

The stories listeners tell about their experience tend to spring from the fact that they were multitasking, like this one:

I was so engrossed in the story that (I’m embarrassed to say) for three days in a row…I completely missed my exit on the way to work. It didn’t end there. I also had “driveway moments” where I would sit in the driveway listening until I came to a good stopping spot. My husband came out the first time thinking something was wrong. When I told him what I was doing he just laughed at me and said, “You know you can bring it inside don’t you?”

Some stories relate to the extraordinary quality of the narration of audiobooks. I can only wonder if I would have found some of the books I’ve experienced on audio nearly as good as I did had it not been for the incredible richness that narrators brought to the book. Similarly, some books are ruined by poor narrators, though those are rare. Here’s a listener story about one of the terrific narrators:

I started listening to the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon (read by Davina Porter) about a year and a half ago. Every morning after putting my children on the bus for school, I would put on my running shoes and my iPod and go for a long walk while listening to Ms. Porter’s fabulous narration of these riveting and beautifully-written novels. I found myself so addicted to the books that I would make time to walk every day, regardless of the weather, and I became positively obsessive about not letting anything interfere with my daily read/walk. I found myself extending my walks just so I could continue listening. I wept, worried, gasped, and often laughed out loud while I was walking, drawing.

I love reading books in print just as much — even if they take me forever — but I can’t tell you where I was or what I was doing while reading most hard-copy books.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.