Week Two - Storytelling

Today, we discussed the concept of story’s and why we chose to tell them and in what format. The idea of stories themselves are as old as civilization and act as a commutative way to connect generations through fact and fiction, which still holds power over what we do today. 

We spoke about how story’s don’t always need to be complete or spelt out for us as ‘6 word stories’ are equally as powerful. My favourite one I heard in class was ‘Dot in the sky. Dead pixel’ as it opens a wave of questions about reality as well as our dependency on technology. The question of whether we live in a simulated reality is perpetuated by stories like these, reasserting how important it is to keep creating and telling them as the fact that this could be communicated through only 6 words expresses the power of storytelling. Although I wasn’t very good at coming up with my own stories I enjoyed hearing others and found the questions raised about simulated reality very interesting.

Later in the lesson we broke down the sequence in which stories are often told, a process which is reflected in almost every film. Films often follow Todorov's narrative of equilibrium, disequilibrium, then a resolution which leads to the new and improved equilibrium. This structure is repeatedly used in many modern films today such as Star Wars and The Avengers, as it is a narrative that audiences connect with and therefore actively holds their attention. The format is often successful due to the characters that move the narrative along. I learnt that there tends to always be a hero, an ordinary individual audience can relate to who is called to action and overall beats the odds and succeeds. This character is then opposed by an antihero, who could take the form of a scary monster such as in Jaws or Jurassic World, a villain like in Scream or a large corporation that bent on not letting the hero win. This story between good and bad is as old as it gets, with the tale of the perceived hero taking down the villain . Only a few films follow the story of the villain, as you would think this approach is much harder for an audience to engage with. However the films that successfully show this create this strange relationship with the viewers as they route on the ‘bad guy’, knowing that what they are doing is wrong but as it’s from their point of view they want them to succeed anyway. This is reflected in films such as American Psycho, where Patrick Bateman lives a double life as both  wealthy banker and serial killer, yet still having the audience route for him. I find this concept fascinating as despite the audiences knowing what the character is doing this wrong a large proportion of people still want them to come out victorious, something which I struggle to follow when watching films or tv shows from the villain’s perspective.

After learning about the power in storytelling I had to create an AI story. This consisted of providing names and adjectives into a website to have it create a story around those words. Mine was a financial drama starring Rick Fish, and despite the very cool name the AI stories were awful. Although asking for descriptive words it clearly didn't understand what they meant proving writers will not be obsolete anytime soon.

Later we learnt about visual storytelling, which can be as simple as placing two images next to each other and allowing our brain to make a connection between them. This is reflected in the  Kuleshov effect, a technique created by Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov where viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single image. 

To demonstrate what we had learnt from these techniques we had a class exercise in which we took a series of images which showed suspense. My team and I went into the basement beneath the main house and created a set of images of someone being followed, building suspense until the protagonist turns around and no one is there. 

Overall today I learnt the basics of storytelling as well as different techniques and formats in which they’re told which I found interesting as I could relate these to a lot of my favourite films.