STORYTELLING: THE GLOBAL RABBITHOLE

s a storyteller and story consul-

Atant, working with networks and studios from Singapore to Sweden, New York to Nigeria, I’m constantly thrilled at how storytellers continue to take narratives to different platforms, expanding their stories to audiences in authentic ways.

A few years ago, I met three storytellers from Voice of Nigeria, a public-service radio station that broadcasts global and local news and stories. I was hosting a three-day, cross-platform masterclass and they rocked the room with their project: A Celebration of Ignorance—a Romeo and Juliet story designed to bring together a young couple from Ibo (the East) and Yoruba

Nyadhour, Elevated, Death Valley, California, 2019 © Dana Scruggs

(the West), fragmented by the civil war that drove primordial sentiments crazily high. Telling the story of Thomas and Agnes, the story was delivered authentically, with a keen sense of audience behavior and told across SMS messages, newspaper columns, and a theatre truck driven into each location every Sunday. No highfalutin technology, no big-budget rollout, these storytellers knew who they were telling the story to, and how they wanted them to feel at the end.

In Singapore, Course Chair of the Diploma in Creative Writing for Television and New Media at Singapore Polytechnic Mary Chin co-produced the original web series “The Leon Theory,” encouraging her students to utilize transmedia story extensions over several media platforms. A playful look at what happens when a young boy ends up on an all-girl e-mag, this collaborative project ran for twelve episodes and was a wonderful example of what happens when content for young adults is actually made by young adults instead of their elders who only think they know better.

In Norway, public service broadcaster NRK had been prototyping and testing ideas to reach their ever-decreasing teen audience in a bid to bring them back from their devices and onto the NRK platform. SKAM, which translates to “shame” in English, took the internet by storm despite there being no legal English language subtitled streams and no official marketing push. Told in real-time across social media, the series aimed to reach the 30,000 sixteen-yearold girls in Norway. With a population at around 5.2 million, it is claimed that more people in Norway watched SKAM than Game of Thrones, and globally, multi-lingual viewers translated the show themselves, making episodes available via sharing platforms such as Google Drive.

Undertakings like these remind me how much I love working closely with story because, although we live our lives through stories, the ones that give meaning . . .

• incite emotion and make us feel. • have a strong beating heart, a captivating pacing, a rhythmic beat, a percussion. (I make many references to musical terminology when I talk about story, pacing and strategy—from harmony to symphony, from rhythm to percussion, from tone to volume).

A great story can live across multiple platforms, multiple timelines, and can reach audiences far and wide, taking us on a journey, and leaving us with a strong memory, a feeling, an emotion. That’s what great stories do. Across all cultures, stories remind us of what it is to be human; they give us connection and context and put us into scenarios, fantasy worlds, thrilling and harrowing story worlds that we would never have time to experience in our short time on earth. Stories enrich, empower, educate, advocate, activate, and inspire, but without a strong beating heart, without a universally resonant and humane central theme, they can rapidly dissolve to weak and dissatisfying.

As consumption habits have changed for a “new breed” of digitally-savvy, binge-consuming, always-on audience, so have some storytelling pillars. The fundamentals remain, but audience-centered storytelling has become a partnership, a collaboration, an act of co-creation, not a matter of the author leading the audience by the nose. After 150 years of mass media, it’s way too easy to assume that by not being passive, the audience is going to turn it all over to the author: it’s choose-your-own-adventure or nothing. But that’s not actually what most audiences want. If you look at the stories people respond to—popular TV shows with a strong social media following, they have a strong author, with something to say and a compelling way of saying it. People want a story they can immerse themselves in—an emotionally gripping narrative they can in some way inhabit with a strong central theme, a strong heartbeat that makes them feel and learn something about themselves.

In short: they want to be a passenger, not an onlooker.

So as a storyteller, how do you make room for them without giving them the wheel entirely? How do you switch control back and forth like in those cars they teach Driver’s Ed in? I’ve found that some storytellers are paralyzed by the paradox of choice—where do you get started, how many platforms, which ones do I need? In fact, a blind rush to “platform” and transmedia was one of the most deafening stampedes from 2007 to 2012. The simple solution is rooted in basic human behaviors and desires. Experiential entertainment built from the seed of a strong core theme is what anchors great storytelling and designs a path to invite an audience from being passive to active as you reach out, grab them by the hand, and pull them into the rabbit-hole of immersion. Which reminds me . . . .

I was six years old when I first remember falling down a rabbit hole.

As a little girl, clutching my Mum’s hand as she led me into a gloriously musty, red velveted cinema, I was transported, through a gold proscenium arch that had seen better days, and fell deep into a story world full of magic, fantasy, a Cheshire cat, a Mad Hatter, and an indulgent over-abundance of hearts. I had stumbled into a “brave new world.”

Atelier 1, Yumi Yamazaki The trouble was, 101 minutes later, things were never “normal” again. The flamboyant Queen of Hearts, a hapless King, and the henpecked Knave of Alice in Wonderland were imprinted in my brain along with Alice’s quandaries of whether to “drink me” or “eat me”—I’d fallen in love with story. I had also been introduced to the circular structure of the Hero’s Journey that once you see, you can rarely “unsee.” Through my childhood I began to find parallels of patterns from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with Gulliver’s Travels to The Wizard of Oz and Rebecca as I binged on films, soaked up plays, and devoured books. Alice (and Alison) falling down that rabbit hole set the stage for things to come, as we both learned something new about ourselves back in that red-velveted cinema.

A hungry fascination for story led me to write three best-selling novels, two theater plays, and a handful of movie scripts as well as penning scenarios for Fortune 100 companies to be translated to television, games, theme park experiences, and brand explorations. The common thread? Understanding story from an experiential perspective, and over the last 20 years I’ve worked with wide-eyed students, super-smart storytellers, professors that I’ve met through academia, producers, directors, and writers’ rooms across Hollywood Studios and passionate activist documentary filmmakers— all on story from the point of view of narrative design, experience design, and emotional design. From traditional pento-paper to deeply immersive, interactive, and experimental works.

Over the last fifteen years, I’ve had the amazing good fortune to be at the coalface of innovation and risk-taking in storytelling. So, in that crazy rush to platform, somewhere along the line story both began to dilute whilst also becoming more important than ever before. It’s

true that technology facilitates storytelling, but themed, experiential story listening makes people feel. I started my online writers’ program, Supersize Your Story, to teach storytellers and writers to learn to tell stories that “give people a twinge in their heart,” but not to be afraid of technology or experience design.

Boundary-pushing projects have existed in storytelling for decades. L’Arrivee d’un Train A la Ciotat, directed by August and Louis Lumiere in 1895, was the first public exhibition of motion pictures. The Lumiere Brothers exhibited a selection of ten of their single-reel films to a paying audience at a Parisian café. Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat is considered to be the first motion picture in modern history as an experiment. Popular legend says that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the “approaching” train and has been used numerous times in VR storytelling classes. It was only 100 years ago that Harold Lloyd was the king of the silent movie. Believe it or not, film too was once an entirely experimental medium.

Scoot on to the present day and you’ll find story experiences such as Awaken the Giants by Juliana Loh and Nicholas Liang—a personal story of self-actualization and the role humans play as an expression and extensions of well thought experience design within a metaverse setting. Blockchain Fairy Tales by Columbia DSL, where participants explore a playful world, contend with magical threats and face the question “What if Happily Ever After is Not Guaranteed?” What if, indeed.

It’s impossible to talk about experimental and boundary-pushing projects without mentioning the newest category of The Peabody Awards as they announced winners for Digital and Interactive Storytelling last month. Their newest category honored sixteen Legacy class winners as the Peabody Awards Interactive Board of Jurors unveiled twelve winning digital and interactive projects alongside four Special Awardees that have achieved outstanding feats in storytelling across interactive, immersive, and new media categories.

The distinguished Legacy Class of winners have created projects that span Gaming, Interactive Journalism and Documentary, Transmedia Storytelling and Virtual & Augmented Reality. Jeffrey Jones, executive director of Peabody, stated, “to recognize the present and future of storytelling in digital spaces, Peabody has taken the unusual step of looking backwards, recognizing landmark pioneering projects that have shaped and defined powerful stories in interactive and immersive media forms. We are honored to highlight these legacy projects and their creators, all of which signal the type of meaningful stories we will be recognizing each year going forward.”

Among The Peabody Award Legacy Winners for Digital & Interactive are two projects that I was especially thrilled to see take home awards as these were part of my introduction to experimental, experiential, and immersive storytelling.

The Beast, A.I. Transmedia Experience (2001), was awarded a Transmedia Storytelling award, with primary credits going to Jordan Weisman, Sean Stewart, Pete Fenlon, and Elan Lee. The Beast remains a story/experiential case study of mine and was originally developed as a marketing campaign to support the 2001 film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. The Beast played out over a massive network of fictional websites and other forms of media that combined to tell a sprawling tale set in the world of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. This mass-distributed form of storytelling, later dubbed an “alternate reality game,” provided a template for a new way to tell stories over the internet and connected media.

The 2007 game, World Without Oil, created by the brilliant Ken Eklund took an award in the Co-Creation and Transmedia Storytelling fields. Once again, unfolding online, this experience simulated a global oil shortage and over the thirty-two days the game ran. Each day played out one week of events, charting worldwide ramifications of a global oil shock. The game invited players from around the world to tell their own stories

of how the oil shortage was affecting their lives—through blog posts, voice recordings, pictures, video, and other user-generated content.

For the record, I’ve worked on my own experimental projects, too; one of my favorites, Dark Detour, is a Halloween horror anthology series told in real-time through social media and more. Happening in the days leading up to Halloween night, you’re invited to virtually travel in real-time with a series of hapless victims as they descend deeper into a place from where there seems to be no escape. It’s a horror story for the digital age; part of the fun is that this story was delivered through our characters phone to yours in various ways.

My belief is that innovations in storytelling lie not so much in the structure or shape of stories, as our brains are hardwired to recognize these patterns of quest, voyage-and-return, rise of the underdog, and overcoming the monster—but instead lie in the content, the execution, and the experiential and emotional considerations. And for me, story is an experience that takes us to a place where we ache to go again, and again, and again, to tell our friends. The convergence and experimentation of story and technology was summed up perfectly by Don Draper in Episode 13, Season 1 of Mad Men as he chokes up with emotion, watching footage of his family on a carousel during a pitch to Kodak: “Technology is a glittering lure. But there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product”.

Of course, cross-platform storytelling isn’t simply about nostalgia. It’s more ad-

venturous than that. But where it’s going is the great unknown, which is exactly what makes it so exciting and enticing. One of my first questions to storytellers, filmmakers and clients is “how do you want your audience to feel when they close down the laptop, switch off the television, shut the book or leave the theatre?” And the language around that reply needs to be more deeply considered than a simple, “great,” “happy,” or “that they loved it!” UK filmmaker and storyteller Martin Percy understands this on a level that really triggers active considerations of behavior change with his work Climate Emergency Interactive—a virtual watch party that aims to turn viewers into doers. This is an opportunity for people from around the world gather online to experience a film together. It’s about the climate Girl with no face, Arles, France 2021 © Eric Kwaku Akoto and ecological emergency. And how it relates to social justice, colonialism, sexism, intersectionality, politics, and creativity. It’s a collaboration between UNIT9 and the University of the Arts London (UAL) and was written by UAL students and staff, aiming to help students at UAL and people around the world find ways to build a more sustainable future. It turns viewers into doers. Real Talk About Suicide is his interactive film with a mission. In ACROSS ALL the UK, suicide is the leading cause of CULTURES, death for men and women under the age of 35. But, remarkably, most of us have STORIES REMIND very little idea about how to actually help a suicidal person. US OF WHAT IT IS Fundamentally, as humans, we have an intrinsic core desire for story; to give TO BE HUMAN. context and meaning. Great stories make us feel, but also present us with scenarios to consider how we might react, what we might do in the event of, or force us to form an opinion, and to look at an international roster of fabulous stories and storytellers underpins that we, as storytellers, have a great responsibility to continue to build bridges and never walls. ●