Not Another Video

“We need a new video for our website. The old one is derivative and too formal and people can’t be bothered watching it.” 

And so began a conversation about producing a new video for this particular community groups. This not for profit catered for aged care clients with a full kitchen team directed by a professional chef operating out of an industrial kitchen. 

A website video might seem obvious. The organisation ion catered to people in aged care. They still get hungry, but they are no longer able to cook for themselves, so a community organisation steps in with culinary niceties matching their clients tastes and and promoting the conviviality enjoyed by the community. But this gave me pause for thought. 

From Linear Story to Storyplex

Form many years the hero's journey, originally from Joseph Campbell's work on mythology, has been the template for developing stories and with good reason. By all accounts, we are hard wired for story. It's the reason we love stories so much and in so many different forms. It is the reason why advertising works, why therapy gets results and how children learn. Under this template stories are linear usually moving through the familiar three act structure. Linear stories are an efficient way of developing understanding, resolving conflict and developing meaning. The term, "Being on the same page" is really about sharing the same story. But in 360º storytelling, that all changes. The term "Storyplex" refers to understanding and sharing experience more as a neural network than a linear pathway. Storyplexes better represent real life for interactive for leisure, culture and training experiences. Learners are offered a more immersive experience leading to faster and deeper learning with better recall.

Take the classic example of a construction site. Workers meet predictable hazards on the job. Training in the use of safety equipment, tools and machinery are essential in maintaining a safe working environment. 

Panoramas and Songlines

The most enduring stories on Earth are connected to places, remembered with songs and taught through dances. In this way, First Nations Peoples perform incredible feats of memory and experience deep connection to the ecology of people, places and country. Such memories are made for a lifetime and beyond and are accurately transmitted from generation to generation.

Recently, following a conversation in one of my favourite online groups, I felt a key turn in a lock. An old lock, with a heavy brass bolt, with an oval head of pressed metal on the key shaft and a tab with specified contour and profile on the far end, so as to marry the internal mechanism with a positive spring-loaded rotation to the hand, and a satisfying “klak” releasing the bolt. As the door swings open, key, lock, door and entire enclosure dissolve into thin air, revealing what I knew all along. At least that’s how I dreamt it.

What is it that obscures our vision up to the moment of seeing, and after, realising we knew it of old? A deep remembering, a restorative process, to which I say, “I know you. I lost you and now have found you again. I’ve always known you and now I know you name. You are me! Hello there!”

We are not merely connected to this Earth. We emerge from it and are part of it. We are but one facet of the story that belongs to our place of origin. What springs to mind, like the second half-turn of the spring loaded lock that completes it’s own rotation, is an image from a book I encountered doing my Masters in Social Ecology; a book entitled “Yorro Yorro, Original Creation and the renewal of Nature” by David Mowaljarlai”, or in the vernacular - “Everything Standing Up Alive”. Are not we each, one of the many fruits of this bountiful Earth, standing up alive?

Enter the Storyplex

This week I’ve adopted a new word, “Storyplex”. It comes out of my research into telling stories in 360º spacial immersion. Stephanie Riggs refers to it in “The End of Storytelling - the future of Narrative in the Storyplex”. I was shocked when I read the title, wedded as I am to storytelling from 20 years of documentary filmmaking. With a dire sense of the need to keep moving forward, I immersed myself in this small book. It was delighted and immediately won over to experiencing stories in a new way in 360º digital spaces.