Jackie Mahendra
Field Notes
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Highlight of the (work) week? Sprinting on this infographic for the #TrayvonMartin campaign. Featured on Mashable and The Guardian.
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WATCH: “Magic and Storytelling, Marco Tempest @TED2012.” Loved this: “Our stories make us the people we are, and sometimes the people we want to be.”
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#StopKony2012 = storytelling on steroids?
Invisible Children’s new viral video captures the intensity and urgency of “an idea whose time is now.” The goal? Stopping Uganda’s rebel leader Joseph Kony by making him famous.
“Kony 2012” seeks to “raise support for [Kony’s] arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” It sets forth to accomplish this through a powerful sequence of layered storytelling that calls the viewer to participate in an international “army for peace.”
The viral video — with millions of YouTube views in just 2 days — slices and dices conventional wisdom about online video for social change. It’s 30 minutes long, for one thing! The high-quality cinematography and gripping plot, however, combine forcefully with the “promise” at the start, which carries us willingly along to the end: that the narrator will tell us how to right an incredible wrong.
By deftly carrying viewers back and forth between “what is” and “what could be,” the video successfully sells viewers (at least those coming from a Caucasian, male, Western perspective) on the creators’ idea. “Kony 2012” manages to convince potentially apathetic viewers that they are capable of changing something that seemed nearly impossible to affect a mere thirty minutes prior: the ongoing kidnapping and exploitation of children in Uganda.
Storytelling at its most potent.
For their part, celebrities are beginning to take note — and tweet their fans. A quick search for #StopKony2010 is dizzying, as people are tweeting the video multiple times a second. Proving its efficacy, the video has already spawned several sarcastic memes and extended critiques, including an important question about promoting US military intervention to stop Kony.
What do you think of Kony 2012?
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Watch this incredible branding video by The Guardian, which uses the principles of storytelling — and a well-known story — to make their point.
Exceptional.
Love for this video and the newspaper is reflected in the comments on YouTube:
Keep your chinny chins up ‘The Guardian’. Try to stay in business despite the end of the printed newspaper era, I’d appreciate it - you’re an excellent journal. —
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The book is fundamentally making a promise; this story will lead somewhere worth time. A well told promise is like a pebble being pulled back in a slingshot that propels you through the story to the end.
From the TED Blog:
Andrew Stanton is the writer behind the three hugely successful Pixar Toy Story movies as well as the writer and director of WALL-E
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Spent last week playing around with Pinterest. Introduing: Adventures in Storytelling.
See also: Pinspiration.
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“Real life doesn’t always make sense, but a story must. Distractions fill the progress of our days, but a story has to move along from one point to another. Everything in a story advances the message or moral.”
— Erik Hare quoting Aristotle, from The Three Elements of Storytelling
Photo Credit: Yves Lecoq
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70% of how we learn is through stories, says Michael Margolis, author of Believe Me: a Storytelling Manifesto for Change-Makers and Innovators.
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Photo reblogged from The Smithian
Powerful image, powerful statement… powerful story?
I’ve been exploring the different realms of digital storytelling that relate to activism this week, as I get ready to jump into a new project on this topic. While inherently limited as a 2-D graphic, this image contains many of the essential storytelling elements: emotion, drama, sympathetic characters, vivid details, conflict, and the choice moment of a story within it, turning the viewers/audience into part of a resolution of the story (i.e. click on the link to do something).
Alternately, it pegs viewers as complicit in the possible non-resolution of the story (i.e. the threat of another 10 years without justice). Other thoughts?
I’m on the lookout for images, videos, Pinterest boards, and campaigns that tell powerful stories in the weeks ahead, so feel free to share away.
![Storytelling quip of the day from @DrNickMorgan of Forbes:
“[Stories are] how are brains work… Why we all feel that it’s safer to drive than fly, even though the statistics prove the opposite.”
P.S. More anti-gravity photos here.
P.P.S. More on how our brains work over at BigThink.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzqzlheK2Z1rn8cwbo1_400.jpg)
