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The 10,0000 year old academic innovation
- 1. The 10,000 Year-Old Academic Innovation Associate Professor, Danny Mydlack Electronic Media & Film Department
- 2. Everyone’s a Filmmaker Now.
- 3. Hawkeye in the Lab
- 5. Talking Science to Grandma
- 6. First, Story
- 7. What?!
- 9. Save the Cat
- 10. Contrast is the Mechanism
- 11. Stories Are Made Not Found
- 12. Goats and Soda
- 13. Two-ness
- 14. Two Flavors of Contrast
- 17. The First 30 Seconds
- 18. The Power of Story
- 20. Beyond the Two Buckets
- 21. The App Format
- 22. Thank you
Editor's Notes
- From Anthropology to Business Administration, media fluency is the thing. That means making not just viewing. Videos are emerging as the most attractive and influential form. Whether they involve talking heads, B-roll, animations or just slides with words, these are non-fiction films and they have become our lingua franca.
- Alan Alda, you know, Hawkeye. From TV’s M*A*S*H. Six-time Emmy and Golden Globe winner. He’s been busy. He’s been hosting and narrating TV science shows. He, along with the Stonybrook University’s School of Journalism have set up the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, ‘the first center in the country devoted to training current and future scientists on how to communicate more effectively with the public, the press and public officials.’
- Alda's fingerprints are all over this program. You see an actor transferring his skills to the service of science communication. One of the intensive workshops is titled "Improvisation for Scientists.” Alda explains, "the end result will be to get you a little bit out of your head and more into your whole body..and open up a channel so the real you comes out. I hope that doesn't scare you too much.”
- Alda makes his case: "Here's just one example of how important it is to communicate science clearly. A member of congress told me about a hearing where leading scientists were testifying before a congressional panel. And not one of the members of congress could understand what the scientists were saying. They kept passing notes to one another. 'Do you know what they're saying? Do you?' These were intelligent people on both sides of the table. Why couldn't they make themselves understood to one another? This hasn't happened just once or twice. This happens a lot. Communicating science with clarity can only help scientists make their work better-understood by voters, by policy-makers, by funders. Even by researchers in other disciplines. Not to mention by the scientists' own grandmothers.”
- Stories hold us. Stories entertain the mind, in the best sense of the word. The word entertainment has its roots in the French word entretenir, to hold mutually. In the realms of business and marketing and even science there is an enthusiasm to uncover the 'story' of a product, an idea, or a concept. Analysts argue about the 'story' the data are trying to tell. Job seekers are encouraged to develop their story. Perhaps all of these people are appropriating the word story to connect with what is most ancient and human. Stories are what hold us.
- This rubs some professional storytellers the wrong way. Aren’t stories narrative sequences of events? Don’t stories have conflict and rising action? Plot? A beginning, a middle and an end?
- In fact, a large part of journalism involve stories with no conflict or plot. They are expository or presentational. And some of them, some, actually hold us. Even affect us. How do they do that without conflict, narrative arc or rising action?
- On the other hand, writing the Hollywood movie has never been easier. How-to books rain down on us. The story gurus have been giving away the secrets. The three-act structure has been codified down to the individual beat within a scene. Understand, great Hollywood movies have featured all types of characters in every setting imaginable. What story gurus know is that content is arbitrary. Form is what matters. For Hollywood, rising action over time is the form.
- For non-fiction, for non-dramatic documentary and presentational films, contrast is the formal mechanism. The ‘engine’ I like to say.
- The untrained think that the story is in the facts. How novel are those facts? How important? How revealing? It will be evident, right? According to the current mindset or worldview or meme-state. The job is to find that stand-out content. But the woman in a lab coat, the man labeling samples. They don’t have that luxury. They work with what they have. In fact, so do journalists. Compelling information-stories are made, not found.
- Nobody uses contrast to create a story better than NPR, you know, National Public Radio. Note the contrast just in these 3 story titles: A Cowhead Will Not Erupt From Your Body If You Get A Smallpox Vaccine When A Rebel Is Homesick He Might Be Willing To Surrender The Koisan Once Were Kings Of The Planet. What Happened? This year NPR launched a blog to showcase more stories. They named it “Goats and Soda.” Anders Kelto, a radio reporter on the team says he was “…traveling about in Africa, I saw a lot of goats. And a lot of soda. In rural southern Malawi, I came across a roadside snack shop in the middle of nowhere. The woman running the shop somehow had a refrigerator full of cold sodas. It struck me that a rather amazing sequence of events had led to that cold Coke in my hand.”
- I like to tell my students that the secret of the universe is two. I was invited to shoot story ideas with my university’s media relations people. What did they have? Construction was finishing on a major project. A new program was launched in the community. A professor published a scientific paper. I was told these stories were ready-made and all that was needed was to grab a camera and get ‘em on tape. These are items. They have story potential. Then again, anything has story potential. Stories are made, not found. I asked, “what is the two-ness of each story? What are the two elements that we can cross in contrast?”
- Hard news stories, burning buildings and crimes, are significant because of their contrast with the world and times. That contrast though is usually implied, almost unconscious. I say that that contrast is exogenous to the story. But today’s newspaper will line tomorrow’s birdcage. The contrast within most of those stories is broken as the world moves on. But good information-stories can be built on endogenous contrast. That is, contrast that is articulated within the story. I think that’s what we mean by timeless stories. In fiction or fact, stories that come more or less complete, all packed up with their contrast or conflict.
- So, that’s just part of my book “Something from Anything.” 1. Stories are king. 2. Information-stories run on the engine of contrast. I take the reader through two separate information-stories. From previsualizing to interview to soundbites to B-roll to voice-over to editing. All hanging off this principle: contrast.
- The second part of this presentation is about a tool I developed for my students to develop just such films. It’s an all-in-one mobile app. Essentially a doc-story bootcamp. It’s an attempt at a step-by-step procedure.
- The first step is to demonstrate the power of contrast in information stories. There was a terrific experiment conducted at the 2013 meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The first 30 seconds were played from videos produced by a variety of fellow scientists. Afterwards the scientist audience rated the videos. The results, I propose, illustrated the power of contrast.
- The second step sells the effectiveness of story in communication. It also expands the conventional definition to include engaging non-narrative, non-dramatic forms.
- The third step plunges students into what I think are the guts of story. Over the years I’ve watched students struggle trying to think up and develop stories. I’ve likened it to trying to start a fire with one stick. You need two sticks, rubbed together vigorously to produce that specific friction that will kindle a flame. So I used two words here. Two. And specific. I think it’s hard to hold two contrasting ideas, elements, people in our heads at the same time. But it is this split-thinking that is at the core of creativity. So, I devised a tool to help us split-think. For all the churning and chewing of our minds, the Two-Bucket Form says ‘take a step backwards.’ Propose the two-ness of your story and then simply, randomly, collect the specific bits as they come to mind. I say, ‘you’re walking down a beach with a bucket in each hand. In one, put rocks. In the other, put shells. The Two-Bucket Form presumes that the story is to be found in separating the fibers at hand. It presumes that specificity, generates.
- The software also includes steps for collecting B-roll, the footage we use besides interviews to embody the story. There’s also a step for writing the Voice Over. I employ something called accordion navigation. Things expand on the screen or roll up. As much as possible, we try not to leave the main page. This has proven to be especially touch-screen friendly. Works equally-well in portrait and landscape. Video and audio are formatted specifically to work on small mobile screens and as much as possible are embedded directly into the app.
- I use the mobile app format because that’s quickly becoming the universal format. BlackBoard has attempted to keep up by developing a general-use mobile app but it’s not very good. Most importantly, though, I’m attempting to push story development beyond the writer’s desktop and make it more available and persistent in the field. Seasoned filmmakers like to say that story development continues far beyond the finished script and on through shooting and editing. And that everybody in the cast and crew is the storyteller.