Sunday 20 May 2012

Unconventional Story Telling


If a picture can tell a thousand words, then the adage is worth tweaking slightly and thinking about how else a story can be told. The art of storytelling has always fascinated me. 
I have a friend who I met when I was about 16 and I've always been amazed at how she can turn a banal story into something hilarious, usually by stopping to laugh herself, leaving you hanging and then dropping a ridiculous line like "but the oven gloves turned out to be a false alarm" or some nonsense.
But what's also interesting is how people don't tell stories. Using their eyes or pauses in a sentence, people do it all the time, tell mini stories they don't want to or don't have time to go into like "then the pasta boiled everywhere and the evening was ruined" when actually the story inferred was probabley "then the pasta boiled over, she burned her hand and swore at me, we went and sat in casualty for five hours not talking to each other and then finally made up on the night bus home at 4am laughing about the nurse with the odd boobs". 
Beyond photos, videos and books there are so many ways to tell stories - with raised eyebrows, silent movies, art performance, animation and music - where the only thing in common is communication. Here are a couple of nice unconventional ways of getting messages across: