The Future of Storytelling Conference 2013On a beautiful morning in early October, a ferry sailed from the tip of Manhattan to Staten Island, with music playing written just for this boat ride, just for these passengers.

If this sounds like the beginning of what could be anything from a romance novel to a tale of adventure, the style (and ambiguity) were done with a purpose: to open this article as a traditional story might open. There is the establishment of time, place and a vague outline of character. Such was the nature of the one-day “Future of Storytelling” (FoST) event, held on October 3, 2013 in Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, New York City. The locale was chosen carefully by Charles Melcher, founder of FoST, giving it the flavor of events more like Picnic (in Amsterdam) than SxSW.

The conference combined theatrical staged activities and performances, roundtable conversations held in small meeting spaces indoors where 20-30 can gather to share, ideate, and learn, areas to workshop and play at storytelling in different ways, both analog and digital, and, finally, large outdoor gathering places for eating, mulling, and networking. The Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island fit the bill perfectly for Future of Storytelling activities.

FoST was designed to disrupt the traditional conference model. Before the event, there were opportunities to join fellow attendees on a “studio crawl” around New York locations with connections to the FoST. Attendees also receive advanced access to specially made short films, each featuring a FoST speaker discussing his or her area of expertise. On the day of the summit, attendees joined the speakers for 60-minute roundtable conversations, using their short film as a point of departure for further exploration.

For readers of vizworld.com, I think there were important take-aways about the use of both traditional and historic forms of storytelling that included oral tradition, visually-driven stories, such as the masterful use of silhouettes/puppets and visual effects, with no words spoken as performed by Manual Cinema, dance, drawing, and employing graphic recorders (including myself) to capture the stories within the roundtable conversations, as  you will see below.

Here is Charles Melcher’s 6-minute introduction to FoST2013:

[youtube url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWFlQS9K4k0&feature=share&list=UUxANyRzvWuk9A5r71joGNNg” autohide=”0″ fs=”1″ hd=”1″ rel=”0″ showsearch=”0″]

 

Roundtable Conversations

I had the opportunity to attend and graphically record three of the roundtable conversations at the conference. The original images of these graphic recordings are 4′ x 8′ wide, and were captured on paper on the wall as the conversations were happening.

[carousel arrows=”display” buttons=”display” caption=”display”]
[panel title=”National Film Board of Canada Chairperson Tom Perlmutter” description=”Perlmutter believes that new modes of storytelling “will lead us to radically different ways of engaging with the world.””]Tom-Perlmutter-FoST2013[/panel]
[panel title=”Felix Barret, Artistic Director of Punchdrunk” description=”Crossfade reality with fiction”]Punchdrunk-FoST2013[/panel]
[panel title=”John Johnson and Debika Shome of Harmony Institute” description=””How do we see a change in the process of telling stories?””]Harmony Institute-FoST2013[/panel]
[/carousel]

The concluding gathering of all of the participants was back in the theater where the day started, and included performances by Natasha Bedingfield and an amazing feat of storytelling by the Hiphop improvisation group, Freestyle Love Supreme. Here is their summary of the events of the day, as told to them by a conference participant and then re-told in their unique freestyle hiphop:

[youtube url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEdg9gOk_A0&feature=share&list=UUxANyRzvWuk9A5r71joGNNg” autohide=”0″ fs=”1″ hd=”1″ rel=”0″ showsearch=”0″]

The Future of the Future of Storytelling conference

With Charles Melcher’s invocation that the Future of Storytelling should be more than a conference, there is now a website where the public is invited to join and share their storytelling ideas and experiences, by registering here.

I’m looking foward to seeing the community from the event connect and widen, to create and share new stories together even before the Future of Storytelling 2014 takes place.

Go to www.futureofstorytelling.org for more information, to join, and to watch for updates.