This Story Smells Funny…

Most of the time, stories that are staged for audiences use the senses of hearing and vision as starting points. A new opera uses smell and hearing instead.

Seating Affects Mental Experience

If you’re like me, you can never get comfortable in a theater seat. I fidget and shift trying to get knees (I’m 6’4″) and everything situated so I can pay attention to what’s onstage or onscreen.

Always interesting Tim Manners  blogs on Reveries about two related topics:  Restless Desks and Baby Buggies.

The Year of the Transmedia Roller Coasters

There was a time when a roller coaster hurled you around a track, flipped you upside down a few times and brought you breathlessly back to the station.  No storyline, no online media, no media to speak of.  A few coaster designers

The Friar Says Short is Good

Some time ago, I read that (according to the author), the shortest story on record was:

“As the last man on Earth

Color, Comprehension and Meaning

Are you one of those flat-earth people that still thinks the way your content is displayed doesn’t affect how people understand it?  It turns out there’s some actual proof

A Risk(y) Story

In the midst of what will probably be the most significant economic event in our lifetimes, we use storytelling to make sense of it.  Here’s four ways I’ve seen narrative being used to do so:

Lose (One) Sense for Dinner

Stories are often seen only through a verbal lens, and then are mostly interpretations of “what could be seen if one was there when it happened.”  What happens when that raw material is missing?  How do we fill in the gaps when we create the story of what happened when there was nothing to see?

Enter Dining in the Dark - a dining experience

Kathy Hansen’s “My Big, Fat Visual Storytelling Synthesis”

This blog post from A Storied Career is like much of the content there – a thoughtful take on story and storytelling technique.  This particular post is a great survey about great work in the field of visual storytelling.

I especially liked the piece by mechanised about the caravan, but could see myself returning again and again to Dr Chris Mullen’s Lyrical Encyclopedia of Visual Propositions on his Visual Telling of Stories site.

Finally, the Purposes of Visual Storytelling are wonderfully summarized in this post from Visuual.com. All in all, there’s plenty here to whet the appetite for more and stir your own personal curiosity.

Where does it take you?  What stories can you give voice to today that you couldn’t yesterday?

Harold and His Crayon Get Interactive

It’s a tired idea that interactivity onscreen starts first with clicking on objects, and then is quickly followed by shooting at them.

Petri Purho is a guy who looks at interactive games completely differently. 

The Fact(oids) Speak For Themselves

I’m sure you’ve seen the video.  Punchy factoids, cool music, and great visual design reveal a lot of meaning about our changing world.