In the old days, writers worked with photographers at newspapers and magazines to produce stories. Some editors seemed to expect the photographers to simply illustrate the stories told by the writers. But the better ones saw a different process with a richer outcome.
They saw that the visual and editorial narratives worked together more like interlocking vines, snaking in and out into a product much greater than the sum of the parts.
When we got the mixture right, there was an interactive chain that moved, much like how musical notes fit with the words in a song.
Think about this. Can you hear a song by looking at the lyrics alone? Can you read the sound of the music?
Artists can.
And that goes for great story-telling in any form.
This process becomes slightly more complex when you move from the world of print story-telling into multimedia — radio, TV, and the movies. Now, the actual or mediated voices and images of people, their faces, their gestures all enter the media space between you and your audience.
It’s easy to overdue it. The story becomes preachy, a lecture or melodramatic like in a soap opera. So in serious media, this is where editors come in. We know that in most cases, less is more. Just let the sounds and the pictures tell the story. Silences become magnified, which is useful on many levels.
In a great story, what the teller leaves out, the listener fills in.
The reason I’ve gone so deeply into this is that today, in our world, every individual can be his or her own story-teller, simply by virtue of the powerful computer in our pockets we still call a “cellphone,” though it is so very much more than that. All of the world’s knowledge throughout the whole of human history is accessible via that tiny device.
You can research, you can write, you can shoot photos or “videos” and you can record sound, and even animate the product any way you wish. And fact-check it. One simple conversation can become a work of art, perhaps a highly valued NFT, catalogued and authenticated by the blockchain, exchanged via crypto, and enshrined digitally somewhere for what we might currently believe to be eternity.
Or not. And that’s only one of your infinite choices…
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