“NARRATIVE PROTOTYPING”

Let’s start with a few words on “making movies”. There are numbers of established audiovisual storytelling techniques covering every aspect of a film production. There are also many ways to analyse films, critically their qualities critically, assess their relevance in various cultural contexts, and even measure their resonance with any chosen audiences. Some of these techniques function in professional (industrial) environments as efficient tools favoured by producers to quantify the predictive “fitness” of a casting choice, a character design, a plot point or an edit, and thus forge the basis of any feedback during the iterative development of a film project. These methods may “optimise” the workflow or speedup the collaborative dynamic between different actors of a production environment. Still, the process of storytelling remains full of undiscovered areas. This is what interests us here.

Drafting stories for the screen is a manyfold process allowing their creators to formulate and confront a scalable amount of questions. Human beings spend a good deal of their social lives telling stories, - so much so, that this particular affinity for storytelling is coined as biologically distinctive. Some may have believable arguments to brand the homo sapiens as “storytelling animal”, and explain the survival of our species by framing our evolutionary advantage in the unique ability to “store” knowledge in stories. Stories have a proven educational potential for social learning, they teach us values and norms through narrative.

We’ve been arguably gathering around a “fire” to tell and listen to stories since ages and “mass media”, at least until the demise of linear television, has been understood to fill and expand that role. Then came the internet and the 20th´s century conventional understanding of the public sphere started to wobble . Telling those stories in digital times involves a variety of creative and collaborative practices that weren´t part of the universe in the mass-media versions of the “public”, and definitely not part of the hunter-gatherer version of humanity. Access to cheap recording and editing technology, to endless libraries of archival material, and to generative technologies, changed our relationship to stories and arguably also changed “our” awareness of reality.

With the rise of the smartphone´s video features, every user potentially became an amateur film maker. Video became a second nature and “making movies” so casual, that a concentrated attention on the nature and potential of film language may feel to younger generations somewhat out of place or casual.

If we take a step back and pay closer attention, we come to realise what a curious phenomenon audiovisual storytelling is.

What is actually happening when we’re telling stories with images and sounds? …starting with written or spoken words, voice, gestures and rhythms …to engage with space, movement, colours, light, pitch, stage and and frame? When we draw, paint, collage, edit, add, subtract, cut and uncut material in sequence?…What kind or work is this? What does it have to do with social life and meaning making? Where is the process starting, where does it ever stop?

With or without a screen or a camera, cinema is a way to approach human experience, - a way to think, feel, relate and be in the world. In the seminars and workshops presented here, we embrace film as eternal beginners. With a fresh mindset, we…..

The teaching activities introduced here seek to help participants explore contemporary themes through narrative engagement, both as creative spectators and critical “makers”. Learning from audiovisual storytelling in all existing shape and form, the workshops and seminars provide context for the research and development of creativeprototypes drafting a variety of digital formats (movies, games, magazines, immersive environments, maps, etc…) with the intent to achieve a specific communicative purpose.

These seminars rely on modules featuring :

1- creative reading activities training the explorative interpretation of vast array of materials : images, art works, films, posts, etc.

2- narrative experiments training various audiovisual conception processes and sub-processes (writing, storyboarding, staging, framing, editing etc..).

3- Iterative and re-iterative processes combining 1 & 2 in sequential assignments and reflective activities.

Developed in various collaborative constellations, these projects investigate what can be learnt, taught and researched with, about and through narrative practices involving images, sounds and words in all possible configurations and imaginable formats.

They typically stage the development of a prototype, starting from their initial ideation, development and re-iteration loops, observing every step as creative situations allowing participants to discover their own ideas rather than just formalising them. They gather impulses from domains as diverse as fictional and documentary film-making, contemporary art practices, experience design, communication strategy or screenwriting (a.o), and use them to conceive media experiences with and/or for specific publics and communities.

What exactly is meant with prototype?