Posts Tagged ‘storytelling’

Prisoner by dub72 @DeviantArt

Archaeologists suggest that the written word has been around for about 6,000 years. Before that knowledge was disseminated amongst humans through storytelling. If modern humans have been hanging around the earth for about 200,000 years, that means that for 194,000 years we developed a pretty robust capacity to capture the essence and meaning of critical information through the telling of stories.

I’ve been slowly but surely seeking out great storytellers who are leveraging the internet TV/video delivery capability to create, edit and publish their stories. Since I’m less interested in watching a couple of kids lip-synching or dancing to their favorite artist on YouTube, I’ve been gravitating toward higher quality sites like Vimeo and watching these videos really gets the wheels turning in my head, especially when I poke around within their over 5,000 HD channels, often watching while on the treadmill through my Roku box connected to a 26″ HDTV in the exercise room (a room which is used frequently here in Minnesota in the winter!).

Sometimes the videos are goofy. Often they’re visually stunning with no point other than experimenting with the technology. Other times they’re just too long and the storytelling is painfully dull. All that said, the gems I find most of the time make poking around the others worth the effort and I often wonder who the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg will be from this batch of budding filmmakers.

Last night on the treadmill I came across this sweet little story made by a woman named Karen Abad for her grad school cinematography class. It’s less than 3 minutes long, you should watch it until the end to “get” the point, and then check out the other HD channels to see some more great stories.