What if everyone on Earth was a storyteller? What stories would they share? Who would they share them with? These are the questions that I started asking myself recently. As technology has made it cheaper than ever to create and share content, there never been more potential for new forms of storytelling. Everyone knows that the future of storytelling can’t look like the past, but nobody seems to know what it will be.
Unfortunately, what have so far are dramatic chipmunks and television studios putting old episodes of Battlestar Galactica on Hulu.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the radical changes the Internet has brought us have a much-wider potential for innovative storytelling. Up until now, we’ve been doing the same things we did on television and film, just on the Internet. It’s as if, at the dawn of the television age, producers just recorded live performances of radio shows and broadcast them on TV.
And in fact, that’s exactly what happened. Over time though, the story changed to fit the medium, becoming something entirely new. That’s where we’re at now. It’s like the era of the talkies, with everyone experimenting with new ideas, models and techniques. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I have some ideas of where this is all heading.
For the last four years, I have been diving head first into the deep end of digital entertainment. I started out as a journalist deeply interested in digital technology, but since then I’ve dusted off my old film degree and worked for innovative companies like Vuguru, EQAL and Electus — all along the way, learning how traditional Hollywood was adapting to the digital revolution.
Last year I decided to take a crack at it myself. The result was FOODIES, a three-episode web series “pilot” that got picked up by The Village Voice, Eater, The Globe & Mail, you name it.
Along the way, I found great collaborators to work with and we began to create branded content for companies like BCBG, Pop Chips and American Express — all the while dedicating ourselves to bringing fantastic production quality and innovative storytelling to the digital sphere.
This spring we were invited by Intel and Katalyst to pitch the “next big idea” in digital storytelling. Our concept, an online courtroom TV drama called Flame Court was selected as a winner by a panel of judges that included YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, among other people. It was a good sign that we’re on the right track.
To say it’s been a learning experience is an understatement. Along the way, I became less concerned with simply telling my own stories and more concerned with helping other people tell their stories. In the digital age, everyone is a storyteller. We’re moving away from the model of a theatre, with a passive audience and an active stage and towards the model of a campfire, a place that people gather around to share and participate in the act of telling stories.
The future of storytelling is social. It’s about creating shows that star you and your friends, that merge fantasy with your daily reality and which exist 24/7. In the past, films could take you away for an hour and TV shows created a world that came around once a week. We now have the ability to create shows that fuse into your life, becoming a part of it.
I’m convinced this is the next step in the evolution of storytelling. In many ways, it’s a return to the kinds of stories we told each other thousands of years ago, where tribesman would sing of their exploits over a nice mammoth BBQ. It’s also something entirely new. If we can enable everyone on Earth to tell their stories, what will they tell us? Having been a journalist for many years, I know the power of stories to cast light on people and ideas that we might never consider.
The future of storytelling is not another gimmick or distribution channel. The future of storytelling comes in empowering people to tell their own stories; to find engaging and entertaining ways to connect people through narrative and to take the vicarious thrill of watching a hero on the screen and transform it into the living experience of being a hero.
This is why I started JStrike Studio. It’s one thing to see the future, but quite another to bring it into the world. In the past few months, we have begun assembling a team, meeting with potential partners and clients and creating a game plan to make this vision a reality.
Starting today, we want to share that experience with the rest of the world. We’re big on openness and conversation and we’d like to invite you to come along on this ride with us. We’ll be blogging here at www.jstrike.com as well as on Facebook about our journey and hope you’ll not only follow along, but share with us your thoughts and ideas as well.
-Japhy
