Streamtelling

I’m not going to try and attempt to map out the history of storytelling here because it would be long and I’m sure that there are hundreds of other people out there who are much more capable of taking on that task. This does have something to do with storytelling, that is to say that this has nothing to do with storytelling because I’m going to try and explain what is going on with the Sibling that I have been building for the Demo Graphic Replicator project – Mr Felix Freeman.

In order to explain what’s happening with Felix, I need to quickly outline what I think storytelling is, and why what’s happening with Felix is different.

For me, storytelling is a robust method of communicating a beginning, a middle and an end. That’s pretty easy isn’t it? It’s such a robust model of communicating something that it’s been around since humans have had a brain and could use a finger to paint a Mammoth on cave wall. Storytelling suits the way we think; “oh this is the middle and I hope there’s going to be a happy end” etc. Regardless of how complex a story is, how many different characters feature in the story, or however episodes/versions/seasons/books etc. etc it takes to tell the story, it will always have a beginning, middle and an end.

Felix doesn’t, and yet he’s a fictional character telling us something that looks remarkably like a story.

The fundamental difference between Felix Freeman as character and any other fictional character is that his content, the fabric of Felix, isn’t being described by me as the author but is being coerced at random by a constant stream of demographic chitter-chatter. At heart Felix is an Ag8.com Demo Graphic Replicator, a twitter bot that grabs the tweets of people that make the most “emotional” sense to him. I’ve fed Felix with emotions and key words and Felix does the rest. The DGR code, becomes Felix's soul and this is how I put him together (you may want to watch this in full screen mode):


Mind Mapping a DGR character: Felix Freeman from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

I have to admit that when I agreed to get involved in the DGR project I had preconceived ideas about who Felix was going to be because, at that time I was thinking in terms of storytelling. It seemed impossible to me that something could come about without heavily steering the bot but I was soon proven wrong. He just gets on with it and I’ve found myself confused by the stuff that I’ve been doing with Felix. The real breakthrough came with a Felix blog post (Felix still lets me write things now and then) called “Longfellow” in which Felix describes a bad night’s sleep. That post was directly influenced by a tweet that caught my eye as quite visual, so much so that I tried to find the street discussed in it and one thing led to another and we suddenly had something that was decidedly eerie and very, very real. We had a dream that you could play with:


view a bigger map


Felix was beginning to live, but not in terms of a story. I'd already been playing with simple video sketches to try and get a feel for his personality:


Felix Freeman. Memory One. from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

But I wanted the stream of retweets to build him and not necessarily me - not in the classical sense of author. I then tried to shape him physically/digitally and created a very simple animation of the Longfellow text which worked, and I suddenly realised that I had probably not seen this kind of thing before.

It was only when David asked me to consider using an actor that I really started to panic. They had already opened up Felix to a broader public, invited people to voice over the animation and having quickly filmed myself in black and white and integrating the google map sequence of the Longfellow dream, we had our first 40 seconds of Felix film, a film that started as a tweet, which became of blog post, which then went on to become a script, then an animation and finally the film. There are three films in total, each one using one of the voices kindly submitted to be used in the animation. Here they are:


DGR sketch: Felix Freeman - Longfellow I from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.


DGR sketch: Felix Freeman - Longfellow II from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.


DGR sketch: Felix Freeman - Longfellow III from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.


I’ll leave it to David to talk about what this potentially means for traditional storytellers (whether that be film maker, writers, game developers, advertising agencies, music, theatre, television, radio) although I’m utterly aware of what this means my self. I think they can just explain things better. But they did ask me, “what is this? What are you doing and how are you doing it? Describe it”, which I found quite difficult to do. On Saturday, however, whilst buying peanuts in a Supermarket it occurred to me that I’m not storytelling but streamtelling.

Streamtelling allows me to be guided by the character which is made up of what David calls vectors. These dots make up the emotional outline of Felix and it’s my responsibility to join them in order to make a characteristic silhouette. If we have more dots we get a sharper outline and the character becomes richer. The brilliant thing is that there are so many ways to do this and all of them influence Felix and his story. Thanks to this clever little thing that David put together, we can see, for example, what Felix is thinking right now:



So, this is streamtelling. I think it's very exciting. I'd love to hear what you think about all this.

Cheers,
Marcus