Stories

    Today in my Journalism class we had a guest speaker. She is the professor for the same class, but different time. She talked to us about story-telling. Obviously I thought, "Here we go. Here is another presentation about story-telling. We know about story-telling." But I was wrong.
    She talked about how story telling is part of our human nature. We remember things and we share things through stories. The metaphor she used was all stories start off as a thrift shop; there are different aspects to a story and are all mixed up. The stories we present to the world are like organized stores; one thing leads to another then another until the story is formed and it doesn't look half bad. It looks complete.
    She also talked about emotion. How emotion in a story can sway or manipulate people. When she was saying this, I thought of course! This is the kind of thing taught for cinema studies. To change how you want the audience to feel about a character or situation you have to manipulate the audience; this means specific audio and visual qualities that will move the audience. Such as if you want to induce tears, show sad visual with sad music.
    I feel so lucky to have ended up in SOJC. Seriously. I came to college to study something on a whim and ended up finding something I want to do. I want to tell stories. I want to give people the voice they never thought they could have. I want to change how people see things and move them to change themselves and the world around them. I have such a hard time telling stories with words that maybe I can do something with motion picture.

Ken Burns: On Story from Redglass Pictures on Vimeo.

Go forth and tell stories. Communicate with all.

Cheers,
Claire