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How digital visual effects in film can be used to support storytelling- a guide for scriptwriters and students.Computer-generated effects are often blamed for bad Hollywood movies. Yet when a critic complains that "technology swamps storytelling" (in a review of Van Helsing, calling it "an example of everything that is wrong with Hollywood computer-generated effects movies"), it says more about the weakness of the story than the strength of the technology. In Digital Storytelling, Shilo McClean shows how digital visual effects can be a tool of storytelling in film, adding narrative power as do sound, color, and "experimental" camera angles-other innovative film technologies that were once criticized for being distractions from the story. It is time, she says, to rethink the function of digital visual effects. Effects artists say-contrary to the critics-that effects always derive from story. Digital effects are a part of production, not post-production; they are becoming part of the story development process. Digital Storytelling is grounded in filmmaking, the scriptwriting process in particular. McClean considers crucial questions about digital visual effects-whether they undermine classical storytelling structure, if they always call attention to themselves, whether their use is limited to certain genres-and looks at contemporary films (including a chapter-long analysis of Steven Spielberg's use of computer-generated effects) and contemporary film theory to find the answers. McClean argues that to consider digital visual effects as simply contributing the "wow" factor underestimates them. They are, she writes, the legitimate inheritors of film storycraft.

The Best Story Wins provides fresh perspectives on the principles of Pixar-style storytelling, adapted by one of the studio's top creatives to meet the needs of entrepreneurs, marketers, and business-minded storytellers of all stripes. Pixar movies have transfixed viewers around the world and stirred a hunger in creative and corporate realms to adopt new and more impactful ways of telling stories. Former Pixar and The Simpsons Animator and Story Artist Matthew Luhn translates his two and half decades of storytelling techniques and concepts to the CEOs, advertisers, marketers, and creatives in the business world and beyond. A combination of Luhn's personal stories and storytelling insights, The Best Story Wins retells the "Hero's Journey" story building methods through the lens of the Pixar films to help business minds embrace the power of storytelling for themselves!

Storytelling can be a lifelong and life sustaining habit of mind, a personal inheritance that connects us to our communities. It can also serve as an organizational inheritance--a management tool that helps businesses to develop and thrive. For more than a decade, award-winning author Janis Forman has been helping executives to tell stories in service of their organizational objectives. In Storytelling in Business: The Authentic and Fluent Organization, she teaches readers everywhere how the craft of storytelling can help them to achieve their professional goals.Focusing on the role of storytelling at the enterprise level, this book provides a research-driven framework for engaging in organizational storytelling. Forman presents original cases from Chevron, FedEx, Phillips, and Schering-Plough. Organizations like those featured in the book can make use of storytelling for good purposes, such as making sense of their strategy, communicating it, and developing or strengthening culture and brand. These uses of storytelling generate positive consequences that can have a sustained and significant impact on an organization. While large firms employ teams of digital and communication professionals, there's much that any of us can extrapolate from their experience to create stories to further our own objectives.To show the reach of storytelling, Forman conducted 140 interviews with professionals ranging from CEOs in small and thriving firms, to corporate communication and digital media experts, to filmmakers--arguably the world experts in visual storytelling. She draws out specific lessons learned, and shows how to employ the road-tested strategies demonstrated by these leaders. Although this book focuses on storytelling in the context of business, Forman takes inspiration from narratives in literature and film, philosophical and social thought, and relevant concepts from a variety of other disciplines to instruct the reader on how to develop truly authentic and meaningful tales to drive success. A final chapter brings readers back to square one: the development of their own "signature story."This book is a pioneering work that guides us beyond the pressure and noise of daily organizational life to influence people in a sustained, powerful way. It teaches us to be fluent storytellers who succeed by mastering this vital skill.

In Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination, Eric Herhuth draws upon film theory, animation theory, and philosophy to examine how animated films address aesthetic experience within contexts of technological, environmental, and sociocultural change. Since producing the first fully computer-animated feature film, Pixar Animation Studios has been a creative force in digital culture and popular entertainment. But, more specifically, its depictions of uncanny toys, technologically sublime worlds, fantastic characters, and meaningful sensations explore aesthetic experience and its relation to developments in global media, creative capitalism, and consumer culture. This investigation finds in Pixar's artificial worlds and transformational stories opportunities for thinking through aesthetics as a contested domain committed to newness and innovation as well as to criticism and pluralistic thought.

People forget facts, but they never forget a good story. Unfortunately it's never that simple, though. Because for most, there's nothing easy about crafting a memorable story, let alone linking it to professional goals. But material for stories and anecdotes that can be used for your professional success surround you! Let the Story Do the Work shows you how to mine your experience for simple narratives that will achieve your goals. You can learn to:* Capture attention* Engage your audience* Change minds* Inspire action* Pitch persuasively* And more!When you find the perfect hook, structure your story according to its strengths, and deliver it at the right time in the right way, you'll see firsthand how easy it is to turn everyday communications into opportunities to connect, gain buy-in, and build lasting relationships.

In a world awash in screenwriting books, The Science of Screenwriting provides an alternative approach that will help the aspiring screenwriter navigate this mass of often contradictory advice- exploring the science behind storytelling strategies. Paul Gulino, author of the best-selling Screenwriting- The Sequence Approach, and Connie Shears, a noted cognitive psychologist, build, chapter-by-chapter, an understanding of the human perceptual/cognitive processes, from the functions of our eyes and ears bringing real world information into our brains, to the intricate networks within our brains connecting our decisions and emotions. They draw on a variety of examples from film and television -- The Social Network, Silver Linings Playbook and Breaking Bad -- to show how the human perceptual process is reflected in the storytelling strategies of these filmmakers. They conclude with a detailed analysis of one of the most successful and influential films of all time, Star Wars, to discover just how it had the effect that it had.

Despite all the high-tech tools available to salespeople today, the most personal method still works best. Through storytelling, a salesperson can explain products or services in ways that resonate, connect people to the mission, and speak to the part of the brain where decisions are made. The well-crafted story can pack the emotional punch to turn routine presentations into productive relationships.In Sell with a Story, author Paul Smith, one of the world's leading experts in organizational storytelling, focuses his wildly popular and proven formula to the sales arena. He identifies the ingredients of the most effective sales stories and reveals how to:* Select the right story* Craft a compelling and memorable narrative* Incorporate challenge, conflict, and resolution* And moreLearning from model stories, skill-building exercises, and enlightening examples from Microsoft, Costco, Xerox, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hewlett-Packard, and other top companies, readers will soon be able to turn their personal experiences into stories that introduce yourself, build rapport, address objections, add value to the product, bring data to life, create a sense of urgency . . . and most importantly, sell!"If you're serious about increasing your effectiveness as a communicator and looking to transform your sales results, Sell with a Story is for you. This book empowered and energized me, and I know it will do the same for you." --Mike Weinberg, consultant, speaker, and author

Storytelling in the Digital World explores new, emerging narrative practices as they are enacted on digital platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Contributors' online ethnographies investigate a wide range of themes including the nature of processes of transformation and recontextualization of offline events into digital narratives; the effects of digital anonymity and pseudonymity on narrative practices; the strategies through which virtual communities discursively work together to solidify and negotiate their sociocultural identities; the tensions between the affordances that characterize different online media and the communicative needs of users; the structures and modes in which virtual users construct and enact participatory practices in these environments; and the significance of different spatiotemporal dimensions in the encoding, sharing and appreciation of stories. More generally, the volume engages with some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that the growing presence of digital technologies and media poses to narrative analysis. Originally published as special issue of Narrative Inquiry 27:2 (2017)

How leaders can use the right story at the right time to inspire change and action This revised and updated edition of the best-selling book A Leader's Guide to Storytelling shows how storytelling is one of the few ways to handle the most important and difficult challenges of leadership: sparking action, getting people to work together, and leading people into the future. Using myriad illustrative examples and filled with how-to techniques, this book clearly explains how you can learn to tell the right story at the right time. Stephen Denning has won awards from Financial Times, The Innovation Book Club, and 800-CEO-READ The book on leadership storytelling shows how successful leaders use stories to get their ideas across and spark enduring enthusiasm for change Stephen Denning offers a hands-on guide to unleash the power of the business narrative.

The first-of-its-kind book on data story telling set in the Indian context by an Indian author.The Power of Data Storytelling is a book that aims to solve the classic dilemma of--How do I make company data interesting and present it in the form of a great data story for today's time-crunched professionals. The book focuses on various methods of converting dry facts and figures into interesting characters, events and relaying them in the form of a story to enable company's decision-making.  The book covers all data story related aspects--art of storytelling, building, writing and visualizing. The book reflects practical corporate examples from varied fields and how data storytelling enabled the decision-making process. It does not require knowledge of sophisticated tools and introduces new, simple and application-oriented methods at every stage to take data storytelling forward.  The book has wide application across industries and organizations with data sets that are big and small. It has explanatory written and visual examples at every discussion which makes it less theoretical and more practically applicable.

What if fairy-tale characters lived in New York City? What if a superhero knew he was a fictional character? What if you could dispense your own justice with one hundred untraceable bullets? These are the questions asked and answered in the course of the challenging storytelling in Fables, Tom Strong, and 100 Bullets, the three twenty-first-century comics series that Karin Kukkonen considers in depth in her exploration of how and why the storytelling in comics is more than merely entertaining. Applying a cognitive approach to reading comics in all their narrative richness and intricacy, Contemporary Comics Storytelling opens an intriguing perspective on how these works engage the legacy of postmodernism--its subversion, self-reflexivity, and moral contingency. Its three case studies trace how contemporary comics tie into deep traditions of visual and verbal storytelling, how they reevaluate their own status as fiction, and how the fictional minds of their characters generate complex ethical thought experiments. At a time when the medium is taken more and more seriously as intricate and compelling literary art, this book lays the groundwork for an analysis of the ways in which comics challenge and engage readers' minds. It brings together comics studies with narratology and literary criticism and, in so doing, provides a new set of tools for evaluating the graphic novel as an emergent literary form.

A must-read for incorporating digital literacy into your classroom! Equip your students with essential 21st-century media literacy skills, as they read, write, speak, and create art within the context of digital storytelling, and reach deeper understandings in all areas of the curriculum! In this second edition, both novice and technologically adept K-12 educators will find: Practical techniques to combine storytelling with curriculum content Tips for exploring effective storytelling principles through emerging digital media as well as via traditional literacy skills in reading, writing, speaking, and art Visual aids and video clips that illustrate best practices in media composition

`Too afraid to have a go at oral storytelling in the classroom? This is the book for you!...The book guides you through choosing a tale you really enjoy, knowing your audience and not being afraid to adapt a tried and tested fairy tale' - Literacy Time `This book is ideal for all adults working with children (mainly at primary level) and would be especially useful for those less confident or who are new to their role. It provides a great opportunity to practise an inspirational and creative approach to teaching and learning...I really enjoyed this book and took away much to think about' - Ruth Underwood, primary inclusion co-ordinator `The ability level for this book is aimed at teachers teaching ages 5-11 and I'd say the author has it spot on. As an educational resource I rate this book highly and think it is a valuable read for all primary teachers. It helps you to think of how you can use storytelling as a tool in ways you won't have thought of before. It's a very enjoyable read and if you're pushed for time you can just dip into the parts you want. I definitely recommend it' - TES website Drawing on her experience as a professional storyteller, in this book, Alison Davies show teachers how to develop storytelling skills as part of a new engaging approach to creative teaching and learning. Packed with hands on, practical advice, the book also includes a range of stories for teachers to use in different class situations. The stories are in an easy to learn format, with pointers and tips on how to tell them and how to involve the class. Topics covered include: - bullying - disabilities - computer games - friendship - greed There are also lots of lesson plans with ideas for starters, mains and plenary sessions, and tips on developing creativity and presentation of ideas in an engaging manner to suit any topic or situation across the curriculum. As well as giving the reader the opportunity to practice their new skills and giving them the confidence to develop their own stories, the activities help them to develop these skills in young people. The book is ideal for teachers, teaching assistants, youth club workers-anyone in a primary level setting who has the opportunity to develop storytelling as a creative and inspirational experience. Alison Davies has also edited Shrouded in Darkness: Tales of Terror to raise money for DebRA, a national charity working on behalf of people with the genetic skin blistering condition, Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB). The book features contributions from from Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Christopher Fowler, Simon Clark and Graham Masterton. All royalties from this book will go to the charity to help them continue their good work. Please click on this link to view details of this book.