Category Archives: Storytelling

Using Google Earth to Complement and Organize Stories

For whomever may be interested in using Google Earth to enhance narratives, check out:
Fantastic YouTube GE channel with quick useful tutorials:
GE support group with timeslider tools, models, etc:
.kmz file from the above bulletin board with places mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays:
 http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=155428&site_id=1#import


GoogleLitTrips links page:
Cool screenshots of “Grapes of Wrath” from LitTrips:
Record a fly-through tour of a character’s travels for sharing on a blog:
“The Sightseer” – Google Earth’s Monthly Newsletter:
Overview of GE capabilities (cool sunlight animation):
 http://www.juicygeography.co.uk/googlecoursework.html
Thanks to Ted Mathot for inspiration.  Check out how Ted has used Google Maps to follow his character Cora’s journey through the American West.

Storytelling in Song: Kerrville Folk Music Festival

 
Great storytelling can be found in songs and some of the best narrative songwriters can be heard around campfires for an entire month in Kerrville, Texas each summer.  Check them out sometime.  Bring a tent, your sketchbook, and a smile while pausing to listen to some of the best storytellers in America from your campsite. (There are even storytelling workshops!)
 
Actually very sophisticated advice on how to write a narrative song, useful for writers of all kinds:  http://folkmusic.about.com/od/tipsforpros/ht/WriteASong.htm
 
Some of the most gifted ‘Americana’ storytellers:
 

Power of Art: Tales for Little Rebels

“Tales for Little Rebels anthologizes 75 years of radical children’s literature. It’s a rousing, relevant chronicle of teaching kids about social and environmental justice, civil rights, and their power to challenge the status quo.” 
Julie Hanus, The Utne Reader.
 
From the New York University Press: “Rather than teaching children to obey authority, to conform, or to seek redemption through prayer, twentieth-century leftists encouraged children to question the authority of those in power. Tales for Little Rebels collects forty-three mostly out-of-print stories, poems, comic strips, primers, and other texts for children that embody this radical tradition. These pieces reflect the concerns of twentieth-century leftist movements, like peace, civil rights, gender equality, environmental responsibility, and the dignity of labor. They also address the means of achieving these ideals, including taking collective action, developing critical thinking skills, and harnessing the liberating power of the imagination.
 
Some of the authors and illustrators are familiar, including Lucille Clifton, Syd Hoff, Langston Hughes, Walt Kelly, Norma Klein, Munro Leaf, Julius Lester, Eve Merriam, Charlotte Pomerantz, Carl Sandburg, and Dr. Seuss. Others are relatively unknown today, but their work deserves to be remembered. (Each of the pieces includes an introduction and a biographical sketch of the author.) From the anti-advertising message of Johnny Get Your Money’s Worth (and Jane Too)! (1938) to the entertaining lessons in ecology provided by The Day They Parachuted Cats on Borneo (1971), and Sandburg’s mockery of war in Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), these pieces will thrill readers intrigued by politics and history—and anyone with a love of children s literature, no matter what age.”
 
Review Link:

I’ll be friends!! Anonymous Secret Twitter Application

 

If you ever want to read the best in human writing open the prayer request book of a hospital chapel and expose yourself to the full human spirit.  Hospital prayer request books are filled with heart-wrenching pleadings and expressions of gratitude from all walks of life.  You’ll never read anything similar.  Souls desperate, broken, and thankful in ways we can never imagine write directly to God.

Read chapel prayer books in hospitals to jump in the deep end.  Do not think you can imagine what they say, go to a hospital and read one. Fact is definitely stranger than Fiction.

Occasionally I want to bug a church’s confessional. Still, though, that would be a preselected group, and, they wouldn’t necessarily be any more honest or forthcoming than humanity in other venues.  Thankfully the Anonymous Secret Twitter stream @SecretTweetis more efficient (…although there are dishonest posts with agendas, too). For me, most enlightening has been the number of people who are decent, and especially, are deeply truly in love with their soul-mates — contrary to the depiction of love by mainstream media.

“My 22nd birthday is next week. The only thing I wish for is a friend”
http://secrettweet.com/secret.php?id=57358

“Your smile and your presence is more powerful than you know.”
http://secrettweet.com/secret.php?id=55695

“Im agnostic but belong2church so I can sing in choir. It’s my only musical outlet n small town”
http://secrettweet.com/secret.php?id=53163

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits

The “seven dirty words” are seven English-language words that comedian George Carlin first listed in 1972 in his monologue Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. At the time, the words were considered highly inappropriate and unsuitable for broadcast on public airwaves in the United States. As such, they were avoided in scripted material, and bleep-censored in the rare cases in which they were used; broadcast standards differ throughout the world, then and now, although most of the words on Carlin’s original list remain taboo on American broadcast television as of 2010.

It is almost as hard to imagine Christ telling a parable to tax collectors and prostitutes as it is to imagine him doing so without curse words.  They are a part of our social fabric as humans: the real world, the factual world, the world in which we and our children function. They are important to developing real world characters with which children can identify. There is something wrong with obsessing over many of the things ‘curse’ words refer to, but, it is also wrong to obsess over money, music, freedom, or just about anything.

Often words are segregated according to the people who use them: their class, race, religion, education, and so on — in themselves most have no inherently crude or disturbing meaning.  They are used to divide and stigmatize, domesticate and rule.  Meanwhile unspeakable evils are plotted with ‘acceptable’ words. To a certain extent over-reliance upon curse words for adding emphasis indicates a lack of imagination, but so does avoiding them altogether in order to white-wash a story or character.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words

Like a Wise Older Brother

“Never in the history of cinema has a movie been entertaining to an audience because of the technology. It is what you do with the technology.  It is what you do with the media that’s so special.”  Quoting Andrew Stanton, “2D animation became the scapegoat for bad storytelling.”
 
If John Lasseter intimidates you just think of him as a wise older brother looking out for your best interests — with a proven history of being right. : )
 
Archived on Factual Fiction’s Art Garden, here:
 
Full clip and many, many other essential teachings are on the DisneyPixar, here:

EllieAndFriendsClub YouTube Channel ♫ ♪ ♫ ♩ ♪

What a pure pleasure…spent down time this week listening to hundreds of uplifting songs about inspiring women to create the Intergalactic Ellie Fan Club channel!  : )  Whoowhooo! (Not official Pixar — Ellie on film charms everyone; her Intergalactic Fan Club frankly doesn’t pull any punches. When it comes to female foeticide, burkas, genital mutilation, and all male anything — brace yourself — Ellification of the universe is a forgone conclusion.
 
(Bless you precious muses!! Art is Powerful. Hope this little μούσα-who-could finds you inspired and smiling! Special thanks to Emma Coats, Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Ronnie del Carmen, and the entiré Pixar story crew for bringing this beautiful archetype to us!)

Astroanimation and Google Earth

A version of Google Earth has been released today which allows sunlight affecting views in Google Earth to be adjusted according to time of day, point of view, and season. Sunlight can actually be animated through time, for a period as short as a few minutes to as long as an entire year…from a moving viewpoint, too. Combined with architectural objects created in Google Sketch-up this is beyond exciting!! –Get this…you can design objects (buildings and sculptures) which cast shadows and otherwise interact with solar objects to create an animation!! Using the sun! The moon, clouds, landscapes, valleys, gigantic redwood forests, celestial events — eclipses, lunar and solar — constellations…the entire universe could be your living palette.
 
Think Stonehenge, Chichen Itza, or the Pyramids — only on an immense unbelievably detailed, complex scale. Entire cities — from nature reserves to sky scrapers to theme parks to residential houses — could be constructed in orientation to the sun and moon, sunsets and their shadows, surrounding landscapes, etc. All for a living, dynamic, co-ordinated changing visual animation, potentially occurring across hundreds of miles…lasting decades, centuries, millennia.
 
For instance, imagine if a planned community such as the Palm Island Resorts in Dubai were constructed to produce a living, constantly changing, narrative animation of cast shadows, reflected (sun, moon, and star) light, 24 hours a day 7 days a week for years — even taking into account within the narrative solar and lunar eclipses visible from the region centuries from now.
 
Structures within an Astro Theatre could be made to move in the wind, contract with temperature, open and close at night, focus and reflect from multiple mirrors, water fountains, stained glass canopies, canyon walls, lake surfaces, ocean fronts, and so on. The entire place could be a visual manifestation of our living universe. –All previewed in Google, constructed in Maya, and experienced online. High-school teams can create these theaters. What a cool way to teach astronomy…and animation, nature conservation, architecture, and so on — not to mention narrative storytelling. Unbelievably exciting. I hope I live long enough to create one of these. In the Grand Canyon, using natural structures….
 
[On a less ambitious scale Google Earth will permit previz of individual buildings so sunlight can be maximized — for example, in nursing homes for health reasons or in outdoor theaters so actual sunsets can be viewed within seasonal set designs, etc.]
 

Update: A Sundial that Shows Solstice “Explanation: What time is it? If the time and day are right, this sundial will tell you: SOLSTICE. Only then will the Sun be located just right for sunlight to stream through openings and spell out the term for the longest and shortest days of the year. And that happened last week and twice each year. The sundial was constructed by Jean Salins in 1980 and is situated at the Ecole Supérieure des Mines de Paris in Valbonne Sophia Antipolis of south-eastern France. On two other days of the year, watchers of this sundial might get to see it produce another word: EQUINOXE.” Image Credit & Copyright: Jean-Marc Mari