The importance of story in creating and making
Gil was invited to the Initiative headquarters to take part in their “Talking Heads” influencers series. Initiative is a worldwide media company which allowed Gil to bring together his two passions, creating and making along with media and popular culture.
19th June 2017Gil presented about the strength of utilising narrative framework to communicate a message as well as how you can utilise narrative in a teaching environment. Sighting examples using popular culture as well as creating and making Gil engaged the staff of Initiative with the possibilities of crafting interactive engagement in a way that can utilise creating and making to inspire and uplift.
The presentation was an hour long, and a four-minute condensed version is presented here.
Transcript:
[Applause]
[Music]
What the camera is actually following is ball bearings that have been tied in with the explosion and the havoc that it’s showing but the really interesting thing about this is that the more we consume images like this we get this dilation of time and explosions that slow down and noises that are beyond what would actually happen in the real world and if you ever heard someone in a car accident they usually say the same thing, which is it happened so fast.
A lot of people were looking at real life as if it was boring because it didn’t match up with what was experiencing on the screen (It was) dull, disengaging, silent cuz you know I’ve got all this audio stimulus
When I’m going and experiencing something in the cinema but I’m not getting that when in real life, slow, grey but in the spectacle of life you know the stuff you’re seeing that’s being delivered to you that’s been honed it’s dynamic engaging it comes with a soundtrack. Anyone here ever put soundtracks on the iPod and use that to come and pump themselves up? The only music I listen to is soundtracks.
It’s really interesting and as cinema has gotten more and more involved we have things like this when “Avitar” came out we actually had a person who took James Cameron to court because after experiencing Avatar he found the world dull and he couldn’t reinter act with it anymore. I happen to be in New York in 200, where there was a quote that jumped out of the wall for me and it was a quote by well-known media representative and a quote was this. “Seeing the planes hit the building was pure Jerry Bruckheimer.” That quote for me was really eye-opening that in a real tragedy that happened in this world we didn’t even have the lexicon of language to explain it without having to go back into the narrative, going back into the spectacle.
Social media has become the new narrator for people. See we are all the stars in our lives and the narrator is social media. That inherent understanding of narrative is an actually an incredible pathway to be able to move through and actually communicate with an audience.
My other passion is Making so I’m going to use that as an example and introduce you to the maker community and
this is a group of people whose purpose is to create and build using technology or old-school methods it doesn’t matter what they use the idea is to create and to be able to share that knowledge with people and in that way inspire others to take that knowledge and create their own narrative with it. Here’s an example. This is actually a cart at Burning Man this is a Ghost from Pac Man it was actually done by some friends of mine where they ran around that event with a Pac Man and Ghosts and they would run around and literally play the game live.
The other thing I want to introduce you to is something that came out of Sydney called the Light Scythe this stick here is actually hooked up to a 90 dollar computer called a Raspberry Pi and in that stick is a whole bunch of things called neo pixels and they are addressable LED lights what this means that I can write a program that’s
going to flicker these LEDs at a certain rate and if I take a camera and leave it on a long exposure I can drag it across and create things like this so can you imagine you’re you want to market something and your competitors got a shop and it’s well known where it is what stops me from going in the middle of the night and putting my brand right across their store?
I’m here today to basically challenge you guys to think it a little bit out of the box my suggestion would be to go and explore what the maker community can do you can do that very easily without even leaving this office. YouTube is your friend and Makers love to share what they do not only what they make but how they made it.
My name is Gil Poznanski, that is my information in details, thank you so much for letting me share what I’ve spent my whole life trying to understand.
[Applause]
The importance of story in creating and making