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Once upon a time there was the IMAGE…

And the image is still here. Bigger and more important than ever!

Our brain thinks and works by images. Imagine I told you “yesterday I spent the afternoon under a tall tree” you would not combine them as a verbal string but instead translate these words as an image. Research has endlessly confirmed this process, yet the consequential action, which is developing a visual literacy, is seldom pursued.

We live in a world where communication is 90+% visual in one form or another. Yet we do not have the skills to understand what images do, because we do not have the literacy competencies to ‘read’ them. The fact is particularly consequential today when digital media 24/7 expose all of us to images much more than words. In addition, not only we live in a world of images, but these images are increasingly hard to understand as deepfakes and AI-generated contents take over. Visual literacy is needed now more than ever!

MIA offers a self-managed and hands-on dedicated solution to learn how to read images, and, consequently, to produce better images, as images that communicate impactfully.

why me?

I had the pleasure of attending the “Storytelling, Image and Strategy” course. His practical and engaging approach brought real value to my work. I improved my skills in digital storytelling and communication, learned how to better organize visual content using mind maps and storyboards, and developed stronger narrative and pitching techniques

A due anni di distanza, constato con soddisfazione i risultati ottenuti grazie al percorso intrapreso con il professor Fusari nel corso di 4 weekend in Storytelling Immagine Strategia. Oggi riesco a decodificare con chiarezza e precisione la struttura comunicativa di un messaggio, intervenendo in maniera mirata sia sulla forma che sul contenuto, con l’obiettivo di massimizzare l’efficacia della comunicazione

Il percorso formativo con il professor Fusari durante il corso di Visual Storytelling si è rivelato fondamentale con alcuni vertici PwC. Un progetto durato 3 giorni tra interviste a stakeholders e analisi, mi sono personalmente occupato della costruzione della narrativa e di come far passare al meglio il messaggio. Risultato ottenuto: presentazione di sole tre slides con meno di 70 parole di testo riassumendo tre giorni di lavoro, ricevendo il premio al miglior storytelling

Le ore trascorse in formazione con Massimiliano sono state non solo piacevoli e coinvolgenti, ma anche sfidanti e dense di contenuti. Tanto che ho deciso di proseguire questo percorso con una formazione più strutturata e approfondita, sempre con lui, per consolidare ulteriormente pratiche e prospettive del “ben pensare” e del “ben comunicare”

When I took a course on storytelling, I was struck by the depth and unusualness of Massimiliano's approach. He teaches not only storytelling strategy, but also the meanings that we want to convey, how to hook an interlocutor, investor, client. I would like to recommend it to everyone because this course really gives you the opportunity to look at communication from a new perspective which could really improve your business and personal life

Lavorerai con un professore universitario con 20 anni di esperienza in consulenza professionale che ti trasmetterà la passione e la dedizione per lo storytelling dal primo minuto in aula e che userà tutte le sue energie per tenere l’attenzione e stimolare la partecipazione di tutti.. Come è successo a me, dimenticherai tutto quello che credevi di sapere sullo storytelling, per un approccio creativo e di ragionamento che non usiamo nel lavoro come nella vita quotidiana

Between June 2012 and June 2015 Massimiliano Fusari collaborated several times with me as a trainer, when I was Director of the Diplomatic Institute of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome (Italy). During his consultancy, Massimiliano critically assessed the visual medium in today’s global cultures, and convincingly established the centrality of storytelling as a strategic format of communication for the International Relations field, and specifically so, for diplomats. He successfully argued to prospective diplomats the relevance of the visual medium in today’s forms of political communication

Grazie all'acquisizione di nozioni teoriche e, soprattutto, alla pratica con casi reali durante le lezioni, ho potuto costruire passo dopo passo una mentalità solida per strutturare uno storytelling efficace, dalla precisa individuazione della target audience alla pianificazione di una strategia verbale e visiva per ottimizzare la comunicazione. Le conoscenze apprese durante il corso sono incredibilmente versatili, sia nel contesto lavorativo che personale

I would like to enthusiastically recommend Professor Max Fusari for his teaching in the Global Executive MBA module on Marketing Strategy. I experienced firsthand the depth of his expertise, the effectiveness of his instruction, and the lasting impact of the skills and tools he imparts. Professor Fusari's unique emphasis on visual storytelling and digital marketing concepts has impacted my professional activities. His comprehensive coverage of digital marketing concepts provided practical insights that are directly applicable to contemporary business challenges. I wholeheartedly endorse Professor Fusari as an exceptional educator in the field of marketing strategy and visual storytelling

DISRUPTIVE - Divertente, coinvolgente, porta con sé un metodo, l’individuazione di un focus e pochi semplici steps di immediata applicazione nel proprio ambito professionale. Si sperimenta personalmente ed in team quanto sia complesso e stimolante il lavoro che la comunicazione visiva comporta e dopo se ne verificano i risultati, portando a casa uno schema di lavoro semplice da memorizzare e veloce da recuperare per l’applicazione in ogni ambito lavorativo e personale

Dr. Fusari researched and produced a comprehensive series of bespoke workshops to develop participants’ theoretical competencies and their practical skillsets in digital media, visual storytelling and strategic communication. The consulting combined articulated theoretical research with sensible hands-on sessions to make participants practice real-life examples and case studies through simulation and role playing. All activities aimed at advancing participants’ gender awareness and promoting gender mainstreaming for State institutions, social stakeholders and private partners of the Government of Kosovo

Ho partecipato con piacere e onore ad una giornata di formazione con il Prof. Fusari con alcuni colleghi Wealth Manager vincitori di un Contest Azimut. Il tema trattato in aula è stato lo “Storytelling visivo” e devo dire che è stata una sorpresa e una conferma su un tema fondamentale e sostanziale per la professione del consulente finanziario attuale e futuro

Devo dire che le mie aspettative erano alte, ma il corso è riuscito a superarle in modo sorprendente. Ho già iniziato a utilizzare alcune delle tecniche che ho imparato nel mio marketing e ho notato un miglioramento significativo nell'interesse e nell'engagement del mio pubblico

Sono state 3 giornate per me molto faticose, dove ho dovuto destrutturare tutte le mie convinzioni e ricominciare a reimpostare dalla basi, dove l’interpretazione lascia lo spazio all’ #IOVEDO. Ne esco rafforzato con dei Pitch già pronti all’uso e con una cassetta degli attrezzi più completa (abbiamo lavorato su ritmo e storyboard) ed organizzata

Throughout the duration of this Digital Catapult acceleration programme he not only advised startups around their product and business development via 1-on-1 sessions, but also ran general hands-on workshops for the cohort. I was impressed by Massimiliano's constant proactivity - he would always seek to improve and tailor his innovation support so it would really contribute towards startups journey to growth

He proved to me the power that strategic communication has in transforming not only lives, but entire communities from Morocco to Afghanistan (he speaks both Arabic and Persian). Massimiliano has been a mentor, a couch and a brilliant strategist. I gained a deeper understanding of how storytelling might be impactful in shaping cultural and political change. This helped me in refining my consultancy in alignment with my own personal story and what I want to say about me

Dr. Fusari spares no effort when it comes to engaging his students. He spreads the love of creativity and imagination coupled with realistic strategy and the knowledge to build a successful product, venture, idea. It was a great experience to be taught and mentored by him during my studies

Professor Massimiliano is one of the BEST professors I have ever met. I took the Creativity for digital media and communication major. When we learned to be creative in the media area, he gave us step by step suggestions. From the basic mind map to combining different visions of thoughts. He provided various examples and personal advice to students

I worked closely with Massimiliano in 2021 and 2022 as part of DiploFoundation’s online courses and the Master in Contemporary Diplomacy. He conceptualised and delivered the training on visual storytelling and visual communication, as specifically tailored to institutional and diplomatic activities. He excelled in bringing current and highly relevant examples to the discussion, making complex topics easy to understand, and successfully engaging participants in a number of exercises

Massimiliano joined DiploFoundation faculty in 2021, bringing his unique skills, knowledge, experience, and teaching style to communications training, focusing on the role of the visual in today's politics. He helped students improve their communication and presentation skills in an online environment. The practice-led workshop addressed the political and diplomatic forms of communication and asked the students to apply theory to practice

Massimiliano brought creativity, commitment and a playful spirit to his teaching and research at the University of Westminster. He was always willing to take on challenges and teach new things and played a key role in establishing our MA in Digital and Interactive Storytelling. He also took on a popular Year 2 module on creativity and made it even more popular with students from across the university

Massimiliano played an important role, contributing to both our Digital Media: Development and Production and Digital Media: Marketing and Distribution courses. He is an excellent teacher and highly popular with postgraduate students. He approached the task of managing and teaching our modules with huge enthusiasm and creativity and motivated our students to produce some excellent work

I was initially introduced to Massimiliano by Digital Catapult, as I was looking for a mentor for an innovative AR/VR client. From the very first introductory call, I found Massimilano to be a very capable, thorough, experienced and passionate mentor, with a real flair for storytelling. He took time to prepare the session, and was also easily able to "change tack" and be flexible, picking up on what was being said and giving some great guidance and examples of how to present in a more engaging way

My team connected with Massimiliano when we were selected for the UK's leading immersive accelerator programme with Digital Catapult. Our startup Overview Ark leverages multiple visual mediums, and Massimiliano a mentor and teacher on the program, helped us to concisely develop our brand aesthetics and techniques. Thank you!

Massimiliano was invited by the Council of Europe’s European Youth Centre Budapest to run a workshop for the participants of the study session “Fighting for a Greener Digital Future." Massimiliano is an engaging and enthusiastic speaker and pays attention to using interactive methods. His input combined theoretical and practical information in a well-balanced manner. The team of organisers and participants were highly satisfied with his contribution

If you are looking for an extremely professional trainer, able to energize the most inactive crowd, with little interest on the training agenda, distrustful of the benefit of the training purpose and outcomes, well, look no further, Dr. Fusari, is your trainer. As the Project Team Leader, I am asked by my project beneficiaries, time and again: "Is he coming back?" In the field of the consultancy service and working on gender equality issues, regrettably, we do not witness such accolade very often

Dr Massimiliano Fusari is an expert digital visual storyteller who opens up new ways of seeing and revealing the world around us through the image. He is professional, creative and engaging, with the ability to inspire through his work. He was invited to give a presentation on digital visual storytelling at the headquarters of the International Labour Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. This followed a successful mission teaching at the ILO's 'Gender Academy' attended by gender experts, NGOs and civil society organizations from around the world. The Geneva presentation proved to be extremely popular!

Massimiliano taught me the incredibly fascinating creativity module at Westminster University - throughout this time, Mass was able to captivate the entire room in his lectures with his eloquence, energy and humour! He inspired the students and enlightened them with the fascinating debates around creativity, and was brilliant at stimulating debate and enthusing the audience. I highly recommend Massimiliano for any role as he is hugely dedicated and contagiously enthusiastic!

Over the last decade or so, I have been crossing Massimiliano’s photographic paths both in their theoretical and practical dimensions. I feel absolutely confident in assessing his qualities as a persistent, curious and always pro-active photojournalist who is perfectly at ease in almost any corner of the Middle-East. I also appreciate the rather heterodox perspective of his theoretical research and the way he dissects the photograph to explore the trans-media component of today’s visual cultures

Massimiliano was contracted as a Voter Education Officer because of his in depth knowledge of the regional culture, behaviour and understanding. Due to international personnel's shortage at the time, he was assigned to deal with completely different scope of works - procurement and logistics. His understanding, fast adjustment and strong dedication to effectively complete assigned task proved him as skilled professional able to manage procurement and logistics for the whole Iranian mission

A single storytelling session in Professor Fusari’s class at H-FARM College transformed my perspective towards everything. Professor Fusari's class is more than an educational encounter; it's a journey into the heart of what it means to truly understand and connect with the world around us. As I continue my academic journey, I carry with me the invaluable lesson that stories are everywhere, in every data point, every historical event, every scientific discovery

I contracted Massimiliano for a commissioned work for the Italian National Broadcast Service, RAI. We used his photographic reportage on China for the opening theme of a TV show. He submitted to us a splendid selection of beautifully shot and carefully edited photographs we then mounted with no problem at all. He proved to be extremely professional and always receptive to our requirements, thus making the collaboration a very positive and smooth experience

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I grew up in a world that would identify enemies through colours: black and yellow as identity tropes, and red and green to identify ideologies.

In the early 1990s, I enrolled at the University of Oriental Languages because I wanted to first hand research the realities behind the representations. I travelled the whole Middle-East for a decade, living, studying and working extensively.

I learnt about a different world and to see things from multiple perspectives, exploring personal identities and social issues in a more thorough way. In addition, I worked as comms officer, radio presenter, political analyst, journalist and eventually photojournalist.

All these experiences made my theoretical understanding and practical media skillsets articulate and thorough. As my theoretical competencies and my practical expertise grew, I came to confront increasingly more complex problems.

For instance, how could I tell visually a culture that is not represented but by verbal stereotypes?

Let me share with you the challenge I devised for my PhD research: as a secular person, how could I visual storytell the richness of the social space of the Hawza (the Koranic Seminaries) to a Western audience that has but a negative verbal storytelling of it?

I rejected linear narratives in favour of an interactive strategy, to make my audiences build personalised stories upon the same images I shared with them. In other words, by editing their own stories, audiences would empathise with that world, and I would turn editing as a key storytelling strategy.

I have since established editing as the grammar of visual storytelling and montage as the pivot of both my storytelling training and consulting.

To edit a world of representation, the first step is devising a mindmap of connections, to craft the knots where audiences could endlessly re/structure their stories. In my grammar of storytelling, I refer to them as semiotic knots.

I like to borrow an image that the great photographer Toscani used for photographers: (visual) storytellers are plumbers.

Like plumbers, storytellers have practical abilities and dedicated strategies and skillsets. When called to solve a problem, the more experienced ones are confident enough to go beyond the established best practices to use “whatever it takes” to deal with a leak.

Similarly, as a storyteller, I have a practical and sensible approach to solving my clients’ problems with whatever I think might work. Please do not mistake my approach to, in any way, overlook ethical or moral concerns: these remain key parts of the multifaceted complexities of any issue of representation, and must be central to any translation of the real as a representation.

Indeed, my 30+ years of turning high-level academic research into sensible training and practical consulting turned me into the kind of plumber that solves his client’s problems with creative effectiveness. When your plumber does a good job everything seems easy and obvious. That is the ability of your good plumber: to make the difficult seem easy!

I pivot my training around the skillsets and competencies that I have built in 30+ years of worldwide consulting and academic teaching on how the visual form shapes businesses and social issues. Images define business either positively or negatively. The wrong image projection might turn upside-down the fortunes of even the most established enterprise.

What I offer is not life-changing promises, but the sensible delivery of impactful and cost-effective storytelling to solve a problem at your enterprise. I best do so by integrating training with consulting.

My practice continues to enhance my academic research, as much as the latter extends the former. By combining practice with research I develop a more thorough understanding of my client’s problems, to offer sensible and cost-effective storytelling solutions.

so what?

From great possibilities, come great responsibilities

Which, as many would have recognised, is not Nietzsche, but a reference to Uncle Ben’s response to Spider Man. I am committed to produce better communication for you, and my greater possibility is the professional management of the visual form. I have dedicated almost 30 years of my life to research and produce impactful communication, both verbal and visual, first as an analyst, then as a practitioner, and, now, by combining high-level theory with daily practice.

I do not produce videos, but strategic visual storytelling.

My pillar is “Show, don’t tell”: it is about editing the visual with the verbal to make evocative and powerful visual storytelling, i.e. story-showing. You get this, for instance, when you do not use a caption to describe what you already see in an image but, instead, to caption it with precision to make the storytelling more memorable. See it for yourself…

The issue: how to caption?

The above picture was taken in 2010 at a Hawza (Koranic seminary) in Damascus (Syria) for a British Academy project in support to my PhD in Exeter (UK). Let’s look at this image.

There are things that any viewer indeed see and can interpret: for instance that the man on the right is stroking his chin as he might listen to something. Depending on personal, social and cultural exposure to this topic, you might be able to guess that this is a class with Muslim clerics (because of the hats), and possibly recognise (=interpret) the rings as signs of a religious faith. In turn, one caption could be

Participants listening to a class

as well as:

Participants listening to a class on Thursday evening in Damascus

The second expanded caption adds something that none could ever guess, which is the time and place of an event happening in a closed anonymous room. In addition, we could work on the participants by adding some qualitative information:

Fully focused participants listening to a class on Thursday evening in Damascus

Eventually, I could add some more sensorial quality to it by working on the main character, the gentleman on the left:

Fully focused student listening to a class on Thursday evening in Damascus

And close with a final twist:

A fully focused blind man listening to a class on Thursday evening in Damascus

I have used this image as part of my visual storytelling training for more than 10 years. On purpose, I always show it with other images having the gentleman with his eyes both open and closed, and that never improved the recognition of his blindness. Indeed, not once, regardless of any personal, social and cultural background contexts, not one person saw the man as being ‘blind.’

The point is that the visual as a sense is constrained by multiple elements, including, among many aspects, our bias and cultural references as well as the way we see and the way we look.

SIS is 1+1=3

As an impactful storyteller, I am committed to train professionals at my courses, and support clients in my consulting, to make the most out of the visual, in strategic relation to the verbal form, and turn weak into powerful storytelling.

If images and the visual have steadily established a pivotal centrality across all forms of communication, then knowing how to ‘read’ the visual format becomes the asset to successfully drive your professional activities.

This is the rationale for my training format called SIS, which stands for Storytelling Image Strategy.

I like to train by hands-on doing things: this is the great lesson of handcrafting, that – to me – seems to have been forgotten after the great Bauhaus experience. We best learn by making things and having the brain to connect directly with the fingers: this is also the principle behind the LEGO Serious Play methodology, which I continuously bring into my training and consulting.

In my training, I promise to you that I will use any strategy to keep you engaged to discover a solution together. To do so, I will not tell you what is right, but I will impersonate the archetypical Sage, i.e. the person that takes you through a journey relying on my expertise and toolkits to solve your problem together: if there is one and only one rule in storytelling is that there is never any pre-arranged template to implement.

Solutions to complex problems require commitment, creativity and expertise. Without your commitment, my creativity and expertise will bring no result.

Make itShow itMaster 1+1=3

massimedia is

consulting

Once upon a time there was the IMAGE…

why me?

Make itShow itMaster1+1=3

so what?

From great possibilities, come great responsibilities

The issue: how to caption?

SIS is 1+1=3

Make it Show itMaster1+1=3!

Make it
Show it
Master
1+1=3

Make it
Show it
Master
1+1=3

Make it
Show it
Master
1+1=3!