An intro to Storytelling

Storytelling is a ‘weird beast’: it is at the very same time the most discussed topic today, and the one that seems to define whatever happens, from the success of a toilet paper brand to the failure of a political candidate. The confusion grows as more and more claim competences that are based on very shaky foundations.

Storytelling is the ability to take data and connect them in a memorable and impressive manner. It is, for many, the prevalence of form over substance with the consequential empowerment of those who know the form to convince anyone of whatever content, regardless of its truthfulness.

For Umberto Eco, storytelling is “what defines the human being” as “the human being is a storytelling animal by nature” as he claims in the critical analysis of his masterpiece The name of the rose.

I tend to agree with him, and even more in a culture that has communication, and hence storytelling, at its core, 24/7. In other words, to me, storytelling is what we do all day long, all the time, and I am dedicated to research and develop ways to combine form with content to make more than than sum of the two. To me, storytelling is making 1+1=3.

Below a quick shoot&run presentation I did for the EU-funded project EXPAND, in Spring 2022, at the H-Farm University just outside Venice, Italy.

Storytelling is the research subject of the doctorate I completed in 2012 and is the core of my academic teaching and professional consulting, with a dedicated focus on visual storytelling.