As filmmakers, we must adapt and evolve with the times to capture and maintain our audience’s attention while keeping purpose and authenticity at the core of our storytelling.
Many purists would consider the idea of ‘versioning a story’, that is adapting it for different ‘channels’, to conflict with the very soul of the storyteller. A story should simply have the time it needs to be well told.
But what works ‘best’ depends on the context of the telling. We no longer communicate sat face-to-face around an open fire but through multiple and proliferating digital media. We have been suddenly removed from millions of years of storytelling evolution.
However, the need to communicate across multiple media can be an invaluable opportunity for stories to reach and connect with wider audiences. Film narratives need to be crafted into multiple variants to engage, not as auteur works of art, but as purposeful tools with a central unifying message.
But how fast can you tell a story with a sense of context, character, place and emotion, whilst also letting it breathe, before the story falls apart and the essence is lost?
Of course, our attention span depends on viewing context and on how invested the audience is in your subject before they take their seat.
So, you need different versions to engage different audiences watching with different levels of pre-existing attenuation to your message, from the active listener to the casually curious.
Well yes, but not in one step. Editing, unlike say sculpting, is a non-destructive process of refinement. So by a careful process of distillation, each step yields a shorter yet distinct form that can be used to connect with audiences in different ways, each time stripping away more of the context and complexity whilst bringing the essence more sharply into focus.
Here’s a recent example of this creative versioning process in action.
The brief from our colleagues ImpactEd Group was to reveal the transformation of a child enabled by the concentrated attention of an adult, herself guided by the skilful evaluation of data.
Each version of the film had to convey more and more succinctly both the context and emotion of a transformative experience.
‘How can data help transform the life of a child?‘
Edit phase 1 (8 days)
5’00″ version for a Campaign Launch for a pre-invited captive audience
Edit phase 2 (2 days)
2’30” version for Branded Channels for a partially engaged remote audience that has navigated to your domain
Edit phase 3 (1 day)
1’00″ version for Social Media for an audience with passing curiosity surfing your content via media feeds guided by hashtags and leading text.
What remains is the transformative essence of a relationship. An adult really listening to a child.
“I didn’t have that one person I could talk to. And now I have.”
So attention is in short supply.
As the attention economy pulls us into a vortex of distraction, we need to fall in love again with being.
And films, as channels of emotion, can remind us of the very essence of who we are.
All we need is someone to listen, and someone to listen to.
How do stories work? A newsletter for storytellers, changemakers and dreamers:
Got a story to tell? Or purpose to communicate? Need some friendly advice?
#AttentionEconomy #CreativeProcess #FilmmakingProcess #SparkFilms #FilmsToBelieveIn #TurningChanceIntoDestiny #Purpose #Authenticity #Filmmaking #Storytelling #HowStoriesWork #DocumentaryFilmmaking #WhatMakesAGoodStory #FilmProductionBristol #VideoProductionBristol #BristolFilmmakers #BristolStoryTellers #DocumentaryFilmmakerBristol
“I didn’t enjoy butchering this magnificent creature, but you apparently need a wake-up call that even you should be able to understand.”
Grant Hadwin
Domicide is the act of destroying one’s own home. It can also be a tendency, carried out through the repetition of thousands of hidden actions, mostly out of sight and out of mind.
I’ve been wanting to write a post on this subject for a while, but have been holding back, waiting for a triggering moment. And last Wednesday that moment arrived when the Sycamore Gap came crashing into the cosy living room of our collective imagination.
The loss of a beautiful lone tree fuelled a predictable outcry. The media fuelled the outrage, baying for the punishment of some ‘degenerate youth’, before pivoting to turn with less outrage on a ‘crazy old man’, perhaps a ‘former lumberjack’.
What is it about one tree that causes us such outspoken agonies while the destruction of the wider world continues unabated with passive acceptance? Could this have something to do with the power of the totem, working as symbolic pressure valve to channel and dissipate our collective sense of grief and loss at the destruction of our home, releasing our outrage so we can return to business as usual?
When I heard the news, my first thought was not for the tree but for the person who had chopped it down. What could have been their motivation? For this must have been a carefully planned act, and so can’t be easily dismissed as some moment of ‘madness’. No, to me, this felt like a howl of pain, a wake-up call that I recognised immediately.
In 2007 I started a 7-year filmed investigation into the motivations of another ‘environmental terrorist’, who orchestrated another attack on an ancient tree in an apparently mindless ‘crime against nature’. But it was not that simple.
On the islands of Haida Gwaii, a remote archipelago off Canada’s Pacific coast, stood a giant and genetically unique Sitka Spruce, known to the indigenous Haida people as ‘K’iid K’iyass’. Owing to the unusual yellow pigmentation of its needles, outsiders called it ‘The Golden Spruce’.
There it stood on the banks of the Yakoun River for 250 years, protected from the enveloping tide of industrial logging in its own protected reserve, complete with tourist trail and signage. Until one night in January 1997, when a lone former logger and timber engineer called Grant Hadwin arrived under the cover of darkness to cut it down.
For the Haida, ‘The Golden Spruce’ was much more than an object of scientific curiosity, a beautiful ‘freak’ of nature. For them this was a mythical being, a boy transformed into a tree, a sacred elder that stood as a wonderous manifestation of the connectedness of all things- a kin-centric belief system.
And Grant Hadwin, himself an instrument of the system of industrial extraction, had come to destroy it in a self-proclaimed act of protest. What kind of madness was this?
This is an extract from the letter that Grant wrote to the authorities justifying his actions:
“Dear Sir or Madam,
I don’t care much for ‘freaks’ whether they teach in University classrooms, sit in corporate board rooms, perform in the circus or are put on display as examples of old growth forest.
I mean this action to be an expression of my rage and hatred towards university trained professionals and their supporters whose ideas, ethics, denials, part truths and attitudes appear to be responsible for most of the abominations done towards life on this planet made in the name of ‘progress’.
I didn’t enjoy butchering this magnificent creature, but you apparently need a wake-up call that even you should be able to understand.
It was challenging to leave this majestic plant in a temporary vertical position.
The next storm will cause this one thousand year old plant to fall into or near The Yakoun River. Please find enclosed some of the last known photographs of ‘The Golden Spruce’.
Yours truly,
Grant Hadwin.”
And this was my film interpretation of the aftermath of what had happened.
What insight might this story give us into the mind of the individual who took down our cherished Sycamore?
And what does this particular choice of totem, the lone tree left standing in a sea of devastation, tell us about the timeless forces of corruption at work on humanity, and about our separation from the land, our natural home?
The Golden Spruce came with its own ancient mythology, with a story that began with the murderous arrival of the Europeans in 1774. The British came bearing ‘gifts’ of blankets laced with smallpox, hoping to wipe the indigenous people from the face of their land. 70% of the Haida population died in the enveloping plague, with lone survivors retreating into the sanctuary of the forest. Among them were a village elder and his grandson. As they fled the village, the boy ignored his grandfather’s advice not to look back, and found himself rooted to the ground, a boy transforming into a tree.
And there K’iid K’iyass stood for 250 years, one tree preserved by the logging company as a living cultural artefact, while the rest of the ancient forest was cut down and hauled to the mill, first as masts for ships of war, and then to build the frames of aircraft that brought death from the skies.
And the Sycamore Gap bears the same legacy. A lone tree, left in a sea of devastation, the land wiped clean by the civilising forces of Rome as far as the wall of Hadrian, built to keep out the savages who still lived from the land and who resisted agriculture, taxation and wage slavery. The wall was there to keep the money economy of Rome safe and sound until the empire burned under Nero, incinerated by the flames of its own self-serving corruption and arrogance.
#Storytelling #Filmmaking #Authenticity #Purpose #Meaning #FilmsToBelieveIn #DocumentaryFilmmaking #FilmProductionBristol #BristolFilmmakers #DocumentaryFilmmakerBristol
“There are many people who don’t believe this actually happened. But it was real. There are the facts.”
Yuri Trush.
What makes a good story? What combination of narrative, character and place makes a story powerful enough to last? To break out of the confines of a single creative interpretation, it must be capable of jumping from one medium to another, adapting in form whilst retaining that universal seed of magic, re-inventing itself in the hands of successive authors, creating its own mythology as it goes.
I was interested in what had happened to people living in the remote forest communities along Russia’s eastern border with China after the collapse of the Soviet Union? What happens to people when the protections of the state disappear? How do they live with no work or pension?
Looking for a commercial ‘hook’ on which to hang this somewhat abstract question, I began researching the illegal tiger trade when I came across a small but epic story.
All great stories tend to be focused on a single emotion- anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, surprise and fear. These combine in subtle ways to create a colour wheel of emotion.
The potent emotion at the heart of this story was fear. That particular fear of being hunted, a fear that still lurks deep in the recesses of our primitive imagination, buried in our pre-history when the tiger was our most feared predator, and man was easy prey. Slow, deaf, blind and foolish.
Long before the ‘blog post’ was a cultural norm, the internet was still a treasure trove of fragments of personal experience ripe for creative treatment. All one needed was a keen sense of the necessary ingredients and a focused search. A local Russian journalist had uploaded an account of a very unusual series of tiger attacks on people, written from the field notes of an eminent field ecologist, Dimitri Pikunov.
Pikunov describes a dark and disturbing series of events initiated by a desperate hunter called Vladimir Markov.
To make a mistake is only human, and we hope and expect to learn from each one. But Markov made a series of mistakes, each one compounding the next, and each steadily reducing his chances of applying the benefit of hindsight.
First he stole meat from a tiger. Then he shot at the tiger. And missed.
A wounded animal is much more dangerous, forcing ‘unnatural’ behaviours that lead inevitably to confrontation. In this case, the tiger was intent on revenge, tracing the scent of the man back to his hut where it lay patiently in wait before stalking and killing him.
Markov had triggered what was to become an infamous series of tiger attacks on people. The authorities called in specialist tiger trackers, a ‘Conflict Tiger Unit’ headed up by Yuri Trush. Yuri was charged both with investigating what had happened and with finding, and killing, the tiger.
This is Pikunov’s account of the final moments of Yuri’s deadly encounter-
“The tiger, now limping badly, wandered the logging road when, in the frosty air, came the rumble of an approaching vehicle. The predator turned off into the glade where the log deck had formerly been and lay down in a shallow ditch overgrown with wormwood. The GAS-66 truck had already made its way up to the corner of the glade.
Yuri Peonka, sitting next to the driver, saw some tracks from inside the truck that appeared to be the ones that they were looking for. Jumping out of the truck, he tested the tracks in the tried and true manner: if it ‘crumbles’, then it is absolutely fresh. Rushing to get his gun, Yuri yelled out to his partners: “He’s here!” Their dog, catching the scent of the tiger, yelped in confusion and, tucking in his tail, hid behind the truck, only sharpening even more the unbelievable tension that mortally threatened all the participants in what was now an inevitable confrontation.
A quick check of the log deck, with its occasional clumps of wormwood, yielded nothing. It was decided that Trush would be the first to go along the hot trail, to the right would be Shibnev, and a bit to the rear and to the left, Peonka. In this kind of wedge, holding their fingers on the trigger, they moved forward. In a little more than twenty meters an instantly soul-numbing roar cracked the frigid air forcing everyone, as if on command, to come to a halt.
The tiger, not more than ten meters away, flew out at them as if from under the ground from an absolutely open, clear spot.
The enormous, ferocious mass of stripes, mad from pain and enraged at people, flew like a hurricane at the first of the shooters – Trush. In a half-unconscious state, he managed to get off two shots. In a simultaneous echo, from the right and the left rang out his partners’ shots on whose accuracy Yuri’s life now depended. These two experienced hunters did not let him down and the bullets hit their mark. The enormous carcass struck the barrel of the rifle and the already lifeless mass slammed down on top of Yuri, its claws, like knives, shredding his outer, winter coat and bloodying it with hot tiger blood.
The three guys immediately composed themselves. The confrontation had taken place so quickly and so unexpectedly that no one even had time to freak. Only later, when talking about what had happened, did the three of them come to the conclusion that everything had come together all too well. And especially the fact that the confrontation had taken place on a completely open spot. What if the confrontation had occurred somewhere in the thickly wooded Bikin taiga? Most likely there would have been yet another victim. Everyone seemed to agree that Yuri Trush was born under a lucky star.”
The idea of a vengeful tiger, enraged by man’s stupidity, was lure enough for me travel to Luchegorsk, a 10-hour train journey north of Vladivostok, to meet with Yuri Trush in person. Pulling into the station on a winters night, I was greeted first by the silhouette of a small back dog, followed by the imposing figure of Yuri himself. I nervously introduced myself and explained my interest in his experience. I mentioned the idea of making a film whereupon Yuri gave a broad smile, revealing a set of sparkling gold teeth. “Sasha”, he said “I have something to show you.”
Back at his flat he sat me down in front of his old TV and inserted a VHS tape. It was only at this point that I realised that he had used a video camera to record parts of his investigation of the Markov incident and I had a film to make.
The story clearly had a universal potency, playing at film festivals around the world from Seoul in South Korea, to Goias in Brazil, winning 19 festival grand prizes and audience awards.
A year after its first release, I received a call out of the blue from the American author John Vaillant. He had seen ‘Conflict Tiger’ at the BANFF Mountain Film Festival and described a ‘light-bulb’ moment in which he realised that he had found the subject for his next book. He asked for my blessing, for some help with contacts, and, by way of thanks, sent me a copy of his previous novel in the post. ‘The Golden Spruce’ dropped through my letter-box a week later and began an extraordinary 7-year creative exchange, a subject for a separate post.
The story first made public in Dimitri Pikunov’s journal had made the leap to another medium, and was on its way to wider international exposure. 3 years later Penguin Random House published John Vaillant’s ‘The Tiger- A True Story of Vengeance & Survival’.
Here is an extract from the book that recounts the lead-up to Yuri’s brush with death-
“The sun shone brilliantly on the undisturbed snow; the only shadows there were those cast by the men themselves—long, even at midday. Gitta continued darting up the trail and then back to Trush, barking incessantly, but she gave no clear indication of the tiger’s whereabouts. She didn’t know. As they walked, the men scanned the clearing, an expanse in which it would have been difficult to conceal a rabbit, and then they focused their attention on the forest ahead, which was beginning to look like one enormous ambush. With the exception of the dog, everything was calm and nearly still. Behind them, smoke rose lazily from the Kung’s chimney, drifting off to the north. Gorborukov was still standing there by the back door, holding his rifle like a broom. In the clearing, the slender stalks and blades nodded reassuringly, as if everything was unfolding according to plan. The men had gone about twenty yards when Shibnev, picking up some kind of ineffable, intuitive cue, calmly said, “Guys, we should spread out.” A moment later, the clearing exploded. The first impact of a tiger attack does not come from the tiger itself, but from the roar, which, in addition to being loud like a jet, has an eerie capacity to fill the space around it, leaving one unsure where to look. From close range, the experience is overwhelming and has the effect of separating you from yourself, of scrambling the very neurology that is supposed to save you at times like this.
Those who have done serious tiger time—scientists and hunters— describe the tiger’s roar not as a sound so much as a full-body experience. Sober, disciplined biologists have sworn they felt the earth shake. One Russian hunter, taken by surprise, recalled thinking a dam had burst somewhere. In short, the tiger’s roar exists in the same sonic realm as a natural catastrophe; it is one of those sounds that give meaning and substance to “the fear of God.” The Udeghe, Yuri Pionka, described the roar of that tiger in the clearing as soul-rending. The literal translation from Russian is “soul tearing-apart.” “I have heard tigers in the forest,” he said, “but I never heard anything like that. It was vicious; terrifying.” What happened next transpired in less than three seconds. First, the tiger was nowhere to be seen, and then he was in the air and flying. What the tiger’s fangs do to the flesh its eyes do to the psyche, and this tiger’s eyes were fixed on Trush: he was the target and, as far as the tiger was concerned, he was as good as dead. Having launched from ten yards away, the tiger was closing at the speed of flight, his roar rumbling through Trush’s chest and skull like an avalanche. In spite of this, Trush managed to put his rifle to his shoulder, and the clearing disappeared, along with the forest behind it. All that remained in his consciousness was the black wand of his gun barrel, at the end of which was a ravening blur of yellow eyes and gleaming teeth that were growing in size by the nanosecond. Trush was squeezing the trigger, which seemed a futile gesture in the face of such ferocious intent—that barbed sledge of a paw, raised now for the death blow.
The scenario was identical: the open field; the alert, armed man; the tiger who is seen only when he chooses to be seen, erupting, apparently, from the earth itself—from nowhere at all— leaving no time and no possibility of escape. Trush was going to die exactly as Markov and Pochepnya had. This was no folktale; nonetheless, only something heroic, shamanic, magical could alter the outcome. Trush’s semiautomatic loaded with proven tiger killers was not enough. Trush was a praying man, and only God could save him now.”
It’s a strange experience to see ‘your’ story through the prism of another narrator’s imagination. John had brought new depths and insight to it with the space and time a book affords both author and reader. It’s interesting to compare how different media handle the spontaneous moment, a narrative territory that is meant to be the special preserve of the documentary film. But the written word exposes different kinds of meaning, and the experience of reading, as opposed to watching, allows us to ‘inhabit’ the story over a longer time. We become immersed in it over days, slowly losing track of where the story ends and we begin. Film is a much faster burn. But what medium has the best claim on the ‘real’? Does it matter? Working together they achieve a higher, deeper meaning, refracting different shades of emotional truth.
And so the story moves on, mutating in unpredictable ways, waiting to make the next leap in the collective imagination.
A month ago I received another note from John Vaillant. ‘Did I keep abreast of the movie news’? he asked. ‘The Tiger’ was to be adapted again, this time with big money and Hollywood production values. Ukranian Director Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi is to direct Emmy and Golden Globe winning actor Alexander Skarsgard.
He attached a link to an article featuring this quote from the producer Darren Aronofsky-
“As a producer, I’ve wanted to do two things for a while now: one is to make this film, and the other is to work with the brilliant auteur that is Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi. I am truly excited to be involved with a project that will allow me to do both, and cannot wait to bring this story to the world.”
Aronofsky doesn’t make boring films, and his partnership with an out-an-out ‘auteur’ (best known for his 2014 film ‘The Tribe’ set in a school for the deaf using Ukranian sign language and no subtitles) bodes well for a fresh re-interpretation rather than a dumbed down ‘Hunt For Red October’ version, with Yuri as some tooled up ‘Rambo’ hero primed to tame the wild and bring ‘civilisation’ back to the Taiga.
I pray they do the story justice, but I know it would survive even a proper mauling. Already percolating in the public imagination in multiple forms, it has already proved resilient and adaptable. We have to hope that we will fare as well as we continue to distort nature as we pursue our foolish ends.
Returning to the question of what makes a good story? A mysterious location, vivid characters and an epic battle do not alone explain its universal appeal. Its lasting impact comes more from the way it unfolds. It offers the familiar tension of a dramatic thriller pivoting our empathies from the preyed upon man to the suffering animal. But ultimately resolves as a parable, timeless and universal, that speaks emotively of their shared destiny.
Got a story to tell? Or purpose to communicate? Need some friendly advice?
Most of the time we wander around trapped in our own heads. Left to its own devices, our sense of self is remarkably resistant to change.
But stories offer a way out by ingeniously diverting us via someone else’s experience, disarming our defences by temporarily altering our point of view.
Released from the confines of our delusions, we are able to make fresh insights about how the world works and our place in it.
And the greater the jump the story can make away from what we know, in culture, language, environment and experience, the more we are confronted with the inadequacy of our preconceptions.
Take for example the act of killing. Most of us tend to think that the act of ‘murder’ is only committed by ‘murderers’. It is not only outside our experience but beyond our frame of reference for what is even possible.
But what if the capacity to kill exists in each and every one of us? What if it’s our circumstances alone that can define us ‘in the moment’?
And by circumstances I don’t just mean the immediate circumstances over which we might expect to have some measure of control, but also the larger forces at play in our family, community and society over which we have no control at all. The two can work together to insidiously bring us to the point of no return.
This was the question that I wanted to explore in ‘Arctic Crime & Punishment’.
Transported to a totally different context, a frozen village at the end of the world, could a story still provide the bridge to understanding our own capacity to kill?
And Arctic Greenland is a very interesting place to ask such a primal question because their code of justice is founded on this same principle of good storytelling. Those called to stand in ‘judgement’ of a crime must first step into the shoes of the ‘criminal’- they are required to give priority to the circumstances of the crime over the act itself.
This apparently tolerant view was not born out of some high-minded nobility, but from the necessity for survival.
“We cannot just expel people from society. We need all the people we have, and we have to accept those that we have been given. In Europe you can afford to sweep people under the carpet.” Judge Jens Kjeldsen.
Furthermore, as small, mutually dependent communities, they are able to judge from a position of knowing the defendant’s shoes very well.
But what about for the outsider? Cast into a completely different world, across the chasm of language, culture and environment, could a story persuade the viewer to step into the shoes of a killer too?
And what purpose does an understanding of such extremes of behaviour serve?
“Among all the miseries, there’s one that pierces our hearts most deeply, that wrings the bitterest tears from our eyes. It’s the awareness that we have committed a mistake that we can’t go back and fix. When we look back on our actions, I’m afraid there’s nothing quite so painful as thinking, ‘What have I done?’”
from ‘How Do You Live’ by Genzaburo Yoshino.
We met Naalu 3 days after her arrest. Our Greenlandic translator knew her and her parents. Over the course of the 3 months it took for her case to come to trial, we got to meet her family, and the relatives of her husband, the man she had killed.
If story can be a path for shared understanding and self-knowledge, it can also be a path to redemption and forgiveness.
“It’s truly painful to admit one’s own mistakes. Most people think up any excuse they can to avoid it. However, when you have made a mistake, to recognize it bravely and to suffer for it is something that in all of heaven and earth, only humans can do.
For error has the same relationship to truth as sleeping does to waking. I have seen that when one wakes from error, one turns to truth again as if revived.
We have the power to decide on our own who we will be. Therefore, we will make mistakes. However— We have the power to decide on our own who we will be. Therefore, we can also recover from our mistakes.”
from ‘How Do You Live’ by Genzaburo Yoshino.
Got a story to tell? Or purpose to communicate?
Need a partner in crime?
In a world of everything is potentially ‘fake news’ where can we find meaning?
We depend on our own finely-tuned radar of ‘emotional resonance’.
What feels true?
‘Truth is stranger than fiction” because it can’t be contrived. But how do we tell the difference?
Much of the power of non-fiction storytelling lies in its claim to ‘authenticity’. And with authenticity comes the potential for ‘emotional truth’ and ‘meaning’, what stories are supposed to deliver.
Documentary’s promise of ‘authenticity’ rests in its unique ability to express the spontaneous. That moment of revelation might be an action. It might be spoken. It might be in silence. But it’s always unexpected.
In the midst of Russia’s material collapse in the 1990s, ‘A St. Petersburg Symphony’ explores the power of music in a time of crisis.
After 2 weeks of filming inside The Russian National Library, the brilliant Ukrainian conductor, Vasily Zvarychuk, invited us back to his home.
This excerpt, from the first film I made in Russia, shows the film’s emotional turning-point, an unplanned moment caught by DoP David Katznelson.
This chance moment reveals Vasily quite unexpectedly, in all his vulnerability, beauty and love.
It shows not only how we use story to find meaning, but more specifically how story works as a means to discover who we are.
In the words of Matt Hague’s alien explorer from his book ‘The Humans’-
“It takes time to understand humans because they don’t understand themselves. They have been wearing clothes for so long. Metaphorical clothes. That is what I am talking about. That was the price of human civilisation – to create it they had to close the door on their true selves. And so they are lost, that is how I understand it. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are.”
Dear Storyteller,
That means everyone reading this.
We all use stories in search of answers, looking for pattern, shape and meaning.
Who am I?
Where do I belong?
Where have I come from?
Where am I going?
And why?
Everyone of us is hard-wired for story.
Stories act as bridges to the experience of others. They connect us through our shared humanity. They are about the emotion of shared experience.
Films are powerful vessels for story because they can communicate all the complexity and subtlety of emotion quickly. Through the curious alchemy of sound, picture and time, they can enable us to feel what it’s like to be someone else.
Every story we tell is an experiment that furthers our knowledge of how this chemistry works.
This post is the start of a story about story based on my own experiments and encounters.
I hope it will work as a starting point for a conversation about how stories work, with a community of people also fascinated by their magic.
Why are particular people such powerful vessels for story? And why do some moments resonate with ‘the truth’ so strongly?
I started out as a ‘picture editor’.
This is about as far from being a storyteller as it’s possible to be. I worked in the story equivalent of a factory- a processing plant for the industrial standardisation of reality into uniform ‘products’. These ‘stories’ were methodically stripped of meaning and emotion, to make each one feel the same.
This was ‘the news’.
And so, as an escape, I started wandering around with a camera.
I was stunned to discover that the camera acted as a catalyst. It gave me an excuse to talk to strangers. And because someone was listening, they were willing to talk. It was a good combination.
And this is how I chanced across Doreen Thomas, on a deserted beach, under a nuclear power station in Kent…
https://vimeo.com/sashasnow/review/699091269/91d2c31fbf
In this moment of clarity, Doreen taught me some invaluable lessons-
Sometimes, in the moment, people will say things that resonate. They are often things that they’ve never said, or even thought, before. Everyone is caught by surprise.
Their words carry the weight of ‘emotional truth’. This is a ‘truth’ that defies categorisation or analysis. You can’t prove it or check it. We just know in our heart that it is ‘true’ because it taps into our innate sense of universal human experience.
“The Eyes are blind. To see things as they are, you have to use your heart.”
–Antoine de Saint-Expery’s ‘Little Prince’
And this kind of truth is not something to be found like a lost penny.
It has to be ‘created’ or, to put it more accurately, it has to be ‘nurtured into existence’.
Got a story to tell? Or purpose to communicate?
Need some friendly advice?
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