Sorry Coach

It's college football season in America, and I recently got a kick out of a pre-game interview with a coach. I didn't catch which school he represented, but a reporter asked him an offhanded question as he was about to go into the locker room.

"Hey Coach, what's your least favorite word?"

The coach didn't hesitate.

"Narrative!"

And with that, he walked off, leaving the reporter sputtering.

I nearly did a spit take.

Having spent much of my life working with narrative, I thought his answer was magnificent. In one word, he'd managed to tell an entire story about his contempt for media storytelling.

I could practically hear him thinking:

I'm here to win football games. To execute plays. Run routes. Force fumbles. Beat the other team. Meanwhile, you people insist on turning everything into a redemption arc, a comeback story, an inspiring tale about somebody playing for his dying mother. Get out of my face, I'm trying to win a football game!

Coach, that's terrific narrative!

And try keeping your job by insisting on "no narrative" from an announcer and a color commentator and a video director explaining what it all means with long shots, medium shots and close up visual narratives!

Thousands of bored stiff fans watching twenty-two men run repeatedly into one another in silence. No articulated strategy, context and or side stories.

Up in the stands, we need narrative. Stories. Who's the villain? Who's the underdog? Who's overcoming adversity? What does this game mean for next Saturday?

We can't seem to help ourselves. Events need to turn into stories, even when we're complaining about the stories.

Narrative is baked in to how we make sense of the world.

It is how we make meaning.

The Original Wireless Network

Something I read years ago in James Gleick's wonderful book, The Information. comes to mind.

Gleick opens his book with an extraordinary account of African talking drums.

In 1730, an English slave-trading agent named Francis Moore traveled up the Gambia River. Along the way, he detected African communities warning of his coming with drums. His ship could not travel as fast as the sound of the warning drums. Which made his job difficult.

Turns out the drums were composing narratives on all manner of topics.

Not a just handful of signals meaning danger.

Actual language.

Because many African languages are tonal, drummers could reproduce patterns of spoken language using changes in pitch and rhythm. But drums couldn't reproduce all the words of human speech one to one.

Drummers compensated with elaborate descriptive phrases in various speeds and pitches.

To say something as simple as "come home," they might beat out long pattern that would suggest the listener's feet and legs retrace their journey to the village.

To tell someone not to be afraid, they might use a long phrase that meant bringing a frightened heart back down from the mouth it where it belonged in the chest.

One birth announcement spoke poetically of a woman emerging from the forest into the village.

The drumming literature announced deaths, funerals, gatherings, arrivals, dangers, and community affairs. They could carry prayers, poetry, even jokes.

By relaying these messages from village to village, drummers could send information a hundred miles or more in roughly an hour.

No wires. No electricity. No satellites. No monthly subscription and no customer-service department.

Just wood, air, human ears, and a shared narrative language.

It took generations of European observation, and eventually the detailed research of linguists such as John F. Carrington in the twentieth century, to understand the complexity of what was happening.

Imagine that. An elaborate wireless communications system operating in plain hearing, with outsiders largely oblivious to the conversation.

They were carrying the narrative play by play of an entire society.

Social media goes way back.

The First Animators?

Travel back tens of thousands of years, into the caves of prehistoric France.

Long before paper, printing presses, or anything resembling a cinema, people were making images on cave walls using charcoal, mineral pigments, and whatever implements they could devise.

At Chauvet Cave, roughly 36,000 years ago, an artist depicted a bison with multiple overlapping legs, suggesting successive positions of its movement.

Archaeologist Marc Azéma has studied these prehistoric images and proposed that some represent early attempts to portray motion and graphic sequences.

Animators!

People attempting something remarkably familiar: narrative representing movement, action, and unfolding events through images.

A narrative of a hunt! (Sorry coach)

Somebody made those pictures, so somebody else could look at them.

And between the maker and the observer, something happened.

Meaning.

The African drummer used sound. The prehistoric artist used images. Both relied on other human beings who understood enough of the medium to interpret what was being communicated.

And we haven't stopped.

Is it any wonder that motion pictures became one of the great cultural inventions of the modern world?

Or that visual and aural media dominates so much of our attention?

Enter the Age of Slop

And now artificial intelligence has arrived drumming out it's content on our little pocket-sized walls..

Unfortunately, an awful lot of it is rubbish.

AI slop.

What an extraordinary expression, a narrative phrase on meaninglessness really.

When images and sound amount to nothing, we compare it to sludge in a garbage disposal.

The problem isn't necessarily the quality of the images.

It's that dazzling images don't automatically produce something worth watching.

Something has to happen. Someone has to want something. An action has to matter. An audience needs some reason to care what happens next in the narrative.

Without that, it's just a spectacularly expensive demonstration of movement. Data center sucking up local electricity to spew incoherent crap.

Even prehistoric bison had somewhere to go.

The Water We Swim In

We are so saturated with content for content's sake, that we barely recognize meaningful authentic stories have left the building.

Yet storytelling itself is nearly impossible to escape.

We are story-assembling machines. Meaning-making machines.

We take fragments of experience and arrange them into something intelligible. We do it when recalling our childhoods, explaining our marriages, watching football, or interpreting a painting made by someone who lived thirty thousand years before us.

And the remarkable thing is that we want other people to understand.

A story without an audience is an unfinished act of communication.

Which is why I believe visual storytelling belongs alongside reading and writing as a fundamental literacy, especially today.

Seven New Cave Paintings

That's why we created Animating Kids.

We teach children to make handmade narratives, using paper characters, simple settings, and frame-by-frame movement.

A character. A setting. A problem.

The combinations are intentionally preposterous. Tim the Tongue. Tiger vs Alien. A horse in a nightclub. And the meaning making is very clever and fun.

Our fans do what human beings have apparently been doing for tens of thousands of years.

They make narratives.

They invent relationships. Construct events. Give characters motives. Decide what matters. Then they turn those ideas into moving pictures that somebody else can understand.

The technology has changed rather dramatically since the caves of France and the drummers of Africa.

The human impulse hasn't.

Sorry coach, narrative isn't going away any time soon.

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This week, we have seven new cave paintings that move, made by young filmmakers who have something to show you.

​Watch this week's seven kid-made films →​

Bon Animate!

PS If you want a great deal on Animating Kids for your site - give us a holler at info@animatingkids.com

We'll get you set up with an amazing introductory price. We go by site size, so rates may vary between districts and singe sites.