Animate

Eh? Wasn’t this supposed to be the storytelling section? Why is it suddenly called Animate?

The simple answer is, because it is! However, there is indeed a bit more to it than that. For me, storytelling is all about animation. I’m not talking about stop-frame films or 3D computer graphics (though these are perfectly legitimate media with which to tell all kinds of stories). I’m talking about our relationship to storytelling at a far more fundamental level.

Fundamentally, experiencing a story is an act of animation. Note, I didn’t say telling a story. I said experiencing it. When someone reads a book or watches a film, a kind of magic happens. Dry, abstract data and information is turned into a living thing, inside the person’s head!. Writers and directors are often praised for making stories real, but actually, they aren’t the ones that do it. This magical transformative act of storytelling animation can’t take place without someone to experience and fill it with life, in many cases their own life.

This is why I chose to call this section animate in honour of the most important person in any story, that wonderful, magical, powerful wizard, the reader, viewer or listener that performs the task no story teller can.