Blog #5

I’m fascinated by how people tell stories. There’s literally almost infinitely many ways that creative people think of to convey how something happened. And in large parts, narrative seems to be a part of who we are as humans. Just look at everything our species and culture has created since there is record of it existing at all. There are cave paintings detailing great hunts or phenomena of life for people of that time. After that there are ancient manuscripts and eventually books. Books instantly became the way that our species carried out information from one generation to the next. Books became the very beginning of innovation, because since we no longer had to learn the same lessons generation from generation, we could continuously solve new problems, picking up where generations before us left off. Now there are endless ways to tell a story. My favorites are film and documentaries. Film is interesting because while everything about film seems intuitive, everything is thought about in extreme detail, and so much effort goes into the tiny minutia in order to create something that’s really beautiful in so many ways. Documentaries can be incredible too, because the filmmaker not only plays a role in conveying the story to the audience, they often play a role in the story itself. This gives the audience a unique perspective that they wouldn’t get from a movie made after the fact or a novel that takes years to write. It’s like the viewer gets to be “in on the action,” as if they themselves were part of the story, too.