Experiential Storytelling

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Hi there, and welcome to another episode of Sound Stories, an inspirational podcast for creative professionals and storytellers who want to improve their lives at home and at work. I’m Stephanie, Ciccarelli, your host and co founder of voices.com.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Today in studio I have with me, Evan Jones. Evan Jones is a creative director and producer at Stitch Media. Welcome to the show, Evan.

Evan Jones:

Hi, thanks for having me.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Well, I’m just very excited to have you here. I’ve heard you speak before. This is quite an honor to have you here in studio. one of the ways that you work, and I just want to jump right into this with everybody, is this method of storytelling called experiential storytelling. It confuses me to know end, so to have you here today is great because we can ask you all about it. So can you explain what experiential storytelling is?

Evan Jones:

Yeah. So Stitch Media is an interactive media production company and we take interactivity really seriously. We incorporate it into everything that we do. Sometimes we are able to put so much interaction into a project that we really don’t think of it as the kind of story that you can just package and read or watch. It’s actually something that has to be experienced. What that means often is that it can be the journey of finding the story itself that is the experience. There’s sort of a trail that you would follow, and the story is putting those pieces together and thinking about it in your mind. So it’s not as if the story is is a product. It’s actually something that exists only in your imagination, because you were a part of all the different moments that created that story.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Wow. I mean, that’s really, really cool. Something I find really interesting about the work that you do Evan, is that you’ve created Together Tales. For those of us who don’t know what it is could you just give us a brief description?

Evan Jones:

Sure. Yeah. Together Tales is a platform for interactive adventures that parents bring to life. And the message there is that you’re going to get a physical book that’s all split up into pieces and with the instructions online, parents are going to be able to create an experience for their child.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

It seems almost like it’s a choose your own adventure. You’re involved in the story, there may be different things that you can do that take you away from a physical book. Maybe you go online to do a certain activity together, or maybe you’re out like doing a scavenger hunt type thing with a map. So many different ways that you can be engaging with this content.

Evan Jones:

Yeah. I mean, choose your own adventures were definitely huge influence on us in our youth. Together tales is actually something called Adventure Kits and so they’re kits that create adventures. But we’ve all seen what branching narratives are like. You give someone a path and they can fork at that path and take option A or option B. The interesting problem that, that creates is that your audience only gets to see one branch. I mean, if someone’s going through one of those experiences, they experience it making the choices that they make, but they don’t get to experience all the other pieces. So, there’s different models of interaction.

Evan Jones:

A good example for Together Tales is that we take people through a story from start to the end, and it’s got all of the things that you would recognize, a big climax near the ending, but the point of it is that it’s not being told by a static object. It’s actually being told through the interpretation of the parents. And so the way that Together Tales really thrives is that it arrives in your house with a big stamp on it that says, “There’s only boring stuff inside this box. It’s for grownups.”

Evan Jones:

And grownups open it up and when they see it, it’s got instructions that says, “This envelope needs to be hidden away. This is what you’re supposed to give you the child at the beginning. And now you need to go online because we’re going to be giving you instructions as you go through the experience that you can act on.”

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Whoa, okay. Now this is all really, really interesting. I just want to go maybe to the genesis of why you’ve even gone into this experiential storytelling. So obviously with the Together Tales, I believe it had something maybe to do with the fact that you’re a dad. You’ve got kids of your own and possibly want to do something creative there. How did you get the idea to actually create story and why would you as a storyteller, want to be weaving in these various, I guess, experiences into what you’re doing.

Evan Jones:

Some of my best memories in childhood are from some of the times where we did something together. We had an activity and I mean, Together Tales really has our heroes out there, are the superstars. People like the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, or some of these really icons that we said, “It’s amazing the things that we can do together with those ideas.”

Evan Jones:

And so when we designed Together Tales, it was about thinking about the type of parent that really does do those sorts of things. I don’t know. There are some parents out there and I hope that they’re listening that look at the idea of role playing along with their child and going the extra distance to make special occasions even more special, doing things like a birthday scavenger hunt. And so we constantly, when we’re talking about Together Tales, we run into people who say, “Wow, this looks like it’s a lot of work.” And we meet a whole other type of parent that looks at it and says, “Actually, you have just saved me so much work. I get to look like the hero of this story, but you’ve given all the hard parts, you’ve prepared all the hard parts for me. And all I need to do is set this up in a particular way and play along.”

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

It’s like they’ve got a roadmap. They know what they need to do, which is awesome. But you, as the creator of this, the architect of this experience, and this kind of … just my mind goes to Dora. I don’t know why. It does a lot. But anyway, you know how Dora in every episode will have three places she’s going to. The bridge, the mountain, the magic kingdom, whatever she’s doing, right? And so it seems like you’ve got these little markers along the way. Things that they will definitely encounter, but how is it that you architect these to have those experiences timed at just the right moment with maybe just the right sort of actions required?

Evan Jones:

Right. So one of the key elements of Together Tales is that an adventure kit is broken up into pieces. It’s actually a package filled with … so we have eight chapters in some of our early books and they’re actually eight individual paged books. They look like comic books, which has really been a score for us for the reluctant readers that are out there. They see that first chapter and they think, “Oh, I can do that.” And by then, we’ve got them hooked. And the idea is that those books are being doled out one at a time and they’re controlled by the parent. We actually have a back channel through Together Tails, which is email communication that we have, that’s all set up on a system so when it’s time to give Book Two, we know that because it alternates. There’s interactive moments in between each chapter.

Evan Jones:

So at the end of Chapter One, there’s a crisis and that crisis centers around, “We need somebody to help us save the day.” That’s going to be your child. The child goes online, finds an interactive activity that is specific to that book and the moment that they beat that game, or they finish that challenge or they complete the task they’re being asked to do, it sends a message right back to the parent that says, “Okay, now it’s time to release Chapter Two. And so we can keep them updated all the time.

Evan Jones:

It’s also … one of the things I’m really excited about is that we’re able to spark conversations because not only does the child … The child’s immersed in this storyline, but then the parent gets a kind of cheat sheet that says, “Here’s what’s going on in the story right now. Here are some things that you might want to talk about in the next car ride with your child.” And there are some really fun moments where we give backstory that sort of fits right into the larger narrative and say like, you might want to mention that you have a friend that does this or something. And when you’re talking, you can be involved in the story if you play along in that way.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Wow. And one example, if I can go back to a video I watched was maybe the children in this case, their part, I don’t know what part of the story this is in-

Evan Jones:

They’re my kids in the video.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Oh, are they cool? Cool. So when you have this moment where I guess they’re going to another planet, and the outside in sort of idea where everything is backwards. And one of the recommendations is, is that you make their sandwiches that day so that the lettuce is the bread and the cheese is there and the breads in the middle.

Evan Jones:

Right. Right. I mean, it’s just a simple thing. Today make a sandwich that’s inside out. But for a child who spent the night before going to bed, reading the story about the Topsy Turvy Inside Out Planet, and they wake up and open their lunchbox and everything is inside out, it’s this little epiphany that I think creates those moments that I hope they’ll remember.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

No, definitely. And that’s really what story is meant to do and what brands are trying to do, is to create experiences that we remember and keep us coming back and feel warm and fuzzy about them. Together Tales is just one example of the experiential storytelling that you do. Can you give us a few others that might be more applicable to a corporate setting?

Evan Jones:

Sure. We’ve worked with a lot of broadcasters that are trying to reach a really large audience. Together Tails is … it happens right in somebody’s home. But we’ve created massive experiences. One of the projects we did for Fox Television was called the Sarah Connor Chronicles. It was a spinoff from the Terminator franchise and the idea for them was they wanted to raise awareness about this upcoming series. They wanted to attract people who were kind of scattered. The fan base has a lot of different interests and we wanted to focus them on this project. And so we created a story that took their plot lines and made them into a quest.

Evan Jones:

And the quest was that we had cameras that could take photographs of the future. If you took a camera … We made these special cameras, and if you took a photo with them, you could send us that photo and we would spend the next 24 hours making it look like that was part of the Terminator world. So it was able to get these branded photos out there that were not something that we had prepared before. It was the fan base that was deciding how the story was going to progress and then our story was being dropped into their moments. I won’t get too deep into the lower but there’s a resistance that is resisting against the terminator and those resistance fighters are the ones that are spray painting messages into your family photos and things. So if you take a picture of your house and send it to us, we will show you how it looks in the Terminator future.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Oh my goodness. That is pretty wild. It just reminds me of those escape rooms, if you will. Maybe the places where you have to … you’re given clues, you’re given instructions and an “Oh, well, here’s your timeline, here’s what you’re doing. Now you figure it out. You decide how you’re going to get out of the situation.”

Evan Jones:

Right. I think experiences are becoming more and more desirable because there’s not a lot of scarcity anymore in the media world. I don’t mean to go off on a tangent, but when you think about how easy it is to get any music that you would like at a few clicks and any movie that you want to watch is ready to stream to you, people are seeking something that everybody else doesn’t have. There’s a bit of cachet to saying, “Well, I didn’t just watch the same Netflix series that everybody’s watching right now. I went out and I did something that was different.” And I think escape rooms have really scratched that itch. I think that there’s a market for experiences. It just stands out from the crowd of a very, very crowded ecosystem.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

So if I were to try to write an experiential story, what would I do to set myself up for success?

Evan Jones:

There are a lot of different terms for the kind of story that you’re talking about. Another one that people have been tossing around lately is story world. One of the things that most creative industries will know is story Bible. If you’re creating a story Bible for your story world, the step that I would recommend first is to really think about what is different in your fictional world than the world that we live in today? Because that’s the first, that’s the foundation that you need to build everything upon. Is that if we’re looking at well-known franchises out there, something like a Harry Potter example, you would say, “Okay, our world is exactly the same, except for one difference, which is that wizards and witches exist. They all go to school in a place that nobody ever finds out because we don’t know about that world. And people can cross between those two worlds,” and things like that.

Evan Jones:

Those are the types of rules that your mythology needs to have to start. But I think from there, you’re then layering on characters. You’re saying, “Who are some examples of people that live in this world?” And I hope if you’ve done your job correctly, you will find that those characters spring out of the first stage. If I were to use another space it would say, “I’ll stick with Harry Potter.” But things like Voldemort as I’ve invoked his name but-

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

We’re all in trouble now,

Evan Jones:

… that comes from the concept itself. It’s just a natural progression from that. So, you layer on characters and then I think it depends how loose you want to be. There is a real spectrum of storytelling. At one end of the spectrum, you have what I would say is linear storytelling. That is, I am the auteur and I decide what story you’re going to experience. I can print that in a book. I can make that in a movie. I can do lots of different things but I know this story.

Evan Jones:

There is another much more loose version of that story that is like having these loose arcs that say like, “Here are some beats that I know I want and moments that I’m trying to create for people. I think they might go in this order. That’s my best guess, but I’ve kept them separate enough that if these four happen first, I know where I’m supposed to go from there and how they connect together.”

Evan Jones:

And so that ends up being a story Bible because it’s a written document, and it’s not a document that any of the audience is ever going to see. If you’ve done your job correctly. That should only go to the people that are creating the project. My art director, my technical director, the writers that I work with, the voice artists. All of these people are going to read that Bible and they’re going to internalize that world so that they can then play the parts that they need to play. I think at that very, very interactive end of the spectrum, you have to give all of that backstory simply so that when the improvisation part is inevitably going to happen, that they’re so rooted in where they need to improvise from.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Something interesting I noticed about your work too in the Together Tales was this whole notion of having this master control robot guy who would tell the kids, I’m guessing what their next steps are, what their mission is, what their orders are like. That’s really interesting.

Evan Jones:

Together Tales as an example, we have a formula to Together Tales Adventures that we follow because it enables us to do things the way that we need to. One of the things is that we can’t have the child, who’s reading the story physically in the book, in the story. There’s some stories where they actually transport the reader and say, “Now you are in this space and you are experiencing this and your choices matter in this space.” But there is a distance that has to happen in the way that they’re crafted, because we don’t break that fourth wall. And so one of the things that we need, is we need a guide character. That is something that we have to set up for every Together Tales that we ever produce, is that we need to have one character who is the bridge between those worlds and who speaks to the characters in the book, and then turns around and relays that information to the child outside of the book.

Evan Jones:

And so that becomes … Unit Mind is our super computer and it’s a reference to all the bat computer stuff in Batman references and things. But we have another story, completely different called Circus of Mirrors. In Circus of Mirrors children can pass through mirrors to find this amazing circus on the other side. And your iPad or your computer, the screen itself becomes that magic mirror. So you can look through a looking glass into that fictional world, but you need that mirror as your guide character to help you through that part.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Well, interesting. We’re talking about kids here, so I just want to make sure that I cover this as well. A lot of media these days, you have to craft it for children so that they know that there are fantastical elements. They are so obvious to them that they know this isn’t real and they won’t hurt themselves, or they won’t … So what goes into that process for you just having mentioned the mirrors and joining into the circus and how do they know what is real and what is not real? Is it that guide that helps them to distinguish, or is it the parents? How do they do that?

Evan Jones:

That’s why we pick this particular age group, because we love the blurring of lines between what’s real and what’s not real. We actually have found that we also have adults who really enjoy that. It’s not just a suspension of disbelief, it’s also, I’d say it’s a step further, which is, I don’t like that double negative. I don’t like the idea that you’re going to take disbelief and you’re going to get rid of it. I love the idea that you’re going to perform belief. That you’re going to actually pretend that you do believe and even though every one of us understands, what’s real and what’s not, we’re all going to conspire to create something that at a certain point, you are playing along and then you cross over. And for just a moment, you believe that there are the witches and wizards of Harry Potter all around you, because it’s an escapism. I think that it’s different than sitting back and letting your mind absorb a story. It’s about thinking about, “Okay, what what do I want in this world?

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I can appreciate the going into that experience and as you say, not suspending disbelief, but kind of becoming part of that story. I mean, you see actors do this all the time. They’re in their role. They’re living it out. They’re reading the lines as if they are that person, just to bring it back to, I guess there’s always closure. Every story has kind of an ending where it comes to a close. When you’re doing that, do you bring them back gently, back into that reality?

Evan Jones:

Yeah, if you’re taking this much from theater that I think we do in this interactive space, one of the big things about theater is about your motivation. I don’t think you can let people just loose into an experience. You really have to prepare them in a sense of saying, “This is what motivates you. This is your goal.” I think that the most satisfying part is that the story closes with achieving the goal that you set out to achieve.

Evan Jones:

Games are so easily pointed to in this example. Is that you have a goal, beat this game, here are the rules, and I think there’s a lot of blending that you’re hearing. We might call something experiential storytelling, but there’s so much that the gaming world has taught us from that space about how stories can emerge out of rule sets.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

All right. Now, I know we’ve both been waiting for this part of the conversation, but there is a quasi debate, I guess, around experiential storytelling, transmedia where they make crossover. What on earth are they? How do they differ? Can you walk us through your opinion Evan, of of what this all looks like and why we should really care about the differences?

Evan Jones:

You know, I’ve been doing this a long time now. I think that 15 years of obsession in it has shown me a lot of different trends. One of the things that I’ve been witness to is what I would say is the rise and fall of transmedia. It certainly for a while was this very, very new thing. AI happen to have a particularly high bar when it comes to that word, because I really feel that it does represent something that never existed before. One example that I would say is that many people would look to Harry Potter and say that’s transmedia, but I actually disagree.

Evan Jones:

And the reason that I disagree is because I think that each part of that universe is discreet, is that taking a book and adapting it into a film, they’re two different media, definitely. But the thing that speaks to me about transmedia in it’s purest form is that it cannot exist as one thing. Is that it’s the synthesis in the audience’s mind of multiple pieces of media that actually is the transmedia. I like to say it’s a transcendent media. It transcends one particular media and so that’s where it crosses over a lot with experiential storytelling to me. Because experiences and games and transmedia and all these can be something which is that it’s not clear where you start. It’s not clear where these projects end. And also you can’t give one to somebody else. You can show them the door and they can enter a transmedia world or an experiential world, and they can start moving through their own version of it, but it’s not going to be the same.

Evan Jones:

Evan Jones:

So for whatever reason, that word also then became very popular because everyone wants to be in all media. I think the reason that I’m so interested in this is that I think that, that style of narrative is a narrative style that is native to the internet. That before the internet we had everything in silos and it was very difficult to imagine a world where you could just with one click be reading a text, watching a video, moving from one fictional space into another new location. That effortless hyperlinking is what I think birthed the idea that stories could be disconnected and decentralized and found in different places at the same time.

Evan Jones:

So, now I see a lot of people talking about transmedia and knowing that, that is my bar, it’s very difficult when you see it applied for instance, to say an integrated brand strategy. Because an integrated brand strategy, I think is a brilliant and useful thing, but it’s slightly different. It’s not the same as saying, “Well, the problem is it’s just adjacent. It’s so close.”

Evan Jones:

So the idea is whether or not marketing is storytelling and whether or not those words should remain separate or have been collapsed lately.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yes, it is a popular term. I’ve heard it, but very narrowly understood it perhaps, before we talked today, for instance, I would think that, “Oh, well, it’s a character from a production of some kind, be it a book or movie, whatever.” But because it exists in so many different pockets or silos, as we would have said before, well, it must be transmedia. Because this character can be engaged with in various formats, be it a talking toy, viewed as a film. It’s the animated cartoon on TV, maybe it’s an audio book with a physical book that you turn the page and you press buttons in it, these sort of things. But it isn’t necessarily that. It’s so hard to understand because it’s new and everyone might be using the word possibly in their own way.

Evan Jones:

It’s the idea that something can exist that’s separate from all of those things, but when they’re in combination, they produce something. One of my obsessions is with emergent properties. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts and the idea that new properties emerge from things. The way that you might be able to say, “Well, when I consumed this story and this story, a third story is actually born and I can connect those dots together. And even though neither of them said it, I can make those relationships happen in my own mind.”

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Would that be like fan fiction then?

Evan Jones:

So fan fiction is an incredible example of a well-developed story world. I would say that if you have guided your audience to feel confident that they can take on characters and settings and right within that space, I mean, that’s sort of the high watermark for whether or not your project has enough of a foundation to last. Definitely I think fan fiction is a wonderful component of that.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Now, experiential storytelling, very amazing. We just went over high level, conceptual. But for those of us who need a more grounded idea of what that actually looks like for a business who is maybe coming to someone like you needing to have this work done, what would you do for them? Where would you start?

Evan Jones:

So when we meet with people, we talk to them about why they’re talking to people in the first place. What is it that they’re trying to convey? That’s the theme of whatever you’re creating. I mean, even as I talk about building a foundation of a story world, you always have some motivation for why you want to share this story with others. It’s about trying to unlock that. Some people were really clear and some people they need to go through a bit of a process of saying, “Well, is this what you mean? And let me say it to you in a different way.” And you have to … Companies go through this with their mission statements. It’s not easy to say “This is the one statement that defines us,” but that’s what a story needs. What are you trying to convey here?

Evan Jones:

And then we would say also, “What is the success metric that you’re going to be using?” As creative people, we always say, “Everybody will be influenced forever,” but if we want to talk about practical goals, we try to say, “Well, we need to measure how we’re going to say that, that worked.? So, because clients don’t come to us with unlimited budgets and dreams of just creating new story worlds for nothing we spend our time at the beginning just trying to get something about, how do we know that this is going to work? Once we say, “This is why we’re making it,” sometimes we end up changing everything entirely because all of this experiential story is great for creating experiences and sometimes people want different things.

Evan Jones:

We always leave ourselves open to say, “You know what? This is not right for your goals.” Then when we find it, it’s a good fit. We can take that sort of theme, central theme of the story and say, “This is why each character is representing a different aspect of it. This is the story arc that we’re planning and this is why it’s going to impart this one message for people.”

Evan Jones:

And so, you start with that and it takes many forms. I mean, in the end we’re producing it and so conceptually it starts there and then we have to get down to the practicalities and say, “Well, we’ve got to cast this. We’ve got to create assets for it. And we have to know our contingency plans if the audience likes it or starts to react differently.”

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Right. And just like any story, you have the protagonist, your hero, and that’s more than likely your customer, whoever it is that they’re trying to put in the role of the hero. Right? And then you’ll have your guide as you said, you always have that guide in there and make sure that they’re not stepping outside of the bounds where they shouldn’t be. But also helping them to achieve their goal, which ultimately is hopefully going to make them more successful, possibly. It could be a success metric that has to do with making some more money or making their people more productive in an offsite or something. It’s great but so long as you get that hero achieving their goal, then that’s what really matters in the story.

Evan Jones:

Yeah. That’s a great example too, is that one thing that we struggle with is that when we bring story to two goals like that, what we find is that stories are different than marketing because marketing is all about the hero and the success. Sometimes stories have to have a villain and they also have times where they need to have conflict. I think there’s a trade off that people make when they talk about these, which is that you have to be willing to challenge people in the story, because the protagonist isn’t just going to be the hero.

Evan Jones:

There also has to be tests and sometimes when we’re talking in a marketing capacity, that’s a difficult sell because we’re saying this can’t just be everything is great all the time. We actually have to confront something and that confrontation is going to be what people remember about this brand. We try to brainstorm and identify things like that.

Evan Jones:

The other piece is that it ends up that, that exercise cannot actually help a brand understand what they stand for, in a way. It doesn’t always have to be about a positive message because people have learned to sometimes tune that out. If you can actually define something that you that you’re counter to, that helps to put people … it helps people understand. I think people make memories out of stories. We use those as sort of a shorthand to remember the context of things. I think that if brands are brave enough for that, that they can really do some great things, but it’s different than just promotion.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Well, by having that villain, as you said, which there always is opposition of some kind, right, you create a rallying point for that hero or the multiple heroes as maybe to come together and unify and say, “Well, you know what? We’ve got this challenge and we need to face it head on and we’re going to take it. And here’s our plan.” And off they march, right?

Evan Jones:

Right.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

So I think it’s amazing. You certainly cannot have a story without conflict because everything can’t be rosy all the time. We all know that, but usually there’s this growth or this element of self discovery that also happens in the midst of these stories. That could also be part of that experiential model that we were talking about, is that people might actually learn something about themselves through the story arc as it unfolds.

Evan Jones:

I think that’s the most exciting part of all.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Evan, this is so awesome. I just love everything you just said. It’s great. It’s inspirational for us as storytellers, but also to know how to engage with media in this new way that we’re finding we’re having to. Now, if anyone would like to learn more about you and what your company does at Switch Media, where can they find you?

Evan Jones:

Well, the easiest thing is our website is just stitch.media and that’s it. You’re going to find case studies of all the projects that we’ve been talking about and, and links to a lot of our work.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Well, thank you very much.

Evan Jones:

Thanks so much.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Thank you for tuning in, and if you haven’t already done so, I’d like to invite you to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, as well as give us a rating. We love hearing from you and gathering your feedback. Once again, I’m your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli and I hope you can join us for our next Sound Stories Podcast.