For the last four years of my life, I've studied almost every aspect and angle of storytelling, especially using visual and audible mediums. Even my writing (which I've never saw myself as a talented writer) has been critiqued and honed to a point where I feel comfortable writing for almost any kind of audience.
Storytellers will forever be needed, but in the age of on-demand, as-it-happens storytelling, it requires a different set of skills than used in the past. Long-range storytellers (which I consider myself a part of) is becomming far less in demand and a new breed of very fast, efficient storytellers are taking their place, capable to pump out more than a few stories every day. The problem here is that in-depth stories, our way of seeing beneath the surface, is becoming far less common and poses some serious threats to our complete understanding of our world.
As I've mentioned a few times in class, my goal is to use powerful storytelling to show and help fight poverty and injustices in the world. Haiti has always been a country in need of serious help on every single level, especially recently with the powerful earthquakes that shook the nation last week. One of the best visual journalists in the world, Dominic Nahr, was on the front lines and some of his work can be found here.
The amazing thing about storytellers such as Dominic, is the power of the truthfulness of the stories they tell. When the moment they show is so human, that even if one knows nothing of visual art, one can still relate and feel the power of humanity, which I believe to be the real art in storytelling. Everything we use to tell stories is just a tool: a computer, progam, camera, lens, microphone; they're all just tools we use to do what we do, tell stories. In the same way a painter doesn't love his paint brush, but rather he loves his own creation, I don't love the camera, but rather the story I tell.
Very good point. It is important to remember the tools are not the story. I feel that novice digital artists often fail to have their "story" transcend the medium of the work. On page 22 of visual explanations Tufte gives a good example of this citing the many perspective drawings of the 1500s that would include tiled grids completely out of context simply because it was the "hot" new thing. Take George Lucas's Star Wars prequels, in an effort to cram as much digitally snazzy stuff into the movies the story suffers horribly.
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