The Story Department

Introducing the Seventh Age of Story

Storytelling is an ancient form of communication that, in fact, predates numbers and even language itself. Cave painting represents the earliest recorded form, and in the intervening millennia there have been six ages of human story: Poetry, Theater, Fiction, Cinema, Radio, Television and the Internet.

The spatial realm of holography represents a seventh age and a new mass medium – ironically having much in common with the caves of homo sapiens as they attempted to dramatize our hopes and fears.

All stories begin with a question, an opening gambit.

In fact, the Greek word story originally means Learning by Inquiry. Holograms are new ways to open up human experience in the era beyond digital transformation – and they bring us back to embrace the real world after the looking-glass effect of the metaverse. Stories are told in languages but also in objects whether they are products or parts of the built environment. Cities are narratives. Industries are narratives.

Building MoonShot as the pre-eminent purveyor of holography to the spatial realm means leveraging classical story design – just as the founders of cinema, radio and television deployed the timeless laws of drama ever since Aristotle. Empathy, suspense and surprise are the three phases of all stories – call them what you will (Descent, Initiation, Return and Attack, Complication, Resolution are two other tripartite sequences as used by mythographer Joseph Campbell and dramatist John Rowe respectively).

We must continuously ask ourselves, what does empathy mean to MoonShot? What does suspense? What surprise?

Finally, the sequence approach to storytelling and screenwriting as popularized by Frank Daniel and others is key to generating episodic narrative for holograms.

Slicing dramatic action into units of 8 to 15 minutes, this method of designing immersive experiences allows us to extend narratives over any length of time.

Products become episodic story platforms. Places become long-running dramatic series. Data becomes a continuous narrative. And people become storytellers with a lifelong audience to listen to them, watch them and interact with them.

Holography – literally that which is written holistically or whole – gets its natural form of communication from the oldest connective behaviour.