A Tea with… Eric!

April 11, 2016 / Aurora Piaggesi / Leave a comment

As mentioned last week, today’s journal will be an interview with Eric, a young artist whose performance could be seen some days ago on Italia’s Got Talent. We met this afternoon and, while sipping a nice cup of tea together, I asked him some questions about his choices in life and career. What I got was a story of a young man who built his own artistic brand based on this key elements: dreams, music and homemade.

Eric was born as Fabrizio Florio in Calabria, a southern region of Italy. As his father was a musician and his mother used to sing, Eric grew up loving music. And Disney films. Even if he is close to his first quarter of century, Eric is not ashamed of saying that Disney represents life itself for him, because of the many shades that the stories and messages from the popular brand are capable to picture.

Completed his studies in Media while traveling across the world, Fabrizio moved to Rome to study performing arts. The tragic loss of his mother gave him the needed epiphany on which he started to built his artistic career. “Back then I realized that from that moment on I was going to do only what I wanted. I am going to live a fulfilling life, for both me and my mum” he says.

So he found himself a nome d’art that could embody his different backgrounds and called himself Eric: a Disney character in love with music and who travels the world by sea. With this name and his own version of Part of your world from The Little Mermaid, Eric collected four “yes” at his auditions for Italia’s Got Talent, and his popularity across the country seems destined only to increase.

During our tea-chat, Eric and I talked about his branding choice. His logline is “Dreams homemade” because he recognized the importance to bring contents even if lacking with technical capabilities. He is aiming to create a true connection with his audience and for this goal he put himself completely on board, and he did it firstly by sharing his story with them.

Eric is not nor Christina Aguilera (whose voice speaks for itself) nor Michael Bay, and he did a great job at understanding what were the main elements he could stress to get to people.

Content: He provided a good performance, without which he would have looked like a fraud, and his story alone would not have been enough.
Story: He showed his inner fears and told his personal story. This was appreciated by the audience, who liked that he took this risk. We are in the dream society, remember?
Connection: He was able to find a song and a character that reflected his story, like it did for many members of the audience. They felt a connection with him.

I firmly believe that nowadays successful brands need to rely on these elements.

Eric is still at the beginning of his journey since he doesn’t have a strategy or enough confidence in his performances, but I want to believe that we all can follow his path and start making our homemade dreams come true.

Bring that son of a Pitch on!

February 14, 2016February 14, 2016 / Aurora Piaggesi / 1 Comment

Pitching is an activity that might sound unknown to those who never had to present a project to a commission, to those who never had to persuade someone else about the quality of their own ideas, to those that are not independent creative workers.

To us pitching represents an inevitable moment in the process of preparing a project. It’s when you have to face your inner fears of being judged and expose your idea to someone whose help you are in need of.

As money and investors lack, pitching has become more and more important. Since the last thing you want is to get to pitch your idea and go there unprepared (nothing is worse than a pitching session full of “ehhhh… mmmmh… ahhhhh….”), you had better to learn the principles of pitching and exercise the hell out of it. There are several courses out there willing to teach you how to do the perfect pitch. They cost around two thousand euros.

If you, like me, don’t dispose of that sum, I would suggest the enlightening book by professional script doctor Bobette Buster: Do Story – How to tell your story so the world listens. In this short yet amazing book, Buster shares her experiences in teaching her students how to bring out the perfect story.

In one of my past article we already outlined the importance of knowing what you want to tell and why so, in this section, I would like to skip directly to the format of your story.

Once you developed your story to be the best you could tell, you have to pitch it in order to, as Cormac McCarthy would say, “bring the fire to others“.

Here are the ten principles of narration as seen from Bobette Buster:

When you tell a story (aka when you pitch your idea), tell it like you were telling it to a friend. It would keep your narration fresh, quick and personal.
You must let your audience know the answer to the following questions: what, where, when, who?
Use verbs in present time: it would help your audience getting involved in your narration.
Remember that story’s main structure develops around a conflict between a thesis and an antithesis. Let your audience know about this conflict.
Don’t forget to give your speech some “colorful” details, something to hook your audience with. My suggestion is to chance this detail as you change your audience, to find the most suitable every time.
Try to pass to your audience that same sparkle that stroke you the first time that idea came to your mind.
Share your story in the most personal way. Don’t be afraid to show a weak point.
Narrate through the five senses: give your audience several ways to visualize what you are talking about.
Dare yourself, don’t hide. In telling stories truth is the winner.
Be short, you don’t want your audience to get bored.

With this indications in mind, you could prepare a short and engaging pitch, so to thrill your audience with the same excitement that is driving you while you work on your project. Good luck!

Back to the core

January 24, 2016January 24, 2016 / Aurora Piaggesi / 1 Comment

These last few weeks have been quite important in my life, both professionally and privately.

As a story editor, screenwriter and storyteller in training, I started working on myself as a freelance. While public relations, contacts, self marketing and promotion are still in the making process, I am glad to find myself already in the position for practicing a bit. I am currently working as a story editor for a private, a professor willing to write down a film treatment. I am helping him to do so, and he’s paying me for this job. After years and years of studying and training I am happy of this goal.

As I was working with this man I immediately realized why his previous attempts in film writing were unsuccessful: there was a total lack of substance and values in his ideas. As many before him, my employer wanted to put a series of images he developed before a story, a structure and values.

Because most of the time the images we develop aren’t original, but coming from other images we might have seen in the course of our lives, I think is really difficult to work on a excellent project if not starting from the very basic question.

“Why am I telling this story?”

Which immediately leads to the following:

“How is my story going to impact on my audience’s life?”

Seems strange to make this kind of consideration nowadays, when our new technologies make us able to communicate our thoughts so quickly that sometimes we tap quicker than we think. There are so many images, videos, words shared everyday on our social media that there is no wonder we feel our minds full of suggestions and impressions we want to express.

But, If I learned anything in these years, is that none of these “immediate” communications, none of these images born from fading memories would last. Nor in our mind nor in our audience’s mind.

A couple of weeks ago I learned from Seung Ah Kim, a famous storyteller from Korea, the concept of “Dream Society” as theorized by Rolf Jensen. As the scheme below shows, we are in a transition period, from Information to Dream Society, a world where technology and pragmatism are soon to be replaced by a new desire of values, emotions… what I like to call “The Core” of our lives.

What powerful stories and communications have in common is an evergreen attention to the core, an aim to find an inner value or theme in the image or anecdote one wants to share.

Once you are communicating (maybe through a story, maybe through a video or an image) just something you think is “likable” or “cool” or “funny”, you are probably not sharing something coming from your core. And that’s why it will reach a less part of your audience.

But if you share something because of the message behind it, because you WANT to communicate THAT something, because you feel like what you want to share is part of you, who you are and how you feel, then is when your message or idea come from the core, then is when you will be heard.

Otherwise, is just the noise of a tree falling in a snow-covered woods.