Meet the Team: sara
If you’re reading this you probably already know that we’re obsessed with stories. Stories are our thing. Whether we’re making a documentary about pothole repairing robots or an animation about the importance of cybersecurity, we’ll constantly be asking - what’s the story in this?
Ellie spoke to Sara about the importance of stories within her life and why they are at the heart of everything we do.
“I love stories, but to be honest, I never really thought about how ingrained they are in me until we started thinking about this chat, but storytelling has been integral to every part of my life.
So I suppose I’ll start at the beginning - my childhood was full of stories. My dad was a brilliant orator who would tell long and elaborate jokes or recount tales of his “adventures” in the army or working as a furniture dealer. Over the dinner table he would paint such vivid pictures of the characters he met that I felt I knew them. But that's because stories were in his bones. My Grandad was from a long line of fairground ”showfolk” where that tradition of oral storytelling is deeply ingrained.
When I was about 7 a theatre company called Pentabus came into my primary school and completely transformed the place for a few days with workshops and performances of The Little Match Girl. I remember being sat cross legged on the beautiful parquet wooden floor in the school hall, watching the play and thinking “I want to do that.” That was my introduction to drama and I guess a different form of storytelling.
So I became one of the drama kids because I just loved being different characters, telling different stories and taking an audience on an emotional journey. But I knew I didnt just want to be an actress, I wanted to create the whole story and not just tell it in a theatre but in places like school halls. Mix that with an inspirational theatre teacher who introduced me to Dario Fo and my mild obsession with Welfare State International and Penny Woolcock's Shakespeare on the Estate, but I began to understand the power that stories give to a community and it was what I wanted to do."
The importance of storytelling
Storytelling power is as old as we humans are. Think about cave paintings and the story they are telling about how and what to hunt. Think about traditional & fairy stories (often told to children by their birth mothers to instill a mistrust in any subsequent step mothers) and religious texts.
Stories are a way of passing on knowledge.
They often contain valuable information that would help to keep us safe, or to pass on culture and traditions of previous generations. Being told a cautionary tale about a boy who got eaten by a bear in a particular cave would definitely make you think twice about going into that cave. You would feel scared and that emotion would help you remember the story.
Derren Brown is a great example of the psychological power of storytelling. I loved his documentary about the psychology of luck and the fact that our perception of how lucky we are is dictated by narratives we are fed through society.
The beginning of S&B
Chris and I started Suited and Booted Community Video in 1999 as a not for profit social enterprise. It was at a time when digital film making technology was emerging, making camera kit accessible outside of “the industry”. We founded the company with the belief that we could marry the process of helping communities tell their story with the quality of broadcast and corporate TV production.
We’d run projects with all kinds of people helping them create short films to tell their stories. From the homeless and people rehabilitating from drugs to those affected by postnatal depression, we met some amazing people. We would also help community organisations create promotional films to show the importance of the work they were doing, in a way we were making branded content before branded content was “a thing”.
And, as with many of the best stories, everything kind of came full circle for me at this time. In the early S&B days I decided to approach people who had been working in this form of participatory “community video” for a while to ask for advice on funding. One of the people I spoke to was Nick Millington, who set up Rural Media Company in Hereford. Chatting to him, I discovered that he had been a founding member of Pentabus all those years ago.
I’m so incredibly proud of the impact of the story based work we’ve done over the years. Particularly the work we have done with hospices and mental health charities. And as we have developed as an agency that storytelling approach is still core to us.
What we do now
I feel like as a society we are in a new age of storytelling. Cameraphones and social media platforms have made it easy for everyone to constantly be telling their story to a wider audience. It's the equivalent of my dad telling us about his day at the dinner table, but now people “do a live” and talk about their authentic truth.
Advertising has moved into that space too. Good marketeers have realised that it’s really not about just the facts. I can look at a poster and see that a computer costs £300 and it has a certain kind of processors, but what resonates is knowing the impact it has had on someone like me. That’s where story comes in. That low-budget computer could help a small business to take off, or help a student to achieve the grades they really need. It’s about the emotional impact rather than the cold hard facts. We are back at the story of the boy who got eaten by a bear in that particular cave. It's the emotion that resonates more than the facts.
