Graydon, a student at the Bay School of San Francisco, participated in the Story Xperiential program last year as part of his 9th grade, 3-week Math of Digital Animation class. His teacher, Jess Goldstein, incorporated the program to help students develop storytelling skills and explore creativity. Jess was introduced to Story Xperiential by Tony DeRose, the X in a Box’s Chief Technical Officer and a former Bay School parent.
“Giving, receiving, and evaluating peer feedback was really helpful for my students. Making feedback required rather than optional forced my students to think about what type of feedback is actionable and helpful. The lessons on giving and receiving feedback were the most impactful. We value collaboration at our school, and this program provided strong structure for teamwork and feedback.” - Jess Goldstein, Mathematics Teacher
In this interview, Graydon shares his experience with the program and how it guided him through Pixar’s creative process.
Can you tell us about your story, experiential story or project?
I really enjoyed the project. I did a short storyreel based on a movie idea, where all the humans on earth disappeared, which followed a couple of former house pets. It was a good experience.
The way Story Xperiential kind of guides you along the process is actually really helpful, and being made to look at other people's work examples definitely helps with working on your own and kind of knowing how to expand on your ideas.
I also really like the comment system, because sometimes you get really funny ones or you get genuinely, really good advice on how to improve the animations or the storyreel or just write better.
Can you talk a little bit more about the peer feedback process?
I think the comment system was really good, especially considering we had to split the project up into so many parts. We got a lot of comments between every step and, more often than not, the comments that were actual advice applied to the whole process, not just a specific part.
Whether it was specific tips for how to improve the artwork or ideas that people had for the story or how to improve it, it just ended up actually being really useful, even the stuff that wasn’t coming from or had nothing to do with my classmates, just complete strangers. It was really helpful for developing my story and the storyreel.
What challenges did you experience and how did you overcome them?
I think the biggest challenges that I had during the whole process was the time crunch in which we had to do everything. We had to do the main part of the project in only a week or two, though that was dictated by the class, not Story Xperiential. But with the time crunch, we just got it done. There wasn't any special trick overcoming it.
The other thing was I'm not much of an artist myself. So, finding references and just being able to put proverbial ink on page for making my storyreel was a challenge. To overcome not being an artist, I just looked at pictures of animals online and sketched over them. It was fun.
What advice would you give to somebody for Story Xperiential?
I would probably say you either want to be very concise and brief and almost vague about what your story is and kind of let comments fill in and give you ideas. I know that's how it was for the first couple of my storyreels and there wasn't a lot there. I got a lot of good ideas just from the comments.
And the other way to do it is to just say as much as possible, be as detailed as you can be in the short amount of time you have and then look at the comments for feedback on your details.
If you go somewhere in the middle, you probably won't get as useful feedback.
So, just really commit to just blocks of your story and try to think about an overworking full thing or doing it slowly bit by bit and fill it with as much detail as possible.