Hi, my name is Bree Jenkins. I'm 32 years old and I live in California. I've been an engineer, I've worked in education and I've also worked in leadership development and I heard about Story Xperiential from Elyse Klaidman who told me about it when I was working at Pixar University, at the time.
Tell us about your Story Xperiential project
I wrote and created a story called “True Magik” for Story Xperiential, which was about a yo-yo named Magik and her grieving process after losing her twin sister Naminé.
I went through the process of establishing the relationship, what they care about, Magic losing Naminé, and then her grieving process afterward and what she learned along the way. How this story came up for me is that I was in the process of grief myself at the time, my grandmother had just passed away and I was figuring out what grief looked and felt like and walking around really feeling like “I can't believe so many other people have experienced this” and just how devastating it is.
I wanted to find a way and Story Xperiential became my outlet for honoring my grandmother and for processing my grief.
What challenges did you face during the program, and how did you overcome them?
The whole process, I would say, was pretty challenging, and in the best of ways because it was a challenge where I was learning a lot.
I don't know how to storyboard. I'm not a trained visual artist and the story was also very deeply personal to me in exploring challenging topics.
So, I was really glad that there were a lot of opportunities through Story Xperiential to connect with different artists who would talk to us about perspective, who would talk to us about how we could focus on the character and what their expressions were, which is why I loved hearing from the experts and learning about their backgrounds.
Can you share how the peer feedback aspect of the program influenced
your storytelling projects?
Even though I am not a trained visual artist, it seemed like a lot of other people also weren't in the program, but also many people were. And so you had this nice back and forth where people would give you advice, give you feedback. They would give you their perspective and also a lot of positive cheering on along the way.
I think that was one of the things that I didn't expect when I first signed up for the program was you submit your work.
A lot of the time a few people gave such glowing feedback, but then they might have said, “... but here's an idea”, “maybe it could be better if…”, “have you thought about this?” or “have you tried this?” So they're asking these really great questions that expanded my work.
I think that was one of the best learnings from the experience - how useful that community of feedback givers was, especially those who are trained visual artists.
Some of them may have been in storyboarding, maybe some of them just loved storytelling and wanted to give their perspective on the story - that made the experience so much better for me.
What were some unexpected benefits you experienced from participating in Story Xperiential?
The other skills I learned along the way were around the process of letting go and I can, I've been working on this for a while, but I can be perfectionistic at times and there were deadlines that we had to do.
So it's like, “OK, I don't have time to just make sure that this is perfect. I have to submit something” and to watch the progress along the way was really cool, especially given that it couldn't be all the details shaken out. It had to be just the best work I could produce at the time.
I also worked a lot with committing to small steps towards progress and the skill of being really new at something.
I find that being bad or new at something always comes with great learning opportunities to build empathy, to remember what it feels like to be at the very beginning, how scary that can be, but also how exciting that can be.
So I'll take all of those skills with me going forward.
How has the program impacted you?
I think by the end of it, I built my confidence a lot in storytelling, and a little bit in the artistic part and in the storyboarding part.
I also found this new outlet to care for and honor my grandmother that I could share with other people that also had these universal truths that other people have also experienced.
What advice would you give to someone considering joining the Story
Xperiential program?
So overall, any advice I have for someone taking or starting Story Xperiential, is to put as much as you can into it, put your heart into it, put your background into it, put the stories that you're hearing from others into it.
Also, I would say do your best to be thoughtful and kind and direct when giving feedback to others so that you can help make their stories even better.
So good luck and I hope you have a great experience with Story Xperiential.