Storytelling — A Desire To Be Understood
My documentary storytelling journey is very much attached to my personal desire to be understood. This motivates me to seek out opportunities to learn how to be better at public communication.
So, when Tembusu College, the residential college I stayed in when I was at NUS, offered a module on Public Persona and Self Presentation, I eagerly applied. While there were other modules that explored communication techniques, exploring the very concept of public personas was novel to me. Fortunately, my curiosities and motivations were met by the enthusiasm of our professor, Dr Sadorra.
In the module, we had to choose two speakers to study before then writing about our own persona. I chose Rita Pierson, whose “Every kid needs a champion” TED Talk still wows me till this day, and Panos Panay, the Vice President of Microsoft’s Surface team who I curiously felt was as effective a presenter as Steve Jobs while also being distinct from him. Why was I captivated by these two individuals, and what fundamental truths can I learn that will then form the basis for my own development?
As with new journeys of learning, mine was filled with gleeful enlightenments and chronic frustrations. This is perhaps why student - teacher relationships become such gifts when synchronicity is achieved. I frequently sought extra consultations with Dr Sadorra after classes. These consultations were less about the assignments at hand, but more about self discovery. After all, my underlying motivation for taking her class was to discover my own persona.
Perhaps the discovery of oneself is aided by the observation of others – That is how I would paraphrase the module description of Public Persona and Self Presentation. That was what I came to learn when working on the assignments to critically analyse the personas of the two speakers that I had admired prior to taking on this module.
I’ve watched Pierson’s TED Talk a dozen times or more prior to this module. Each time I’ve been captivated, yet never being able to articulate why. Through open conversations and intriguing propositions, Dr Sadorra gave me hints of where to explore but never the answer. After all, the answer lies in the process.
It was then that I experienced my eureka moment – that the appreciation of one’s public persona comes from the ability to describe, and to do so requires the development of my own internal vocabulary. For instance, Pierson had the aura of a strong comforting grandmother. She radiated maternal love while essentially giving a pep talk to a crowd of teachers that would succeed her. It felt like handing over the baton, knowing that while the job is rewarding, it is also hard. She gave the TED Talk in April 2013.
While researching for the assignment, I learnt that on 23 June that year, she passed away. That context was a defining feature of her persona, even if it was unknown to most of her audience including myself. I learned then that one’s public persona can change to embrace the context at hand, if not for the very least to be more effective in communicating to their audience.
With my newfound awareness for descriptors and context, I was now equipped to learn about my own persona. I sought to meet up with friends and colleagues that knew my love for presentation. I wanted to understand their perception of me, the same way Dr Sadorra pushed me to understand my perception of Pierson.
Common keywords began to emerge – ‘disarming’, ‘perceptive’, and ‘convincing’, to list a few. These descriptors allow me to improve on being myself as I can appreciate their full nature in tandem to the context that I am set in. And so, I became a better orator of my ideas and stories.
This belief of being myself to be my best self was reinforced when researching about Panay. I sought to juxtapose him to Jobs who is celebrated for his presentation style. Many would copy Jobs in hopes to attain his level of on stage charisma, some obsessively so. None would come close. And that was because while Panay and Jobs were distinct, fundamentally their approach in shaping their public persona was the same – they are who they are. And their understanding of that allowed them to be themselves – their best selves. And that is why no one else would come close.
These realisations were only possible because Dr Sadorra listened and danced with me through my journey of self discovery – one that will continue for a lifetime. Yet perhaps the greatest reward from her was that she showed me how to appreciate the personas of others, a vital skill when a cornerstone of my Documentary Storytelling process is to enable people to be themselves despite the novel experience of being in a documentary. By now, I reckon that I had conducted at least a hundred interviews. And in 2020, I featured some of them into a showreel to encapsulate the essence of what I do.
At the heart of the video was my hope that audiences would realise that people articulate their stories best when they present themselves. How else would justice be done to their stories?
