Storytelling and Culture: East Meets West Part 1
- By: Raven Sun Creative
What Makes a Good Story?
As a westerner have you ever watched an Asian film or read an epic tale and wondered about the number of characters involved in the story. As an easterner, have you ever read a book or seen a series of western films and wondered why everything is centered around a single character or action?
The nature of storytelling is less free-flowing than it appears on paper. Unbeknownst to many people, some of our most prominent Western works of literature and media follow the same narrative structure as other prominent works of Western literature and media. It is because of this outline that we are both receptive and intuitive to the organic flow of Western narratives.
This leads to another question: are storytelling structures the same in other parts of the world?
Eastern Vs. Western Storytelling
Louis Alfieri and Amy Kole sat down a few weeks ago to discuss their experiences working overseas as creatives in Japan and China. In part one of this two-part conversation published in Blooloop, they talk about how stories are broken down in Eastern countries when designing experiences for Asian guests, as well as how the poignant and customary philosophies of the East and West shape the way that location-based entertainment is developed and experienced.
Through it all, we start to gain a better understanding of how narratives take different forms, and what these forms reveal about their deeply-ingrained cultures.