In this episode of Let’s Make This More Interesting from eatbigfish, Adam explores what it takes to be more interesting in a very different medium: stop frame animation. Madga Osinska, today’s guest, is a director of short films and commercials for the world-famous Aardman Animations, besides her own projects, and a winner of jury prizes throughout Europe for her work.

Adam and Magda unpack what it takes to really deliver Aardman’s four principles – comedy, story, character and craft – alongside the value of constraints in forcing you to find better ways to tell your story. And what it really means to explore the human condition in plasticine.

The conversation explores:

• The combination of heartwarming and heartbreaking in creating audience engagement
• How to give a character depth – and why flaws matter
• The real value of details and easter eggs
• Visual storytelling – using colour and shape to tell the story in parallel to the words

…And why you should be very, very careful never to win an Oscar

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Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish: the strategic consultancy that helps ambitious Challengers to grow.

Follow Adam on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-morgan-3a473a/

Thanks to our editor Ruth and our producer Rachael.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does it take to be interesting enough for people to brave the New York City subway to come and join you on a cold, wet, Tuesday night? Every Tuesday night? For two years?

In this episode, Adam Morgan is joined by Jeffrey Robb, professional Dungeon Master, actor, and educator, who runs paid games of Dungeons and Dragons up to eleven times a week across the five boroughs of New York. And what starts as a masterclass in epic, layered storytelling turns into something rather different. Because as Jeffrey explains, a great dungeon master isn't in fact there to tell an epic story; they're there to make it possible for a disparate group of people –– with different motivations, different expectations, different levels of commitment –– to create an epic story for themselves.

There's a lot here for anyone trying to hold a room. Jeffrey and Adam explore:

• The importance of choices in storytelling experiences: why giving people agency over the narrative creates ownership (- and why the best choices always leave room for a secret third option)
• Why it’s key to see the experience as ‘carefully managed chaos’: how the most inventive moments come from building a system flexible enough to be surprised by its own players
• Where you do and don’t want surprise , and why it has to work in two very different ways here
• The lessons Jeffrey learned from superhero comics and Shakespearean drama that he brings to the experiences he curates
• The primacy of trust, and what a "Session Zero" can teach anyone who needs to unlock a group's imagination fast
• What it means for good drama asks a question of its audience

Along the way, there's a squeaky goblin, why it’s unexpectedly dull to play a villain, and what increasing consumer expectations mean in D&D: why so many people now seem to want a burned village to avenge…

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Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish: the strategic consultancy that helps ambitious Challengers to grow.

Follow Adam on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-morgan-3a473a/

Thanks to our editor Ruth and our producer Rachael.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How engaging do you have to be, really, to break inertia? To disrupt beliefs? And what does that take in your communication and in your culture?

In this episode of Let’s Make This More Interesting, Adam Morgan is joined by Lucinda Barlow, who leads International Marketing at Uber across more than 60 countries. Drawing on a remarkable body of evidence spanning 19 communications campaigns around the world, Lucinda shares the two approaches that created real impact and drove growth, and the ones that didn’t.

They discuss the cultural forces driving dull work: mechanistic thinking, an obsession with productivity, the quiet presence of fear as the “8th passenger” in the room: how, together, they create a system that rewards mediocrity.

And Lucinda shares how and why she champions a challenger mindset in her team, even in a large company like Uber, and what it means for the way they both push for and protect more interesting ideas from those forces of Dull.

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Let's Make This More Interesting is a podcast from eatbigfish: the strategic consultancy that helps ambitious Challengers to grow.

Follow Adam on Linkedin.

Thanks to our editor Ruth and our producer Rachael. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.