 To first of all understand where the term storytelling comes from, Professor Dr. Hans-Christoph Hobom from the University of Applied Sciences gives us a brief introduction to the major developments in storytelling over the millenniums. The first change in the structures of fictional prose fictional stories you find when you come from orality to literacy. You lose more and more those mnemonic structures. You lose the rhyme, for instance. The big epics are in rhyme. They have to be sung. And you lose all these serial effects. You have more and more what we call a story with a beginning and an ending. The Odyssey doesn't have real beginning and ending. It's just a story we make out of it. But finally it is told in its parts, in its portions. And it's beginning in the 17th and 18th century to be more and more introverted. You feel more and more the person in it. So it begins to be more and more individualistic, combined to the personality of the reader and the writer. To have someone who sees himself as a writer, the author. That is an invention of at least the 17th and 18th century. We find it more and more interwoven with the personal biography, even the fictional biography, but we more see the person in the story. The first stories are more the group. The very first stories are the group in terms of the culture or the nation also. The foundations of the nations are the first stories, the epics. And it's getting more and more individualistic and more and more, let's say biographic. The possibility to write about one's own life is quite a new invention, finally. And in the 19th century it is more the quantity effect. You find a great variety of stories and fictional prose. And in the midst of the 20th century you have sort of a destruction of the structure. With Nouveau Romain, Michel Boutin, Boutin and Rob Grier and those. And we are only now, to my optimistic view, we are coming back to some more biographical stories. For anybody interested in a deeper exploration of the origins of storytelling, please check out Professor Hoboom's full lecture on the topic that we added below. In it he explains the major cultural changes and developments that influenced and define the ways stories are told, up to the present days. From epic oral storytelling up to the development of science and writing and literacy, the ability to write and read. And much later Gutenberg's invention of book printing and therefore also followed by the first ever mass production of stories. Thousands of years had to pass. If we look at the time span between the first film scenes, however, shown to the public in 1895 by the Lumière brothers. And secondly the first ever TV transmissions in the 1920s and then thirdly the construction of the first computers. Time spans between trans-setting media related developments have become shorter and shorter. Also all of these inventions have sooner or later inspired artists to tell and distribute stories in a new and certain way. And not only the transmission presentation and interaction has changed but also the stories, the content. New means have always made it possible for artists to broaden their ways of communicating with the recipients, with you, the audience or the reader. If we look at the works of Georges Méliès for example the inventor of trick film and special effects in the early 20th century we can see narrative artworks full of movement, fantastic costumes and tricks like in his famous silent movie Voyage dans la Lune a trip to the moon in English from 1902, really early work. The scene in which the rocket crashes into the moon was made just possible by Méliès' invention of the stop-motion trick that was created by a simple yet at that time very innovative cut in the film material. It's just a cut that creates this stop-motion trick. This is just one example of how technological inventions and media have influenced the stories and the ways stories have been told directly. The evolution of technological tools to share stories has all but slowed down in recent years, as we all know. If we look at the upcoming and the spreading of the worldwide web, the internet in the 90s, digital data and also the founding of the online video platform YouTube in just 2005 the development has been crazily quick these last years. Today it's not only possible to spread media content very, very broadly, very easily by the internet the upcoming of easy to use affordable HD cams, smartphones with inbuilt cameras audio recording and texting services to create not only spread media content is just as important in the ways stories are told today. Always, really, really always this technological development has been connected to yearning for new and adequate content and exploration of its possibilities. This is why I think it's important to look at the latest developments in content and tools a bit closer, which is what this course is all about.