 Do you like Game of Thrones? I do. I also like Yerma Girls, Castle, Veronica Mars, Web Therapy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Miss Marple and The Secret of Monkey Island a lot. All of which, in my opinion, really are great fictional stories. So what is this course all about? Many of you asked before. Storytelling of course. But what is storytelling? Easy, you might think. It's all about telling a story. But what does that actually mean? How would you define it? What is it that immediately comes to your mind when you think of a story? We ask every single one of our guest lecturers how she or he would define a story. But here is a quick peek into what they said. So to answer what is storytelling, I think we need to think like what is a story? So if you think of a story as being basically a synchroence or pieces of information that we as humans try to find some relevance between, we're looking for these connections. And so a storytelling is what a storyteller does. So a storyteller would take pieces of information and then control the delivery of that. So they would withhold some information, they would reveal some others. Storytelling uses a language, a language not me being la-la-la-la-la-la, but it can be a film as a language, an expression like dancing, or you could also have poetry as a form of storytelling music, like rap music or any type of music. There are very, very many ways to even define what story is. It can be a moment, it can be the whole story of the universe. It can be a very fragmented approach, episodic, it can be one plotline. As you see, while I'm telling all these definitions, I think there shouldn't be a definition of story. Every writer should define that, him or herself. Of course it sometimes depends on the medium. Is it dramatic storytelling? Is it storytelling in a novel? Is it for a young child? So the audience sometimes defines what storytelling is, but that's how far I would go. I think the best types of storytellers understand what's going on inside the audience's head, like what pieces they're trying to connect and what work they're doing, so that everything is not just laid out as an easy kind of explanation, but they leave these strategic gaps so that we are almost obliged, so we find ourselves diving deeper into this story to find those connections and understand the relevance where it is, even if sometimes there isn't any relevance, we are looking for it. The only definition everybody seems to be able to agree on is that storytelling consists of both the telling and the story part, the ideas that are shared, narrated and presented by the storyteller. This course will be about both the structures, elements and concepts necessary to create a story and also the people, the tools and the channels that eventually tell these stories. The story and on the other side the telling, that's about both. Only if we explore and understand the functionalities, so to say the MO, the mode of operation, the work of both sides of storytelling, that are tightly interwoven, we will be able to analyze their relations and dependencies and possible changes in storytelling in general over the years. To be able to research tools, structures and content alike, my team and I have invited a whole network of professional creators, executives and scientists to share their experience in storytelling with us and therefore with you. Some of whom you've just seen already, Konjeja Funke, Robert Platten and also Maria Graustrenze. In the following weeks, we'll have a look at how they define and deal with storytelling themselves and what good storytelling means to them. This course is called the Future Storytelling. Obviously, apart from any time-travelling participants, nobody knows what the future will hold. However, we can very well analyze, understand and contextualize stories and the media up till today to see where we have already been and might be heading, which is why we start our next unit with a quick look into the past.