Michael Backes, Screenwriter, Digital Pioneer, Special Effects Artist & Author

#144: How to Use Inspiration, Relatability and Suspense in Your Brand Storytelling

#144: How to Use Inspiration, Relatability and Suspense in Your Brand Storytelling

You may appreciate the importance of using inspiration, relatability and suspense in your stories. But it’s difficult to combine all three elements. We inevitably leave out one of these critical story elements unless we follow proven frameworks to our storytelling.

Michael Backes is here to show you how. Not only is he a storyteller, he is a screenwriter, co-founder of the American Film Institute Digital Media Studies program, Hollywood digital pioneer, special effects artist and author of Cannabis Pharmacy: The Practical Guide to Medical Marijuana.

He’s even a propagandist artist/scientist. I know, a varied career.

Though Michael has experience in many fields, they all relate back to storytelling. He’s currently working with a consultancy in Southern California that specializes in cannabis science and policy issues worldwide, helping change the narrative around cannabis to help people with chronic pain.

Michael shares his eclectic background in storytelling and what it takes to truly connect with an audience. We discuss how to construct engaging story structures that make your message incredibly easy for your audience to understand and get into.

In This Episode, You Will Learn

• How to take long exposition and boil it down to one fast-moving page of content
• What we might expect from the coming artificial intelligence age: the storytelling singularity, which happens to be on our doorstep, by the way. 
• How to overcome an anti-narrative

Key Quotes

“There is an infinite number of stories that could be told, but there are a finite number of structures that those stories could be told within.” –Michael Backes

“A corporation is nothing but a story that a bunch of people agree upon.” –Unknown

“You can truly change the culture of a company by changing the story that underlies it.” –Michael Backes

“Good stories are disruptive.” –Michael Backes

“The best storytellers really are the ones who set it up where you don’t see the surprise coming. They know how to control the tension.” –Michael Backes

“You have to make it easy for the brain. Story structure makes it easy for people to follow along, and then you deliver up the novelty and surprises.” -Park Howell

Mentioned In This Episode

• Michael Backes LinkedIn
• Michael Backes Quora
• Cannabis Pharmacy: The Practical Guide to Medical Marijuana
• The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation
• Artificial Intelligence
• Dramatica
• Playwright Tom Stoppard
• JJ Abrams Ted Talk, “The Mystery Box”
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence 

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