"Theater was for rich folks" That's not really true, though. The best seats were for rich folks, sure, but that's still the case today. There were always seats for poorer/working-class fans especially in the upper parts of the theater sections. Even operas had their place among poorer audiences - the Swedish artist Carl Larsson described in his childhood, a period when he and his mother were in total poverty, times when they would attend performances of Mozart's operas, along with many other working-class theater-goers. Some operas, especially Italian ones, were written to strike directly at the hearts of its national peoples, many of whom were far from rich. Sorry for this tangent.
I know nothing about the historical facts here, but to be fair the quote from the video is "theater productions were MOSTLY for rich folks". Again, I don't know the historical facts behind the claim, but if we're going to be specific, let's argue the actual point being made.
I had never heard of Myriorama before and it's quite the interesting concept. That is also a nice top for getting over writer's block. I usually fish around in multiple random prompt generators to find a few touch points to plot a story around when I am suffering from writer's block.
I've got some dice called "Rory's Story Cubes", each face has a different image representing a plot point, character, scene or narrative beat, and they're great for helping come up with quests for my _Dungeons & Dragons_ games. It's the same principle as these cards, sometimes you just need a set of random gubbins and your brain will work out the rest
Oh I have those! I got them for language learning/teaching; the idea was to push me (or my students, which I never ended up having any of) outside of comfort zones when forming sentences or doing short talks. They work - OK for that, though once you figure out one word for a given dice face then things can still fall into a bit of a holding pattern. But it's still a bit of a nice push to experiment, which is important.
If you don't already know them, Austin you should look into the "Oblique Strategies" set of cards made by Brian Eno (yes, the composer) that are specifically designed to help people fight creative block by employing unconventional techniques.
There's a book that's formatted in a similar way to the story cards! It's called The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson and it's a bunch of small packets that can be placed in any order to make a story. Overall, its about 244 pages. I personally haven't read it in any order yet, but I plan to soon!
When I was a kid we'd take shoebox lids, cut slits in them, and use cardboard and sheets of glued together paper to create analog side-scrolling shooters. This was the 80s so we ended up having to make shit up between irregular video gaming sessions. One hand pulls the threaded sheet, one hand controls your little fighter ship or w/e, and you made shit up while "shooting" drawn on enemies. We were in 3rd grade, what do you want.
It kinda reminds me of Story Cubes! Like you roll the dice and you try and make up a story based on what you rolled and you could mix up the order or the various dice together or just reroll it. Like 'I use a superhero based dice with a few mystery based dice to come up with a story about, uh, a guy with shrinking powers getting mixed up with ghosts or a murder. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but I do like this concept!
The answer better be "cocaine", cos I mean, it does work, brilliantly, at removing writer's block. Works almost _TOO_ well. You end up writing 100,000 words in one go if you aren't careful
I can wholeheartedly recommend a card game named Arkham Noir that has a similar structure. It's more of an actual game, it's a Lovecraft-themed detective solitair game, you string together clue cards according to the rules, forming lines that make up the solution to a case. It's at once a good puzzle game, and tells you an improvised detective story where you're the hero. And the mechanics are really cleverly set up to make the story beats fit together and make internal sense. I've had some fantastic experiences with this game. I've stumbled through city streets, mad with curses, looking frantically for a priest to cure me of insanity. I've chased a believed killer, only to discover in the end he was a hero who gave his life to protect people from the evil spirits. I've found the murder victim turned into a zombie for a witches amusement, and punished her by taking her magic powers away and locking her up in an asylum to rot. And new stuff keeps happening at every shuffle of the deck.
This is pretty cool! I’ve actually done a similar thing to help with writer’s block in the past, but I just used a normal deck of cards and essentially played an association game. These illustrated cards look awesome!
It's interesting how a scrolling background is such a common thing in theatre that even TV shows set in a generally-Renaissance level of technology feature them when doing episodes in theatres. It feels so lofi and basic that I can understand why they do that, but it makes me wonder in 500 years what anachronisms will be common about today. Behind-stage LCD screens in productions set in the 1970s?
I've seen the Myriorama in action in Shrek 3 where Prince Charming is performing dinner theatre after his mother the powerful Fairy Godmother was defeated
Austin, I just want to voice my appreciation for your dedication. Sad to see that your videos aren't getting so many views these days. It's clear that you put a lot of work and creativity into your videos and they are always unique and interesting. Thank you for it!
I swear, this whole video felt like it was leading up to be just one long, drawn out segue into an ad fora card game. But nope, he just wanted to share with us a cool idea. And I like this idea! (Only realized it wasn’t an ad when the real sponsor kicked in at the end lol.)
Oh yeah, I actually like to use tarot cards like this to give me a headstart into a new story! And I already really like it, so these cards look super cool to me!
this strongly reminds me of the power of random encounter tables or random area generators in tabletop roleplaying games: invaluable in kickstarting the process of creation/prep for GMs
Chat got DOES feel like 21st centurie's version of that actually, down to us using other people's work to come up with a story, but, in a less ethical way I suppose 😅
Some of the more traditional folk musicians out there still put on "cranky shows". One who has several of them posted on RU-vid is Tom Azarian, better known as "Tom Banjo", as mentioned in the Grateful Dead song "Mountains of the Moon"...
I actually already use one of these. I play a tabletop roleplaying game called "Index Card RPG" and it came with a "think deck" to help you come up with stories. It sadly doesnt have art nearly as beautiful as your cards but the system really works!
I think with the rise of AI people will start looking more and more for hand-made art, imperfect things which you can be sure were made by a human. And thus techniques from the pre-industrialized society could resurface and become the standard for great quality stuff, and everything mediocre will be left to AI
You should put the cards on your website with an affiliate link so we can all buy some and help with the money for your movie and taking some more time between videos!
Another version of this could be listing different famous/well known scenes from films/books/tv/etc and mixing up and reordering them then generating a full story from that, using your own characters and ideas to keep it somewhat original, as well as filling in the gaps between those scenes.
The "weird 19th century solution to writer's block" isn't as weird or as 19th century as you might think. I dabble in creative writing and tabletop roleplaying games from time to time, and I have two separate decks of cards with illustrations and one-word writing prompts that I can mix and match in any order I want to help generate story ideas. Heck, some games use a regular deck of cards and a series of tables with prompts to help you interpret the cards. It may be an old idea, but it keeps getting reinvented and reinterpreted again and again.
What's funny is, I discovered this video *after* discovering The Story Engine, which is a similar idea to Myiroramas, but more focused on providing narrative prompts.
I’ve been curious about myrioramas ever since I first saw this video. I took the plunge and ordered one and it arrived today. I think I’ll order another one. I’m curious to see what stories I might dream up with them.
These cards are amazing resources for inspiration and it's a lot better solution than I thought it would be. Instead of "Secret technique that is wildly known actually" it's a fun card game!
My writers block tends to come and go with my mood, which is helpful because I can tell if I'm going to be creative or not, and not so helpful because being creative helps with my mood, so when it goes, it just feels worse. lol
Well, that's interesting, both for the theater aspect AND the new card games. The Mystery Mansion really looks like something up my alley. We're positively spoiled for entertainment and other creative options in modern society, and we don't realize it because we take so much of it for granted.
I don't usually have any issue with writer's block (if anything, I have more story ideas than I have time to write them), but I clicked because experience has taught me that, if Austin McConnell has made a video on it, it's probably pretty interesting. I was right.
Interesting and fun info. But writer's block is rarely about lack of ideas. It's more common that a writer have tons of ideas, but can't sit down to actually write them. It's not the concepts, or inspiration that's lacking. It's the minutiae of making words flow into paper (or screen). Free association writing is usually a more readily useful strategy. Just start to write non-sense, even random characters, once you're in the flow, slowly start to morph into the things you actually do want to write.
I had a game like that when I was a child (I think 4-6) If think it was like 3/4 scenes with 4 cards each Right now it's probably alteady was given as a gift to family member or frinds
If you want to write: what ever works, use it! It's an exercise. I look at the world and there's my story. Then I write a stupid poem about what I saw, and some silly people buy what I wrote. Dunno. Pointless. But fun.
