Created in partnership with Microsoft.
There’s an art to storytelling. Whether you’re a Hollywood director with a dozen Oscars under your belt or a pub raconteur with no published works but an oral legacy that will echo down the ages, the aim is more or less the same—keep people rapt from start to finish.
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What an audience might not realize is that the creative process usually needs to tick that exact same box; the most compelling stories are often those that spill out in a rush of focused excitement. That’s why, when you’re crafting stories, the best thing a tool can do is to get out of the story’s way. The lens that doesn’t mist up. The pen that doesn’t dry out on a whim. These are among the greatest storytelling aids yet devised. The same is true of digital tools that are so ultra-intuitive they feel like extensions of ourselves, which is why the apps of Microsoft 365—Word, Excel and Powerpoint among them—have been used to tell so many stories, for so many years.
“It all really starts with a Word document and ends with a deck in PowerPoint,” says documentary filmmaker and journalist Lee Adams, creator and host of the hit VICE show Minority Reports. “Then, when I think about Excel, I think about a way to keep track of a project from start to finish—whether it’s music sheets or pre-interview notes. So each of these tools plays a very important role. Each of them kind of represents a different phase of the project.”
Artistic relationships can be a delicate thing. If any one party has a problem expressing themselves, they may begin to feel their input is being sidelined, potentially leading to a simmering resentment that can kill exciting plans stone dead. The ‘pick up and play’ ease with which any creator can quickly get to grips with apps like Word is crucial when it comes to the key part of any project: collaboration. “You might be working remotely with a directing partner, or a producing partner,” explains Adams, “and you need a way to collect other people’s thoughts. These tools make that possible. Everybody’s involved all at once, all of the time.”
Adams is a thoughtful filmmaker, one who clearly muses carefully on how he relates not just to the tools of his trade, but to his subjects and audience. “I knew that I always wanted to put myself aside,” he says, remembering the first time he encountered VICE. “That’s what spoke to me so deeply. Now, I’ve learned that the most important perspective in the room when I’m holding a camera is very rarely my own. It is the person that I’m filming, and the person who’s going to watch this. I need to give them space to find their own feelings.”
Many of those who make use of Microsoft 365 are in their college years, feeling their way into the world of creative work with Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The fact that you can continue using the apps, for free on web or mobile, long after you’ve graduated is one of the big draws that keeps inventive new ideas flowing through them. Adams is more than happy to share pointers with budding storytellers.
“A lot of young filmmakers and journalists have asked me how I got started,” he says, “and my first piece of advice is always ‘write it down.’ Whether you’re unsure about an idea or you have something burning inside your mind that you cannot wait to pull out of your head and bring into the world, you have to write it down first.” It helps to have the right tools at your fingertips. “So you have to learn how to do that unglamorous work, like creating a deck—I know what it’s like to lie awake at night and just have images rolling around in your mind. You need to get them out.”
As a young creative, the beautiful thing about nailing your approach is that you can take it and apply it to a whole range of different subject matters, searching for the fundamentals that underpin any great story. “I can make documentaries about sports or politics,” Adams says. “I can make documentaries about the sons and daughters of coal miners, or kids who ride dirt bikes. Whatever your process looks like, for me, it always starts with a question: What is the impact of this event on these people?” His conclusions, he says, are what “always goes into a Word document first.”
From there, a good story, artfully told, can take you anywhere in the world, can lead to all kinds of improbable encounters. “I was in Queens once, working on a project about illegal dirt bike riders,” recalls Adams. “One of the kids came up to me and said he recognized me from a previous documentary I’d made about young black bull riders. I felt like those guys understood me—and through my work they found a kinship with a kid who grew up on the other side of the country.”
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