Strange Tales in 2017

This year we did eight Strange Tales events featuring 36 brilliantly different people telling stories about unconventional story telling… Here’s a little summary of what happened.

Strange Tales is a free, roughly monthly event in London hosted by Sharna Jackson at Wonderbly. We’ve been doing it for two and a bit years now which makes it a real thing in my book.

The focus of Strange Tales is on highlighting people and projects, mainly from London, that are doing storytelling … differently. There’s not a lot of rules beyond that though. Generally its three talks and we all hang out for more conversations afterwards.

The 2017 events were filled with genuinely inspiring and surprising presentations — some epic, some tiny, all from the heart. We thought we’d capture them here and link to the presenters where possible.

An enormous thank you to all our presenters, all of whom presented free of charge, for giving up their time and ideas to teach everyone else something they know about unconventional story telling.

If you’d like to come along to an event please sign up for the email updates — I hope to see you at a future Strange Tales! Here’s what you missed in 2017…

Our eighth event and the first of the year focused on early years content …

We started with a brilliant talk by Dom Minns about an interactive project he did way back when for Ok Go

Next Chris O’Reilly told us about a stunning VR project called Rain and Shine he’d done for Google

Finally our own Zeena Shah took us through the design process behind our Fantastic Firsts product that enables anyone to tell the story of their child’s first year

Our second event of the year had an illustration theme

We first heard from the absolutely charming Owl and Dog on the design of their Play Books — books you can play!

We then had a very revealing talk from Sophie Deen about Detective Dot, a detective who solves problems using code

We rounded it off with a stunningly detailed presentation from Marija Tiurina on the art work in her new personalised book, Kingdom of You

Our tenth event focused on the challenges of character design

First we heard from Jamie Badminton who spoke about the incredible care that goes into the design of the Sarah and Duck characters

We then heard from An Vrombaut on the lyrical, magical character designs in 64 Zoo Lane

Then Wonderbly’s David Cadji-Newby gave a talk on the challenges of designing protagonists for personalised story telling products

For our eleventh event we shared some stories of innovative Kickstarter projects

Made by Those talked about their project to create wall mounted etch a sketches

Luke Leighfield talked about stories and music

We ran out of titles for Strange Tales 12

In this event Liam Walsh did a run down of his VoiceBook project (also covered here)

Emily Short gave us a virtuoso tour of the history of Interactive Fiction

And Becca Rose came and showed off a one of a kind story telling project she had created that used a room size UI to interact with kids and their story ideas

After failing to plan a theme with Strange Tales 12 we moved into failing to plan the content and experimented with an open mic format for episode 13

Jules Moscovici and Miranda Smart talked about their graphic novel

Thom Wong talked about writing short stories

James Mitchell talked about … something

Fabrizio Festa talked about his project, Bambino Volante, an uplifting story about a boy who can fly

And John Lau showed off his story game, Uncanny Valerie

Strange Tales 14 bought the professionalism back with a bang through a partnership with BAFTA

BAFTA winner Tony Cooke talked to us about comedy writing for kids

BAFTA winner Julie Bower talked about her heroic project, So Awkward, and everything she’d done to make it happen

And finally BAFTA winner Greg Jenner gave us a hilarious run down of how he gets kids horribly excited about history

In Strange Tales 15 we pivoted from the big guns and BAFTA back to littler projects that still meant a lot

Aisha Yusuf showed us her AI pet

Luke Leighfield returned to tell us about his self publishing project

In our final event of the year we went back to the chaos and did a full open mic set again

Thom and Marija returned and showed off their tiny guidebook

Tony Parkin told us about an international project to tell stories about disappearing sparrows

Laura Hamm ever so nearly launched her superb new web app that helps kids tell stores

Swetel Shah told us about her brilliant project to teach coding skills through gaming

And finally, Filip Denker told us about a superb new product he’s working on, Yoto, that empowers kids to choose their own music in a world of streaming and apps

And that was that. Huge congratulations to Sharna for putting on such a great show throughout the year — it was a brilliantly diverse mix of content, full of emotion, surprises and real insight into the breadth and depth of story telling experimentation happening in London right now.

A final massive thanks to everyone that attended. As with all community events Strange Tales is as much about the audience and the conversations that happen after the talks as the talks themselves—if you came, thank you for sharing your ideas and time with us this year.

If you’d like to come to a Strange Tales event please sign up for our email updates and if you have already been, please share this post with your friends and encourage them to come along too!