M E T A N A R R A T I V E
M E D I A
M E T A N A R R A T I V E
meta: higher, above, transcendent
narrative: myth, tale, story
A story that helps us makes sense of reality.
The Great Story in which all stories participate and from which all stories draw their power, beauty and meaning.
ABOUT
Stories are the fire we carry within.
Telling a story is one of the most ancient and human acts we can perform. Whether on the walls of a cave or the glass of a screen, human beings have told stories to create identity, convey meaning, speak truth, bring laughter, pass wisdom, produce healing and cause action. Like fire, stories have the power to gather and create or scatter and destroy.
Storytelling is carrying the fire to others.
No matter who we are or where we’re from, regardless of culture, creed or color, whenever we hear those six magical words — let me tell you a story — we all do the same thing: listen. Why do we do this? Because existence has a distinctly narrative shape to it and we’re homo narratus: story-telling, story-watching, story-loving creatures. We’re made for stories. We’re storyphilic.
Stories contain a strange magic that draw us in, humanize us and cause us to think newly and act powerfully.
Metanarrative Media works with this magic. Aligning ourselves with the primal power of storytelling in image, word, and sound, we harness and shape stories to deliver outcomes for our clients and draw and delight our audiences. Corporate clients looking for brand resonance, relevance and results. Audiences looking for film and television that transport and transform them.
While our name conveys transcendence, we’re throughly down to earth. The strategists and storysmiths at Metanarrative are savvy creatives with business brains, prioritizing client outcomes and audience appetites over stylistic sacred cows. Magicians and wizards by nature, we’re as strategic and pragmatic as they come.
A creative communications agency and film development & production company fusion, we specialize in designing bespoke, narrative-driven strategic communication and marketing solutions for clients and producing artful, substantive, financially remunerative entertainment products for audiences.
To be a company, brand or a person is to have a story to tell. What story are you telling?
Carry the fire.
Cormac McCarthy
WHAT WE DO
On our entertainment side of the house, in the vast expanse between superficial, spectacle-driven films and saccharine, sentimental films is the space in which Metanarrative works. We court a sizable, overlooked and underserved market, hungry for authentic, enriching entertainment. Entertainment that’s becoming increasingly thin on the ground.
We supply this market with artistically excellent, substantive, audience-centric productions. Film and television with legs that can deliver the entertainment triple-crown: audience adulation, critical acclaim and commercial success.
On our communications side, in the clutter of canned, cliché corporate communications, we design distinctive, unconventional story-driven digital content for your company, campaign or brand. Research shows 99% of companies say they will continue to use video marketing in their approaches, and 88% are committed to devoting more investment dollars to future video-based campaigns. Stories break through the onslaught of information coming at us and the subsequent inertia our brains automatically seek by grabbing our attention, causing us to care and to relieve the tension of the story by taking action.
Whether in entertainment or corporate communications, throughline is one thing: story. We leverage the undeniable human affinity for stories to create relevant and resonant film & television productions for audiences and content strategies for brands and commercial clients, infusing our designs with narrative power to deliver audiences and market outcomes.
Most often it’s not the smartest person in the room who grabs the audience or wins the argument. It’s the best storyteller.
FILM DEVELOPMENT & PRODUCTION
DEVELOPMENT
We provide bespoke, classically informed, commercially canny story consultation, script consulting, editing, writing, creative development, packaging and financing services.
PRODUCTION
We host a portfolio of feature film and streaming television projects in multiple stages of development. We offer the full suite of production services in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia and Australia.
CONSULTING
We provide audience research & analytics, development, marketing, packaging, casting, financing and distribution consultative services to move your concept, script or film project from possibility to reality.
CREATIVE STRATEGY
We leverage our expertise in film and television for our corporate clients to shift their strategy and grow their reach into the marketplace with image-fueled, story-driven, force-multiplying digital products that generate impact, results and returns.
BRANDING &
MARKETING
We assess your virtual identity, evaluate your brand and inventory your current impact to identify advantages, attrition and opportunities. Because branding is designed for the market you’re in, we design brand and marketing in lockstep to maximize efficiency, distinguish you from the herd and expand your market impact.
VIDEOGRAPHY &
NARRATIVE STRATEGY
Whether you know it or not, story is the secret sauce in your branding, marketing and communication strategy. Over the past three years, video usage and consumption on mobile devices has risen a whopping 100% every year. We design, develop, script, shoot, produce and launch top-shelf video for your brand, company or campaign to extend your reach, amplify your brand and level-up your bottom-line results.
CONTENT
STRATEGY
Leveraging micro and macro-level research and analysis, we identify your target audiences, design your strategy, develop branded, bespoke content, craft messaging and deftly deploy it to enhance your brand, product, services and unique value proposition to the marketplace.
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
Flannery O’Connor
THE SCIENCE OF STORY
Storytelling isn’t just ancient artistry and metaphysical magic. Storytelling is a science. The science behind it helps us understand why and how it’s such a powerful tool.
Much of it has to do with a powerful neurochemical found only in mammals that helps us carry out critical life-sustaining behaviors called oxytocin. Oxytocin also creates bonding between human beings, social cohesion among groups and deep levels of empathy for others, even others we don’t know. It’s the neurochemical in our body that humanizes us.
Studies in neuroscience indicate that the presence of oxytocin in the brain is what creates measurable, cognitive-emotional connection between the communicator and the audience. Research shows the most effective way to produce oxytocin is through well-crafted, human-scale storytelling.
To conserve energy, our brains are designed to idle. Full attention demands large amounts of energy, which is why so many of us tune-out and ignore the billions of bits of information being hurled at us at every moment. Storytelling boots our brains out of idle, grabs our attention and causes us to actually care about what’s being communicated and who’s doing the communication. Storytelling is powerful because it affects us in every dimension: intellectually, psychologically, physically, spiritually and emotionally. It even impacts our will, shaping the choices we make and thus the course of our lives.
Statistics and data can grab us, but they don’t hold onto us. They don’t stick. And they don’t make us care, because they’re abstractions. Well-crafted stories hack our brain, causing us to pay attention, truly care about what’s being communicated, and act on it. Stories stick with us. Simple as it is, superior storytelling is the rocket fuel in an explosive and effective communication strategy or a top-performing film or television production. Investment in well-crafted story development will expand your ability to widen and deepen your reach across markets and attract, elate and grow audiences.
Facts tell. Stories sell.
WHY
We live today in a disenchanted world.
Overawed by materialism, reduced by empiricism and narrowed by nihilism, we’ve grown disenchanted with humanity, the world around us and the wonder of being human. Perhaps it’s not the world lacking of wonders but we who lack wonder.
Yet still we search. Haunted by a strange longing for something beyond us, we find traces of transcendence in stories. Old and new, page or screen, we return to stories that transport us to other worlds. Good stories have this transportive power to lead us out of this reality into a deeper reality. Stories are doors in the walls of our disenchanted world.
Frank Capra said that there are three universal languages: music, mathematics and film. Film is story written in sight and sound. We at Metanarrative Media believe stories in sight and sound and screen are the most immersive, persuasive and transformational means of communicating, humanizing and re-imbuing our disenchanted world with wonder, meaning and a new vision for being human. This is why we make stories.
We are the stories we love, the stories we tell and the stories that tell us. Story-craft is soul-craft. If screen-storytelling is the most powerful instrument of communication we have, we have a responsibility to make stories that humanize us, heal us and give us hope to carry on...to carry the fire.
Whether in commerce or cinema, marketplace or movies, Metanarrative wizards wield this instrument for our corporate clients and audiences to slay the dragons of our lower nature that dehumanize and divide us and appeal to the angels of our better nature, shaping us into the human beings that shape the sort of world in which all of us can flourish.
No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does. Straight through our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.
Ingmar Bergman
CONTACT
Reach out to us for a complimentary consultation.
Our strategists, developers, producers, strategic storysmiths and comms crafters are ready to launch you. You’ll be glad you climbed aboard.
info@metanarrativemedia.com
We tell stories in order to feel at home in the universe.
Roger Bingham
IN ASTRIS
The word desire comes from the Latin phrase de sidere, meaning “from the stars.” As Maslow’s hierarchy demonstrates, we desire many things, the lowest of which being material, the highest being immaterial: the actualizing of the self by the transcending of the self.
Like stories, stars too are fire: large, luminous bodies held together by their own gravity. If the stars are fire mysteriously arrayed in patterns, characters and symbols, perhaps stories carry this fire, this deep desire burning inside us for that which is beyond us.
Were it not for the storyteller, civilisation would destroy itself.
Albert Camus
Stories … protect us from chaos, and maybe that’s what we, unblinkered at the end of the 20th century, find ourselves craving. Implicit in the extraordinary revival of storytelling is the possibility that we need stories — that they are a fundamental unit of knowledge, the foundation of memory, essential to the way we make sense of our lives: the beginning, middle and end of our personal and collective trajectories. It is possible that narrative is as important to writing as the human body is to representational painting. We have returned to narrative — in many fields of knowledge — because it is impossible to live without them.
Bill Buford